By Dr. Peter Harrop, chairman, IDTechEx The RFID business is quintupling in value in the next ten years but the Active RFID business is growing about ten times, driven by such business as the $475 million military order currently being serviced by Savi Technology and innovations such as the first 100,000 Active RFID labels from Power ID with greatly enhanced range over passive alternatives. Within Active RFID, the market for Real Time Locating Systems (RTLS) is projected to grow even faster - from $145 million today to $2.7 billion in 2018. Several analysts have come up with broadly similar figures to these projected by
Interactive Print - Near Field Communications
The RFID star isn’t shining quite as brightly as it was when Wal-Mart mandated that crates and pallets from its top 100 suppliers carry RFID tags. Once heralded as the next big thing in packaging, RFID usage still has not made it all the way down to the item level on a widespread basis. Still, it incorporates one of the first implementations of printed electronics and comes to mind for many when printed electronics is mentioned. However, printed electronics does not just mean RFID, and package printers may want to educate themselves now about it to become experts before their competition does. While the
By definition, “standards” is “fulfilling specific requirements as established by an authority, law, rule, custom, etc.; a guiding principle.” However, I can state without equivocation that sometimes the pursuit of standards can literally go to the dogs. When discussing this matter with TAGSYS’ Chief Technology Officer, Alastair McArthur, he instantly recalled his experience with his children’s pet bulldog, Oscar. It seems Oscar has had an encounter of the closest kind with RFID. As an unsuspecting pup, the French bulldog was injected with an RFID tag. The use of RFID for the identification of companion animals, referred to as micro-chipping, is a very mature