Cambridge, MA, March 27, 2007– ThingMagic, Inc. (www.thingmagic.com), a leading developer of radio frequency identification (RFID) technology, is presenting a location awareness and asset tracking RFID application, utilizing the Google Maps service, during the company’s opening keynote address at the 5^th Annual RFID World conference in Grapevine, Texas, today.  ThingMagic VP Kevin Ashton and CTO Yael Maguire will demonstrate the application live, following reviews and demonstrations of the most advanced RFID reader and tag technologies on the market, and some recent applications beyond traditional retail supply chain, enabled by this latest technology.

“Last year, we had an emergency evacuation in our building. Our staff was unexpectedly separated by several stairwell exits, making it hard to account for everyone, or even confirm, who was on site or out of the office that day. That incident, and some work on a number of location awareness and facility asset tracking applications with various customers, led our engineering team to apply Mercury® reader technology to an internal application for our headquarters in Cambridge, Mass.,” said Maguire. “We integrated a system of Mercury5 readers and antennas, employee RFID badges on lanyards, and our office floor plan, with Google Maps. This demonstration application allows us to track staff wearing the badges and record their location history within our office space. We are able to quickly locate every employee and guest in the event of another building emergency, or preparedness drill, that requires fast, full evacuation -- but there are many other uses for an application like this, notably tracking assets.”

ThingMagic is also conducting the first public demonstrations of the Mercury5e embedded RFID reader in its booth and during the keynote. This new reader utilizes the Intel RFID Transceiver R1000 chip, which integrates a number of components into a single integrated RFID circuit, and enables digital signal processing and analog data processing on the same chip. This has enabled ThingMagic to develop the lower energy-consumption, higher performance, smaller Mercury5e, for use in RFID desktop, label, mobile and wearable printers, and handheld and mobile devices.

The Mercury5e embedded RFID reader module:

• Combines multi-region capability into a single module, enabling immediate, locally compliant deployment of any Mercury5e in Europe, North America, or South Korea;
• Utilizes an embedded version of the latest “Yagi” MercuryOS, for more 100 percent tag reads, many more simultaneous reads, and the ability to identify and filter interference from other RFID readers, fluorescent lighting, and wireless networks and telephones
• Is optimized for Generation 2 RFID tags, for state of the art performance;
• Supports Generation 2 Dense Reader Mode, and advanced filtering, to reject multiple interference sources; and
• Consumes very little power, for maximum battery life and a broader range of applications.

 “Given its processing power, Mercury5e is the smallest, most accurate and cost effective embedded RFID reader module, due to the combination of our RFID expertise and the use of the Intel R1000 Transceiver chip,” said Kevin Ashton, Vice President, Marketing, ThingMagic. “By significantly reducing the size of an embedded reader, and capitalizing on the Intel R1000 Transceiver silicon, ThingMagic is enabling many more RFID applications, especially those that require powerful, mobile RFID readers with low power consumption and high processing power. Though it is half the thickness of the Mercury4e, the Mercury5e consumes less energy, operates in dense reader environments and works in multiple regions -- which is exactly what many of our customers have been requesting.”

For a demonstration of the Mercury5e, RFID World attendees may visit ThingMagic in Booth 1400.Clustered nearby, ThingMagic partners Avery Dennison, MARKEM, MediaCart, SATO America, and Zebra Technologies will be demonstrating RFID enabled systems that utilize embedded Mercury reader modules.

Mercury5e is available on an OEM basis to manufacturers of label makers, print and apply machines, and other embedded, mobile and handheld RFID devices.