When I was young I used to think a lot about how to create a machine that could track and organise every single object in the world, giving easy access to bizarre information like exactly how many blue cars there were in my home town, how many people in my county, where the greatest concentration of certain types of animals were, and so on. It was perhaps a sign of some kind of obsessive compulsive disorder, which, if the highly organised state of my MP3 collection is anything to go by, is still ticking along nicely.

Many years later I heard about RFID, and got rather excited. These tiny, cheap chips allow the tracking of all sorts of inanimate objects, giving the ability to locate and count every single tiny item in a huge warehouse precisely.

In fact, the technology is already in use all over the world. Warehouses and factories are heavy users, certainly, but it’s also present in car keys, door entry cards, Oyster cards and all sorts of other everyday objects. It’s easy to imagine a future where most objects are trackable, a sort of more down to Earth version of my imagined machine – some call it the Internet of Things. As interesting as this idea is, it’s several years off at least, and the most interesting application for RFID in the short term is personal use within the home.

There are all sorts of things that you could use RFID for. A souvenir from your last holiday could be tagged so that anyone who places their phone near it has a slideshow of images from the trip open in a browser. You could add 6 tags to the sides of a cube and have a different radio station launch when each side is placed near your PC. You could even hand out business cards that load your LinkedIn profile when touched on a reader. The possibilities are endless, which is part of the appeal.

Up until now if you wanted to play with RFID chips you had to get your hands dirty with electronics and programming, but a new startup called tikitag is making things much simpler. A nicely packaged RFID reader and 25 sticky-backed tags are included in a starter package, along with software to perform all sorts of functions.

There are limitations, though. For now the service only works with tikitag RFID chips, although it is considering adding support for third party tags, and programs can’t be written by users – they have to come directly from tikitag’s developers. However, these are small compromises for what looks like an extremely user-friendly device. The Internet of Things may soon be coming to my flat.