Future watch

From the Sunday New York Times magazine April 10, 2005. In an article principally about the cooperation of Neilsen and Arbitron in tracking what people watch on television and hear on radio, the following:

"In addition, (Ron) Kolessar (Arbitron's chief engineer) told me, his bosses recently asked him to experiment with adding Global Positioning System capability to the P.P.M. (portable people meter) so that the company could determine when a person drives by a particular billboard or walks by a particular superstore on a given day. And he has been tinkering with radio frequency identification (RFID) so that a P.P.M. could track a reader's interaction with magazines and newspapers. A tiny chip embedded in a page like this one, perhaps the size of a pencil dot, would tell a P.P.M. that a reader picked up or opened the Times magazine. It might even register, with other P.P.M.'s, whether a majority of readers continued to the end of this article or stopped right here. ''We've got all sorts of things we're playing with in preparation for a world that is probably a couple years away,'' Kolessar said. ''But it's going to happen. And it's going to happen because the advertisers are pushing this. It's them. They want to know more.''


http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/10/magazine/