Ranging from reps of chipmaking giants Texas Instruments and Seimens, to CEOs of local entrepreneurial startups, to undergraduate students showing ingenious hand-build and coded prototypes, exhibitors and attendees at the Canadian RFID conference in Markham, Ont., provided a snapshot of an industry that appears, after a couple of decades of promise, to finally be approaching critical mass in the corporate IT mainstream.
As Rikk Boldy, GM of Deister Electronics Inc. (Canada) commented, if the history of the RFID industry over the past twenty years was analogous to a pregnancy, 2007 marks the third trimester.
Much of this year’s conference was devoted to publicly trotting out the technological “offspring” of the participants at the conference seminars, including:
A hospital asset-tracking system that sleuthed out hoarded medical equipment concealed under blankets, behind doors and in basements, and which introduced the first RFID enabled medical waste bin, which captures data on discarded medical supply packaging as it is tossed into the wastebasket, and updates a hospital’s supply database.
An automated white-goods appliance warehouse in France that uses RFID to allow massive material handling forklifts to handle tons of ovens and fridges as gently as eggs, saving millions of dollars in damages annually.
A meatpacking plant in Prince Edward Island integrated through RFID by Merit-Trax Technologies of Quebec, into a national traceability process that can track every bit of a cow that is aimed for human consumption, from farm gate, to dinner plate.
A portable restroom display advertising system created by a Toronto startup which (really) uses RFID to help turn hundreds of thousands of ‘Johnny-on-the -Spot’ biffies into almost-elegant, colourful ad kiosks precisely targeted at local markets, both for exterior display, and interior marketing targeted at their captive, erm, user audience.
A massive, international ‘Tap and Go’ fast-payment project spearheaded by MasterCard that uses RFID chips to enable near-instant credit card payment, at retail locations ranging from coffee shop drive-throughs to video rental, gas, ATM cash dispensers and grocery checkouts.
All of the above mentioned RFID implementations have been made possible by the RFID community’s mix of technological advances, and the growth of a reseller/integrator community of entrepreneurial RFID specialists and experts in the reseller channel.
As one seminar speaker from Germany showed, RFID chips’ inherent ruggedness, low cost and small size allows them to be embedded in steel and concrete, or in credit cards, shipping pallets, or shoes and shirts, to help count, track, monitor, secure, move, buy and sell nearly anything form coffee bomb disposal robots.
The conference lent weight to RFID booster’s claim that the expanding pool of resellers and system integrators, encouraged by industry heavyweights like TI, Seimens, IBM and Microsoft, have learned how to build solid RFID solutions to tough business problems.
Educational institutions such as McMaster University are training the next generation of RFID technologists and inventors, and forging strong partnerships with industry, and especially with the health care system, to ensure that RFID technology is developed for real world needs.
The Canadian federal and provincial governments are also trying to help, through investment in education, training, international standards and interoperability initiatives, and also by focusing on the challenges to privacy and public safety and security that RFID is connected to.