Heineken To Track Beer By Satellite

Do you knowwhere your beer is? Dutch beer maker Heineken wants to make sure - so it hasput together a team that includes IBM and the University of Amsterdam to track beer by satellite.

Beer Living Lab is a pilot project that will track20 beer containers shipped from the Netherlands to Heineken's UK distribution centre. Each container will be outfitted with GSM, GPRS and globalpositioning systems. Satellite uplinks will be provided due to particular technicalproblems with RFID, which can only be read when the tag is close to a RFIDreader.

This is great for shipping- but what about beer tracking for the consumer? It happens that Kooliothe Autonomous Refrigerator Robot is a mobile 'fridge that tracks its ownposition by sonar and OCR web cams.

Bill Christensen is the founder and editor of Technovelgy, a website dedicated to cataloguing the inventions, technology and ideas of science fiction writers. Bill is a dedicated reader of science fiction with a passion about science and the history of ideas. For 10 years, he worked as writer creating technical documentation for large companies such as Ford, Unisys and Northern Telecom and currently works to found and maintain large websites. You can see Bill's latest project on Twitter.