WebID
Overview
The fast pace of today's business heavily relies on intellect-intensive technologies that provide increased product visibility and transform the entire supply chain. The domain of advanced automatic product identification has recently witnessed a lot of attempts to revolutionize the technology. The encouraging results of 2003 in the sphere of automatic product identification attest to a growing global interest in this newly discovered sector of IT. 2004 is the year of special attention to retail solutions and adoption of EPC standards.
To explore this entirely new opportunity for optimizing product turnover in cyberspace, MERA Networks has launched its new Product Web ID Project, aimed at expanding the role of Internet technologies in modern society. MERA Networks offers a fundamentally new approach to what is known as «Efficient Consumer Response» (ECR), an initiative supported by a number of international programs and organizations, including the UN.
The objective of this project is to enable automatic creation and launch of websites to accompany the output of every single product item.
A product's lifecycle has several stages including production, sale and disposal. The concept of MERA's Product WEB ID Project is built around the idea that every product item is accompanied by its own website serving as the product's web ID throughout its entire lifecycle.
Production
During manufacture a product item is assigned an electronic product code (EPC) which becomes the web site URL on the Internet. The site contains the product's complete description, information about the manufacturer, the product's location and terms of sale. The site may also offer the product's picture, video or demo. The exhaustive information about the product will be available together with built-in software tools for editing the site content and controlling access to the site. The website management rights at the time of the product output will belong to the manufacturer. Later, during the product's life, its web ID card will be complemented with information about new owner(s).
Sale
An owner (manufacturer) who intends to sell the product makes it public providing access to the product's web site for the Internet audience. Anyone using a common search engine such as Google, Yahoo, Yandex etc. can find the website and purchase the sought product through a regular e-commerce system. The new owner who wishes to keep the product hides the associated website completely and opens it for general public only when s/he wants to resell or exchange the product. In the course of the transaction the buyer automatically acquires the site management rights, which enable him/her to add new information about the product, grant or deny access to the site, and alter the terms of the next sale/delivery. However, the new owner cannot modify the information provided by previous owners. Therefore, there may be several successive sales of the product and all the transactions will be available for view to authorized persons subject to permission from the current site owner.
Disposal
The final stage of the product and site lifecycle is disposal. The owner who wishes to dispose of the product and the associated web-site makes a pertinent record making the site inaccessible on the Internet.
This Product Lifecycle Model provides immediate information about the product on any of the three stages of its lifecycle and enables sellers and potential customers to interact effectively.
MERA's vision of its new project is that every tangible object in the real world will have its reflection on the Internet. This will lead to creation of a full-scale, cost-saving and efficient goods turnover system in the virtual world.
