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Technology: Paper Documents Become Smart
A major milestone in technology happened over Christmas — Amazon’s eBook sales surpassed the sales of their paper books for the first time ever.
More of our lives continue to evolve around digitized and electronic data, and while many have long predicted that paper would be obsoleted, the demise of paper documents is still a long ways away. Paper processes still abound. And printers make it much too easy to crank out paper versions of electronically authored data.
While paper documents aren’t going to disappear anytime soon, the technology used to make the ‘paper’ of paper documents is changing, especially in the application of confidential and secure documents. For example, the ‘paper’ used by Crane, the supplier to the US Treasury, for printing US currency now includes components like advanced security threads, watermarks, planchettes, security fibers, special additives, and fluorescent and phosphorescent elements.
RFID is frequently being embedded into or attached to the paper needed for secure documents. For example, tickets printed for a trade show last year in Germany included embedded active RFID components. RFID ‘smart labels’ provide added security and tracking information to documents, and the cost to produce RFID labels attachable to paper documents is dropping significantly. RFID smart labels are expected to eventually replace the use of barcodes.
