Innovation / Technology

In an increasingly complex and fragmented consumer culture marked by media overload...marketers (some, at least) are rediscovering the power of simplicity and clarity.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.—IDTechEx has published “Brand Enhancement by Electronics in Packaging 2010-2020 The impending surge in e-packaging.” It concerns the market for electronic smart packaging devices, known as “e-packaging.” According to the report, global demand for these devices will grow rapidly from $0.09 billion in 2010 to $7.7 billion in 2020.

Finnish apparel company NP Collection has won the Golden Tag Award 2009 for effective logistics and profitable trade using RFID. UPM Raflatac is the winner of the Minitag Award for the same project.

Initial products based on organic electronics—thin, light-weight, flexible, and inexpensive to produce—are already on the market.

UPM Raflatac, Seeonic™ and Alliance, a RockTenn company, announced the deployment of a new generation of Alliance’s MAXRPM™, an inventory management system for retail promotional items that uses RFID technology to provide retailers and manufacturers with real-time business insights of retail promotion performance at the item level.

IDTechEx announced a new report “RFID Forecasts, Players & Opportunities 2009-2019”, which addresses the global RFID situation. Areas of growth, undersupply and oversupply, and trends are given based on extensive new primary research.

Los Angeles Marathon organizers have implemented an innovative RFID solution that provides highly accurate time-tracking for road races and athletic competitions, while reducing the cost and complexity of successfully executing these large-scale events.

Flexographic printing quality has been approaching that of gravure for some time now. Although it has been attractive to printers due to its lower price point than gravure printing, one of flexo’s shortfalls has always been that its quality is not at the same level as gravure. Trisoft Graphics, Inc. (www.trisoftco.com)—a digital prepress and graphic design company serving the packaging industry since 1993—recently installed a new flexographic platemaking system it expects to use to produce flexographic printing plates that, when employed, will rival gravure’s quality.