RFID Journal Announces Winners of Its Ninth Annual Awards, RFID Startup Challenge

Interstate Batteries, Kuehne+Nagel, Detroit Diesel Corp. and Zebra Technologies are among this year's honorees.
Published: April 21, 2015

At the RFID Journal LIVE! 2015 conference and exhibition, held last week in San Diego, Calif., RFID Journal announced the winners of its ninth annual RFID Journal Awards. Also announced were the winners of this year’s Coolest Demo Contest and RFID Startup Challenge.

The top honors went to the following companies:

Best RFID Implementation: Interstate Batteries, for its use of RFID on racks to monitor inventory and streamline replenishment across a large number of retail locations (see RFID Brings Greater Efficiency, Product Visibility to Interstate Batteries).

Best Use of RFID to Enhance a Product or Service: Kuehne+Nagel, for providing active and real-time temperature monitoring of temperature-sensitive pharmaceutical and health-care products in transit during intercontinental transportation.

Most Innovative Use of RFID:The NASA Marshall Space Flight Center, for its use of a passive RFID temperature sensor inside a urine processing unit, enabling it to recover the most amount of water possible.

RFID Green Award: Detroit Diesel Corp. (a Daimler company), for its use of a visual RFID tag that saves more than 7 million sheets of paper annually (see Omni-ID’s View 10 Tag Aims to Replace Paperwork at Detroit Diesel, Other Factories).

Best NFC Deployment: Skoubee, for its use of Near Field Communication (NFC)-enabled pet tags to allow owners to find lost pets, socialize with other pet owners through the Skoubee platform and manage all pet medical information.

Best New Product: Zebra Technologies, for its athlete-tracking solution that provides coaches, teams, media and leagues with unprecedented performance and playing statistics.

In addition, RFID Journal‘s editors presented the 2015 RFID Special Achievement Award to Carlo K. Nizam, the head of Airbus‘ Value Chain Visibility and Auto-ID Program, for his outstanding leadership in helping Airbus to improve efficiencies by digitalizing business processes within its operations and across its value chain, and for promoting the importance of RFID within the aerospace industry.

RFID Journal introduced a new award this year for Best Internet of Things Deployment. The award was given to Turkish Technic (a division of Turkish Airlines), for its use of IoT technologies to link technicians, tools, parts and inventory, ground services equipment, aircraft, hangar slots and other resources to the Internet, so that all information about all of these individuals and assets can be accessed via a single software platform (see Turkish Technic Uses RFID, ZigBee and Other Auto-ID Technologies to Improve Efficiency).

Finally, Phase IV Engineering won the Coolest Demo Contest. The company demonstrated how tightening or loosening pressure on a piece of rebar could be measured with its battery-assisted passive ultrahigh-frequency (UHF) RFID strain sensor and logger (see Contractors Use RFID Sensors to Measure Strain in Seattle Rail Tunnels).

Also, for the first time in the 13-year history of RFID Journal LIVE!, early-stage RFID companies were invited to present their product or service, as well as their business and marketing strategies, for the inaugural RFID Startup Challenge. This year’s finalists were Golden Environmental Mat Services, which is launching a service using RFID to locate and manage wooden mats used by the oil and gas industry, and to track each mat’s location and deployment; U Grok It, which sells a low-cost handheld UHF Gen 2 RFID reader that works with iOS and Android devices, and Microsoft Windows 8 tablets; Intellifi, which offers a product suite consisting of UHF RFID hardware products (Smartspots) and a cloud-based service (BRAIN); and Invisi-Tag, which provides a complete asset-tracking RFID system for landscaping contractors and other types of service providers.

A panel of RFID Journal editors selected Golden Environmental Mat Services as the winner, and as such, the startup will receive $100,000 worth of free promotional services, including banner ads on rfidjournal.com, a webinar and ads in RFID Journal’s digital magazine. The three other RFID Startup Challenge finalists will be provided with $25,000 worth of banner ad promotion on rfidjournal.com.