RFID News Roundup

Sandestin Putting RFID on Tap
Florida golf and beach resort Sandestin will deploy an RFID-enabled beverage management system provided by Capton, a San Francisco-based provider of liquor-monitoring technology. Sandestin, owned by luxury property firm Intrawest, will use Capton's Beverage Tracker system to monitor liquor usage at multiple food and beverage locations throughout the 2,400-acre resort. According to Bill Merlyn, the resort's food and beverage training manager, Sandestin chose the Capton system after a test installment led to a reduction in liquor costs and increased revenue. The system provides managers improved visibility into the total amount of liquor poured daily, allowing them to react to shortages and replenish low stocks. The Beverage Tracker consists of RFID-enabled liquor spouts, an RFID interrogator and software. The spouts contain a battery-powered 418 MHz RFID tag and a measuring device. Whenever a bartender pours a drink, the tipping of the bottle activates both the tag and the measuring device, allowing the spout to measure the volume of liquor poured (in ounces) before the employee tips the bottle back up.

SAP, Cisco Back Reva in Series-B Funding
Reva Systems, a provider of networked RFID interrogator-management systems, says it has closed its second round of investment funding. The company says it has received $13.5 million, with contributions from Cisco Systems and SAP Ventures, the Palo Alto, Calif., venture capital division of enterprise software provider SAP AG. This brings its total funding to $20 million. Reva's original venture backers and individual investors, including North Bridge Venture Partners and Charles River Ventures, also contributed to the round. Reva Systems will use the funding to market its Tag Acquisition Processor (TAP) platform (see Reva Taps Into Reader Networks), which can be deployed on top of the SAP NetWeaver integration and application platform, as well as its mySAP enterprise resource-planning platform.

NFC Forum Releases Smart-Poster Protocol
In June, the NFC Forum, a nonprofit industry association advancing the use of near-field communication (NFC) technology, said it would begin publishing specifications for how NFC devices will communicate in their three main modes of operation: peer-to-peer, read-write and card-emulation (see NFC Forum Announces Technology Architecture). Each mode requires that NFC devices use a common data format for communications, and the forum this week announced its specification for one such format—the record-type definition (RTD) for smart posters. The new specification provides the technical details for creating records for data stored on RFID tags embedded in posters, allowing cell-phones and other NFC-enabled devices to read the data. The specification is available to the public for a free download at the NFC Forum Web site.