Five Years Forward : Five Years Back

Just a bit of personal musing this week. A student sent me an email asking for input to their project on what's going on in RFID and, in best interview style, one of the questions was, "Where do you see RFID in five years time?"

Interestingly, it's more or less five years since I first got involved in RFID and while there have been some technical changes, its also interesting to see what hasn't changed. So, here is my take on the top 5 things that have changed and top 5 things that haven't changed in the past 5 years....

What does it mean for the next five years? Maybe I'll speculate on that in another post.

Changes.

1. Growth in the use and variety of UHF tags. Much more specialisation in tag types.

2. The beginning of NFC as a widely used technology for payments, ticketing and consumer initiatives.

3. The growth of standards from GS1 and EPC Global which has been responsible in part for (1) and will be even more important in the future.

4. Enormous growth in the supply side with manufacturers / vendors appearing every few weeks in both the tag and reader areas. Its getting harder than ever to spot the reliable ones.

5. Greater involvement of user groups and some evidence of cross-industry initiatives. Although most solutions seem to be focussed on point applications there are encouraging signs of multi-user solutions. Five years ago it was just Walmart and DoD who were pioneering.

Stasis

1. The physics of RFID - it's still getting in the way (& of course always will)

2. User misunderstanding. Greater access to the technology hasn't improved understanding of what can and cannot work or how to run a successful project.

3. The wide spread use of high frequency and low frequency RFID. Plenty of people were telling me it was dead five years ago. It's still alive and kicking.

4. Lack of good IT infrastructure for RFID based projects. It's all still hand crafted.

5. Enthusiasm. The industry seems as keen to innovate and progress as it was in 2007. Users are still intrigued by the potential for RFID.

Definitely short of postings...

Hmm, I've been backward in coming forward with posts for the blog for a while. Mostly we have been getting the new version of the shop working and revamping the solutions part of our main web site. There's a whole new area on our CheckedOK application up on line at http://www.corerfid.com/checkedok.aspx and the new version of our shop is fully operational at www.rfidshop.com. We've managed to refresh the product set on the shop during the changeover too so there's some interesting new stuff. I was quite taken with the ID Blue reader pen(this ones the UHF version but there's an HF one,too). Definitely a useful device if you're a tablet PC or iPad user and need to check RFID tags.

Busy on the products..

It's a hard call on selecting products for the shop. We want to put up stuff that people might want to buy on-line but also we're conscious that the shop is a great way for people researching the technology so we need other things there too. Over the weekend we've put on a new range of high frequency desktop readers from Elatec, including an attractively priced NFC trial pack. Let's see how they go!

Component readers from Elatec in RFID Shop

The Elatec component RFID readers are now on our webshop, on the low frequency readers page. While most of the work on the new shop has been to move the current product set across, we have added some new stuff including a nice range of OEM component readers from Elatec. These PCB mounted readers are designed for integration with other products and look like they will be popular.

New Shop Site Up & Running

Well, the new version of the web shop (www.rfidshop.com) finally went live this week after a few weeks of HTML bashing and much effort in rewriting the product descriptions, etc. There was one horror moment yesterday when it looked as though visits had dropped off a cliff but it turned out to be that I hadn't put the tracking code into the site's HTML, so Google analytics wasn't seeing it! All now fixed so at least we are getting accurate data on how many visits we are getting and where from. It will be interesting to see what changes as a result of the redesign.... volume of visits? ..... bounce rates? ..... time on site? Time will tell!

Interesting to see that Gartner slots "The Internet of Things" (which uses RFID as one of its base technologies) as one of their 12 strategic technologies for 2012. We see plenty of tactical applications but little move in organisations to embracing a strategic view of RFID. There's a way to go yet, I think. Gartner's top 10 strategic technologies for 2012 Media tablets and beyond Mobile-centric applications and interfaces Contextual and social user experience Internet of things Next-generation analytics Big data In-memory computing Extreme low-energy servers Cloud computing Source: Gartner

Big Push on our On-Line Shop

We've been working for some time on an exciting revamp for our on-line shop. There's going to be a big push on moving products over so we can start by the end of January. The aim is to make it easier for folk to find the things they need, so watch this space!