Apr 29, 2009This article was originally published by RFID Update.
April 29, 2009—The coverage below is the second of a two-part piece summarizing news from this week's RFID Journal LIVE! exhibition and conference in Orlando. See yesterday's Part 1 for more highlights, and check RFID Update next week for a review of the event.
- Motorola announced its new FX7400 series of fixed-position UHF readers, which are approximately half the size of previous models. The flagship FX7400 features power-over-Ethernet (PoE) and can be installed under retail point-of-sale counters, inside ceilings or behind walls for item management, file tracking and other uses. Motorola also released APIs in .NET, C and Java for the new readers. See the announcement here.
- Impinj released the Indy R2000 Gen2 RFID reader chip. The new chip is based on the R1000, which Impinj acquired from Intel last year (see Impinj Buys Intel's RFID Business, Cements Leadership). Key among the R2000's features is carrier cancellation technology, which improves performance for RF-unfriendly environments and items. Motorola's new FX7400 readers mentioned above are based on the R2000. More details about the new chip are in the announcement.
- ODIN technologies announced its SMART Container, a specialized shipping container that uses passive UHF technology to inventory its contents, and can transmit data by passive and active RFID, WiFi, cellular and satellite communication. The container was developed for military applications and is being used by the U.S. Navy. More details, including a video, are available here.
- Leading UHF RFID inlay and tag producer Avery Dennison is entering the high frequency (HF) segment of the market and introduced its first three HF inlays. The new products are the AD-709, AD-714 and AD-720, which were designed for the media and document management, card and CD/DVD markets, respectively. See the announcement here.
- Wavetrend Technologies announced it received a contract from secure logistics firm Oryx Projects to provide active RFID systems integrated with GPRS, GSM and satellite communications to monitor shipping containers and other high-value assets in Afghanistan. Wavetrend also said its readers are compatible with Microsoft's BizTalk 2009 server, which the software giant recently released and was featuring at its own booth at the show. See the Wavetrend announcements here and here and more details about BizTalk Server 2009 and its RFID support here.
- Reva-4-Retail is a new product from Reva Systems that provides item-level inventory tracking and stock management for stores. See the announcement here.
- RFID tag designer and manufacturer Confidex announced the SteelBYTE, the latest in the company's expanding portfolio of tag products. The SteelBYTE is designed for the IT asset tracking market in the US, and is powered by Alien's Higgs3 chip which provides 512 bits of user memory.
- Reader and inlay maker Sirit added desktop and durable fixed-position UHF readers to its product line and announced 10 new HF and UHF inlays. See details here.
- Tego said its high-memory passive UHF TegoTags that were first announced in February (see Memorable Development: Tego Releases 32K RFID Tags) are now available. Tego also announced the TegoXM RFID Launch Kit, which includes Tego's software and reader technology to help developers create high-memory applications. TegoTags can store up to 32k of user data and comply with Gen2, ISO and ATA SPEC 2000 standards. See the announcement here.
- Swine flu is in the news, and also had an angle on the show floor. B.O.S. Better Online Solutions announced BOSwine 1.0, a system for tracking pigs that uses RFID tags to uniquely identify each pig and a software platform for tracking breeding history, vaccinations, medical treatment and other events throughout the animal's lifetime. See the announcement here.
- ADT featured item-level management solutions for retailers and provided details from a study of some of its customers that showed more than a 32 percent improvement in inventory accuracy and nearly 15 percent improvement in store revenue linked to RFID use. Details here.
