Boom! The Five Cent RFID Tag is Here and Will Change the Industry
Posted by Patrick Sweeney on Fri, Feb 11, 2011
This week I'm back at ODIN's HQ with an exciting breakthrough in the world of technology- but I'm getting ahead of myself.
Last year ODIN had a record year as many of you know - we had massively successful RFID projects like Vail Resorts, J&J, Airbus, etc.
These Fortune 100 companies putting RFID into production is a great sign that the industry and the technology have finally broken through the science project stage and can be used for mission critical business applications.
ODIN deployed hundreds of readers at Vail's top five mountains with 99.9% uptime and accuracy despite -35 degree temperatures in some places.
That is proof RFID can be very accurate and highly dependable. That dependability and accuracy of RFID will drive the first uptick in what will become the much sought after "hockey stick" diagram showing an explosion in market size and company revenue but it won't sustain it.
ODIN will double our revenue this year in healthcare and IT asset tracking but that doesn't mean there is scale yet. Scale comes when you change the game and slash prices.
Sure there are plenty of applications like putting a $.50 tag on a $3,000 medical device that make sense, but to change the way people behave and get rid of what I call parasitic roles (more on that later) you need the costs to keep declining.
This fall we saw an alarming trend in RFID tags with raw material prices driving tag cost up. That was very bad, but technology has again come to the rescue. I met with several of our clients and partners in Europe last week and had the chance to meet a start up company that has what they call a breakthrough technology. I have heard this so many times since we started developing this RFID industry that I took the claim with a grain of salt.
When I met with them, however my doubts were quickly swept away. This company has invented a way to bond antenna substrate directly to paper labels and attach a chip using 90% less material getting nearly the same performance (the ODIN labs are verify that as you read this).
If the performance is as promised this means prices will go down dramatically and more applications will be open to using RFID to replace the parasites on a company's bottom line - people who are paid to count, find and track things.
Those parasites add no value to a company- they cost money but do not produce anything. they need to be eliminated to create value. Good RFID Software, a well desingned system based on physics and cheap tags is what it will take. The five cent RFID tag is now very real and the better news is that it is very green, a lot less waste and pollution. A big provider like Avery Dennison, or Zebra should buy this company today and add their scale and disruption and in a year we'll have a three cent RFID tag that will explode the applications of RFID and they will have an investment that looks like a big hockey stick. Boom time!