Nov 07, 2016In May 2016, we honored the companies offering the best radio frequency identification deployments and the best new RFID product for the tenth year in a row (see RFID Journal Announces Winners of Its 10th Annual Awards). As the RFID Journal Awards enter their second decade, I thought it was time to review the award categories. We decided to make some changes to better reflect the current trends in RFID deployments.
One issue our judges sometimes grappled with was how to compare a great deployment in the health-care sector with, say, a project in retail or manufacturing. So instead of one Best Implementation of RFID award, we will now recognize the best implementations in health care, logistics, manufacturing and retail. These are the industries that are most aggressively adopting RFID technology, and this allows us to compare, for instance, a great retail deployment with other retail deployments.
There will also be an award for best implementation in any other industry. But we are eliminating the Most Innovative Use of RFID, Best NFC Deployment, Best Internet of Things Deployment and RFID Green Award categories. While they were all legitimate categories, Most Innovative seemed unclear to those submitting, and the other three overlapped with the Best Implementation category.
We will continue to honor the company that uses RFID to provide additional value to its customers with the Best Use of RFID in a Product or Service Award. For clarity, we changed the Best in Show award—so named because the winner is chosen at our RFID Journal LIVE! conference and exhibition—to Best New Product starting with the 2016 awards. We will continue to use that new name, and continue to present the RFID Special Achievement to someone who has contributed to the RFID industry.
The goal of the RFID Journal Awards has always been to highlight great RFID projects and deployments. I hope these new categories will result in more entries. If you have completed an outstanding RFID project or have a great new product to promote, I encourage you to submit it for next year's awards. LIVE! 2017 will be held on May 9-11 in Phoenix, Ariz.
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.
