The Rocket

Issue date: 8/31/07 Section: News

Media Credit: Steve Reed Graduate student Alissa Bookwalter informs junior education major Anastasia Mullins and physical education major Jacque Kerns about how to activate their new SRU ID card that contains an RFID chip that can be scanned to purchase items. The new contact tag can be used for Rock Dollar transactions at certain locations on and off campus. [Click to enlarge]

Slippery Rock University's students and faculty members will be the first in North America to use a near-frequency tag that will act as a debit card for their Rock Dollar accounts.

The tag, which is meant to be attached to customers' cell phones like a sticker, can be affixed anywhere and is passed over a receiver used by merchants and on-campus facilities to charge services and goods to Rock Dollar accounts.

Barry Welsch, director and co-founder of the company that created the tags, Heartland Payment Systems Inc., said that in the future they could be used by students to gain access to buildings and dorms or possibly even replace student ID cards completely.

Welsch said Heartland Payment Systems is looking to apply the same system currently being established in SRU to other schools in western Pennsylvania. Different color tags to match cell phone colors are also being discussed.

His company decided to make them attachable to cell phones after polling focus groups and finding that while only 75 percent carried their student ID cards, all 100 percent had their cell phones, he said.

"This is the most likely thing for a student to have with them," Welsch said. "We are migrating slowly to your cell phone acting as a credit card."

The new near-frequency tags need to be held about one and a half inches from the receiver. A wireless signal sends information to the receiver, which automatically encodes the data.

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