The National Information Society Agency's(NIA) President Dr. Chang-Kon Kim has been hard at work strengthening global cooperations in the RFID/USN industry. The right international partnership would be instrumental in promoting the growth of the industry and also in seizing the early market share.

On June 17th, President Kim began his visit of RFID/USN related companies in the Silicon Valley and San Francisco area. He used the opportunity to discuss with CEOs and CTOs of many prominent RFID/USN companies. The President also talked about Korea's u-IT cluster initiative and how global cooperative efforts could be of help in making the project a success. The visit provided an important first step towards building real global partnerships for the development of RFID/USN technologies and services for not only domestic but also international markets.

Companies visited include chip designer/manufacturers such as NXP, ATMEL, Impinj, tag and reader leaders such as SAVI Technology, Alien Technology, and USN companies such as Crossbow, and Archrock. They showed a keen interest in many of the RFID/USN pilot and main projects that are being carried out in Korea such as u-Agriculture and u-City. A common consensus reached was on the huge potential of the ubiquitous field in the future.


President Kim said recently, US RFID/USN companies are shifting their focus from simply producing and supplying tags or readers to providing a full information service based on RFID/USN technologies, and it is evident that the value chain is no longer limited to a single country has become a global effort. He added that RFID/USN will become the core industry of the ubiquitous society, and has infinite growth potential to improve not only the IT industry but also other industries.

On a different note, an MoU between NIA and the Center for Information and Technology Research in the Interest of Society(CITRIS) was signed on the 21st. CITRIS is a joint initiative between U.C Berkely, Davis, Merced, Santa Cruz and others. NIA and CITRIS will cooperate and carry out joint research projects on enhancing the competitiveness of the service industry by the use of IT.