May 04, 2017Next week, RFID Journal will host RFID Journal LIVE! 2017. This is the 15th year that we have run the event, and it is always the highlight of my year (professionally speaking). What makes it so great is that I get to meet so many of our readers who are otherwise anonymous to us, and I get to hear how they are finding radio frequency identification solutions that will make their companies more efficient and profitable.
For me, this is what it's all about. During the early part of my career as a journalist, I felt like I was writing or editing stories that most people didn't care about or read, because the publications were given away for free and the editorial was mostly filler between the ads. There was no emphasis on quality and no commitment to providing real value to our readership.
Around 2000, I was fed up and contemplating a career change. Then I heard about a new technology called radio frequency identification that promised to transform the way in which companies do business, bringing unimagined efficiencies by collecting data and tracking physical objects with no human intervention.
When the publication I was working for folded in August 2001, I wasn't upset. I was excited, because I knew what I was going to do next: I was going to launch my own website to write about this exciting new technology, and I was going to do things my way. I was going to hire good writers and editors and provide high-quality news articles, case studies and features.
A year later, I decided to launch a conference and exhibition. We called it RFID Journal LIVE! because we wanted to bring the stories we were writing about to a live audience, to let our readers hear directly from the companies using RFID and meet the firms providing the technology involved.
It has been extremely rewarding. I proved that you could do journalism my way and be successful. But much more importantly, I have felt every day for the past 15 years that the articles I write are helping people to understand how to use—and benefit from—RFID technology. Many people come up to me at our events and tell me how much they value what we do, both at the conferences and on our websites.
If you are attending LIVE! next week, thank you. I look forward to seeing you there and I hope that you will find the sessions and exhibits extremely valuable, because that's why we work so hard—and it's what makes it all worthwhile.
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, the Editor's Note archive or RFID Connect.
