Insights from RFID Journal LIVE! 2008

My guess: By next year, some vendors will be signing contracts for tags, readers and software. That's because the vendor community has responded to requests from their earliest customers to make their products better performing and easier to deploy. Here are just a few examples:

• Alien Technology unveiled an upgrade to its interrogators, enabling them to capture not only the contents of RFID tag memory, but also tag velocity and position.

• Omni-ID, Ferroxtag and others introduced better-performing tags or inlays.

• Intelleflex revealed that it has shrunk its battery-assisted tag down small enough to hang on a key chain, making it much easier to attach to smaller assets a company might need to track.

• Intermec announced its new IP30 handheld RFID reader, which snaps on to existing Intermec handheld computers so customers can RFID-enable existing equipment.

• Wavetrend has integrated its active RFID solution with GPS and other systems for global visibility.

For more examples, see our LIVE! 2008 Product Roundup, as well as the news announcements on our event Web site.

I expect our fall events to have strong attendance, and for the industry to continue moving steadily along the path it is now on, with more end-user companies reaching the point where they are ready to deploy—and those already there expanding their existing rollouts.

It's taken longer than I expected to get to this stage, but now that it's finally here, it is exciting to see firms benefiting from the technology and achieving what I had always believed RFID could deliver. During the event, one end user told me: "I can't talk about it publicly yet, but we have used RFID to reduce one process from 24 hours to 20 minutes." It's that kind of results, and the ability to learn how to achieve them, that will make future events even better than this year's RFID Journal LIVE!

Mark Roberti is the founder and editor of RFID Journal. If you would like to comment on this article, click on the link below. To read more of Mark's opinions, visit the RFID Journal Blog or click here.