Fun with RFID

I found this article is interesting, this help us to build a Windows application that incorporates RFID technology for data collection. It demonstrate how to use two RFID readers and then it compare their relative pros and cons.

Article : http://www.code-magazine.com/article.aspx?quickid=0611061&page=1

For Demo/ Starter kits : http://www.trossenrobotics.com/store/c/2784-RFID.aspx

Three RFID Trends for 2006 from ABI

ABI Research of Oyster Bay, New York, this week published what it considers three key trends that will occur this year in RFID. The first is the continued significance of the US market despite increasing internationalization of RFID. ABI notes that a number of non-US companies -- namely Omron, Siemens, Rafsec, Sato, KSW Microtec, and Samsung -- have recently made efforts to begin grabbing US market share. (Most notable is probably Omron, the $5 billion Japanese sensors manufacturer, who in November announced that it would "invest $20 million worldwide over 2005 and 2006 as a first step in seizing a larger share of the U.S. and global radio frequency identification (RFID) market.") ABI Research's director of RFID and ubiquitous networks Erik Michielsen sees the international cross-pollinization bringing a more rounded perspective and healthy competition to the wider industry.

ABI's second prediction has to do with the oft-overlooked but absolutely essential component of the RFID ecosystem: the label converter. The company sees 2006 as a key decision-making year for the many label converters figuring out how to position themselves in RFID, which will eventually prove an important revenue source for them. (Label converters are the companies that take inlays from the likes of Alien, Rafsec, and Texas Instruments and add stock face, liner, plastic sheathing, adhesive, and whatever else necessary to make the inlay a usable tag. Typically end-users purchase RFID tags from label converters, not directly from the inlay manufacturer.) Label converters this year will make key strategic decisions around things like which verticals to target, be it consumer goods, cold chain, pharmaceutical, etc. Says ABI, "There are large market opportunities and niche opportunities, and how well these companies position themselves will have a great impact on their success."

Lastly, ABI sees standards body EPCglobal focusing its efforts on the reader and network level, which is "traditionally the territory of technology giants such as Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, BEA Systems, Sun Microsystems and IBM." How welcome EPCglobal's participation will be is a matter of debate, according to ABI. Some in the market perceive such participation as an overextension of the organization's mandate; others not. ABI itself thinks the jury is still out, saying it "has an open mind on the issue."

ABI Press Release

Drug counterfeiting may cost the worldwide pharmaceutical industry more than US$30 billion annually. Radio frequency identification — RFID — seen as one way to lower that cost, has its own defining characteristics. Issues of drug counterfeiting and patient safety differentiate it from RFID in retail markets.

To minimize this wastage, and to raise the level of safety for patients, some companies are embracing RFID tagging of drug shipments at the item level. At least three major manufacturers — Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline and Purdue Pharma — have announced plans to tag their products.

Will companies use UHF or HF technology for item level tracking?

How is pharmaceutical tracking different from supply chain management?

How will this market grow over the next four years?

To learn more about the RFID life sciences market and how it may affect your business model now and in the future, please visit: The RFID Life Sciences Market.

Shakeout in the RFID Industry

ABI Research of Oyster Bay, New York, today released as part of its RFID Research Service a warning that the RFID software market will experience a shakeout in the next six to nine months. Despite the lion's share of attention tags and readers have historically received, is at the application layer where the collected data from RFID is used in an "organization's operational machinery" to actually create value. As hardware matures and deployments expand, end users are increasingly focusing on making good use of the data. "New initiatives are flying thick and fast," according to ABI.

Driven by increasing demand for software to make sense of the new RFID data, there will be general consolidation in the application space, including rollups and acquisitions. ABI's director of RFID and ubiquitous networks, Erik Michielsen, notes that there is movement into the RFID application space from a number of areas. Enterprise software behemoth SAP, for example, is adding capabilities to its software suite Netweaver that are typically found in the products of OATSystems, Acsis, Connecterra, Sun, and Globeranger. Conversely, OATSystems is an example of a company whose products are handling standard Netweaver functions, according to Michielsen. Some of the middleware players are also expanding their products beyond mere middleware interfacing and into data analytics, business intelligence, and automation networking.

Whether or not ABI's predicted shakeout occurs, expect the RFID application space to be the most dynamic area of RFID in the coming years. A shakeout would change the playing field in the short term, but the effects will probably be subsumed long term as so many new ideas, products, and companies make use of RFID data that today's fledging field will be seem nominal by comparison.

Read the full release at ABI Research

Microsoft Takes On RFID Data Management

Microsoft plans to ship the next version of its database and development tools in early November, and it's working on software to manage radio-frequency identification data that's due next year.

Senior VP Paul Flessner said Tuesday at Microsoft's TechEd conference in Orlando, Fla., that SQL Server 2005, Visual Studio 2005, and BizTalk Server 2006 will ship the week of Nov. 7. The company is also working on software for use with Windows and SQL Server it says could smooth out problems companies are having loading data from RFID tags into databases, and making that data available to workers.

News : Information week

World Retail RFID Market $4B in 2011

Research firm Frost & Sullivan today released a report entitled World Retail RFID Markets -- A Retailer Perspective that predicts that the retail-specific market for RFID will grow from $400 million in 2004 to almost $4.2 billion in 2011. Following are additional key assertions of the report:

• Projected demand for RFID systems integration services will go underserved at current supply levels. "The market needs hundreds of systems integration companies with RFID capabilities."
• Nothing short of hundreds of thousands of RFID knowledge workers will be necessary to meet demand.
• North America constitutes 40% of the world's retail RFID market.
• In the Europe, Middle East, and Africa region (EMEA), more than 70% of retailers with revenues of over $5 billion are involved in RFID deployments.
• These retailers don't expect a return for 5-7 years.
• The RFID initiative of German retail giant METRO will alone spur European RFID market growth. Around 300 of its suppliers are expected to be compliant within two years.
• In the Asia-Pacific region, retail RFID is driven largely by Korea, Japan, and China.
• Continued government appetite for RFID will be a leading source of Asian demand.
• Health care is already a substantial RFID market in Asia-Pac; retail is expected to follow suit, albeit only gradually.

Frost & Sullivan's relatively rosy outlook marks the second piece of good RFID retail news in as many days. Yesterday RFID Update reported on the announcement by Wal-Mart that it is seeing quantifiable benefits from its RFID initiative, including a 16% reduction in out-of-stocks and a 10% reduction in manual orders.

Read the Frost & Sullivan Press Release

Alien Technology Announcement of 12.9 cent RFID Labels

Alien Technology Corporation today achieved another RFID industry milestone with the announcement of EPC Class 1 RFID labels priced at 12.9 cents. This represents a 44% decrease in the price of 96-bit RFID labels from Alien in the past 12 months reflecting significant progress towards the goal of widely available, economic RFID labels. The Alien Technology(R) ALL-9338-02, a fully converted EPC Class 1 tag, can be purchased today for 12.9 cents in order quantities of 1 million or more.

The industry's most widely adopted EPC label, the Alien(R) Squiggle(TM), available as the ALL-9338-02 pressure sensitive label, is suitable for use in general supply chain applications such as those being implemented by major retailers, their suppliers and the DoD around the world. The label is one-half inch by four inches in size, small enough for use on a wide variety of products.

"Customers are expecting and demanding dramatic reductions in RFID tag costs to improve the business case and ROI for their RFID implementations," said Keith McDonald, Sr. V.P., Alien Technology Corporation. "Alien has been very clear about our roadmap for aggressive cost reduction, and this 12.9 cent price for labels in relatively modest quantities demonstrates our progress in driving down the underlying cost of RFID tags. RFID labels from Alien and our extensive eco-system of Alien Qualified Partners can be delivered at prices appropriate for mass adoption in the retail supply chain and other industries."

The 12.9 cent RFID label offered by Alien is made possible by the company's patented manufacturing process, Fluidic Self Assembly (FSA(R)) and Alien's new cost efficient High Speed Strap Attach Machine (HiSAM) assembly technology. These manufacturing technologies allow for low-cost packaging of very small semiconductors in very high volumes that in turn are packaged as low-cost RFID tags.

Alien previously announced the ramp of its RFID chip packaging capacity to one billion straps per year at its Morgan Hill, CA headquarters. Alien has now doubled that capacity to two billion units per year and is building a 47,000 square foot facility in Fargo, North Dakota, with capacity to produce up to 20 billion units per year in the future.

by BUSINESS WIRE

Flexibility Key to RFID Vendor Survival

The recent settlement of the legal disputes between Intermec and Symbol has removed one of the foreboding clouds that had been looming over the RFID industry. Taking the issue of intellectual property off the table gives the vendor community the ability to focus exclusively on developing more robust, mature products that can take advantage of Gen2. Feedback from early adopters and vendors who are testing Gen2 has been very positive, and AMR Research's spending data is expecting an increase in RFID budgets from $547K in 2005 to $640K in 2006.

Many of the customers we speak with are looking at the first half of 2006 to clarify their RFID deployment strategies, in time with the broader availability of Gen2 in the marketplace. Now is the time for the vendors in the marketplace to fine-tune their go-to-market messaging to be able to take advantage of the continued growth and much broader scope of the next round of RFID deployments. The most important attribute for an RFID vendor is flexibility in sales strategy, technology strategy, and partner strategy. Here is why:

Sales Strategy

Data from our recent RFID adoption study reveals that many different parts of an organization (operations, R&D, IT, finance, marketing, and sales) are involved in RFID purchase decisions. Because of RFID's potential across the entire supply chain, this should not be surprising, and the data has been confirmed by the interactions we have been having with customers over the last few months. So what does this mean for vendors? It means that vendors need to have a more detailed and flexible sales strategy that can articulate the benefits of RFID to many different constituents. RFID sales staff must be flexible enough to take the sales pitch in many different directions, even during the same meeting. The vendors who can win over the varied influencers will be the ones that have the most success.

Technology Strategy

Most of the hype and activity around RFID is associated with UHF, EPC-based RFID. But as many customers and vendors are starting to realize, there are many other flavors of RFID that can be used to solve a particular business problem. For example, the US Department of Defense is a heavy user of active RFID and many hospitals are piloting the use of 802.11-based RFID to track medical equipment. Pharmaceutical companies are looking at HF RFID to track their goods. Heterogeneous RFID will be commonplace. Vendors will need to be flexible to support multiple protocols, frequencies, and classes of RFID if they want to be considered strategic to their customers.

Partner Strategy

Successful RFID deployments require process change and a great deal of technology integration. Only a select few vendors will be able to offer the breadth of hardware, software, and services to be a one-stop shop for their RFID customers. Even those biggest vendors will leverage partners for some of the components of a solution. The vendors that are successful will be the ones that can be flexible enough to develop strong partnerships with the many classes of vendors required to bring an RFID solution to bear.

The vendors who can adapt to the rapidly changing marketplace through flexible strategies will be the ones who not only survive but thrive through the inevitable consolidation of the market.

ref: rfidupdate.