Norway’s Thinfilm Electronics has finalized a deal with Xerox to manufacture up to a billion of its printed electronic smart labels annually. Thinfilm’s process sees circuitry and memory chips printed onto plastic or paper using fairly traditional methods – and avoiding the cost of a silicon foundry. This gives a very promising technology the scale needed to add intelligence to previously unconnected objects – the very definition of the IoT. These smart labels allow a business to attach asset tracking, brand authentication inventory management and temperature sensing functionality to any object they can stick the label to – at a target cost of pennies per device. This has huge potential in the food, medical, and logistics industries, and the deal…