Two winners in RFID
In terms of frequency, there has been one major winner in RFID but now there are two. Traditionally, over half of the rapidly growing, multi-billion dollar expenditure on RFID has concerned 13.56 MHz systems. They are used for tickets, cards, library book labels and the like, spanning finance, transport, secure access, asset tracking and so on. Participants in this business have prospered while the enthusiasts for the volume alternative – UHF – have conquered the standards for airline baggage and pallet and case tagging for instance but had only heavy losses to show for it as sales failed to take off and serious technical shortcomings had to be tackled. No more.
We now see billions of UHF labels used every year, including for item level tagging, particularly 100% of the booming business of apparel tagging in the retail sector and throughout its supply chains. Wal-mart now tags more apparel than pioneer Marks and Spencer in the UK. Suppliers of UHF RFID are at last bringing a smile to their investors faces with a steady stream of profits. These and other sea changes in RFID will be fully analysed in the IDTechEx event RFID Europe 2011. There are more end users than ever presenting at this event and the latest best-in-class speakers to join the speaker line up are Avery Dennison, Motorola and Megasoft updating on those retailing applications, Siemens on temperature sensing RFID, the RFID Institute SA on mining applications now taking off, Aton + EuroClone on cloud computing for RFID, the UK ESP Knowledge Transfer Network on the changing Internet of Things, IDTechEx on Wireless Sensor Networks WSN (third generation active RFID) worldwide and VTT of Finland on Real Time Location Systems (second generation active RFID) – vibrant RFID markets that are thriving in parallel.
RFID Europe 2011
The IDTechEx RFID Europe event 27-28 September in Cambridge UK will field new best-in-class presentations, Masterclasses, visits and exhibits, moving the subject onwards. For example, the six different optional Masterclasses before and after the two day conference and exhibition will be hosted by Dr Peter Harrop and Raghu Das of IDTechEx who have completed RFID consultancy projects for over ten of the world’s largest companies and written 20 widely read RFID reports. They are supported by no less than Prof Gyou-Jin Cho of Sunchon National University in South Korea and Prof Mario W. Cardullo of Archimedes Tracking Corp and The Belfield Group of the USA. The whole event has global coverage but with the most attention on Europe. For full details on the event, visit www.IDTechEx.com/RFIDeurope.