Mashing the Information

Passive RFID is now a basic function in employment in libraries. Users of borrowed resources self check after scanning a barcode from their library card. Active RFID will then mean that the information agency can then track that item whilst it is out, or after it has become overdue.
I am currently employed in the events management industry for a company which has in house contracts for service provision at several venues. Regularly data projectors and our laptop computers are stolen. It has been a dream for several years to use active RFID or GPS to track these items, but for a small cap company the restriction remains that the overhead of the use of such infrastructure still remains preclusive. Thus the procession of lost resources without any means of recourse still remains prevalent.
Very soon there will be a situation where annual stocktakes are no longer required, because the corporation server knows through the intertwinglement of asset lists, GPS and RFID readers where every single asset is located at any given time.
Theoretically malfeasance between orders and physical deliveries leaving the warehouse must become a thing of the past, because the system will know what is in the truck, and whether an item too many or too little has been loaded. From a PDA an order is generated or retrieved. Thumbnail images can be recalled and shared.
Location software speaks to logistical task schedulers, so that in planning a delivery run a course is plotted from point to point. At any one given time the system knows where all of the vehicles, the people and the assets are.
We are on the cusp of an age where such sharing of information between systems is ubiquitous. The adjustment between the two and three dimensional information age is as much about the resources and the software as about the people who are using the systems. Thus the present observation about mashing tools are that the systems themselves are hard to access, and are not well explained. Indeed we are still in the process of discovering the applications towards which we would focus the mash.
It will be very interesting to compare this perspective with that which will be given about this form of intermingled functionality in just the next couple of years, as consumers of information and owners of things become more and more accustomed to the growing dynamic relationship between things and their interchanged systems of governance and application.