The company's Smart Cosmos platform will provide an open, secure and standardized way to track the world's objects, Smartrac CEO Clemens Joos has told NFC World, enabling system integrators, developers and consumers to connect physical objects with cloud-based descriptions that can be used to identify, authenticate and verify products, track assets and deliver a wide range of consumer applications.

JOOS: "There are around 1.5 trillion things in the world"

Smartrac, the world's largest RFID tag producer, will seed the new platform by adding a secure link, tag identification credentials and supplementary data to the more than 1.5bn RFID and NFC tags it produces each year.

Businesses and consumers will then be able to use this data and the Smart Cosmos platform to associate tagged products with cloud-based descriptions. Smartrac hopes to attract other tag makers to the platform in order to maximize adoption of both the platform and NFC/RFID technology as a whole.

Business users will also be able to link their data to their own IT and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems as well as to third party applications.

A series of applications for the platform, which is due to go live in April 2014, is also being developed. At launch, these will include applications for license compliance verification and for the authentication of a tag's electronic components as an anti-counterfeit and anti-cloning measure.

'With Smart Cosmos we are enabling the ability to connect all things to the digital world and make this digital signature available to business partners, customers and consumers, and reaching out far beyond the connectivity of IP addresses," Joos says. "This will be a significant driver for the true empowerment of the Internet of Things."

"There are around 1.5 trillion things in the world that people are using and the good part of RFID is that you're able to tie these objects by using RFID and NFC tags into what I call the 'connected world of things'," he told NFC World.

"With this platform, you can involve developer communities and start to spin and define value added services and solutions," he added. "With Smartrac being the biggest tag manufacturer and supplier, Smart Cosmos has huge potential to become the biggest and fastest growing global platform."

"Our customers today have all the capability and competency to use the data and tools that we already provide them with, such as application interfaces, to run and spin their own applications. We will of course see what kind of opportunities we can offer to enrich the tag, to make it even more smarter and secure."