It's 2010, and an ordinary day on an assembly line. A bottle of root beer gets stamped with an innocuous little tag that immediately begins sending messages into cyberspace. The tag radios the soda company's Web site to report the bottle's whereabouts, allowing computers to track the bottle as it moves from the factory, through warehouses and distribution centers, and into a refrigerator at a corner drugstore. When the bottle is sold, the manufacturer is alerted and makes a new one to take its place. Finally, facing reincarnation at a recycling plant, the bottle radios its "last words" to a robotic separator that lifts it from a pile of plastic and newspaper and tosses it into a container of broken glass.

Manufacturers hoping to recoup some of the billions lost every year to theft, counterfeit, and depleted stocks have been closely watching a technology that promises to track the locations of individual products, from perfume bottles to car parts, in real time. At the heart of this scenario is a little device called a "radio frequency identification tag"-a silicon chip that boots up and transmits a signal when exposed to the energy field of a nearby reader. The ultimate goal is to put a radio tag on virtually every manufactured item, each tracked by a network of millions of readers in factories, trucks, warehouses and homes, transforming huge supply chains into intelligent, self-managing entities. Dick Cantwell, vice president of global business management at Gillette says that the devices for reading the tags are "going to be a ubiquitous part of construction, whether you're building stores or homes....We see this as a tremendous opportunity and we intend to make full use of the technology as it becomes available."