RFID from the top of Mt. Everest
Posted by Patrick Sweeney on Mon, May 09, 2011
A good friend of mine, and sometimes karting buddy, Kenton Cool just summitted Mt. Everest for the ninth time – that’s right nine times to the top of the world. This trip however was a first for anyone in the world. Kenton took up a Samsung mobile phone and called his wife – teary eyed - to share the excitement with her. A cellular call from the top of Mount Everest? Seriously.
Think back just a couple of decades when you saw the first cellular phone. It was probably in a bag with a coiled cord attached to the handset. Maybe if you were really cool you saw one of those grey Motorola bricks that had the black antenna poking out of it. Either way the calls were terrible (they were still analog) you could hear other people’s conversations, and constantly got dropped. Now a new mobile phone like the Samsung Galaxy can call someone from the top of the world. Never mind booking a flight, checking on your house security system, or video conferencing a friend, mobile technology has come a long way and RFID is the next disruptive mobile technology.
RFID is racing up the same path of innovation. Just four years ago there wasn’t a tag that could hold much data, or had any security on it, metal and liquid foiled RFID performance. Next week ODIN will release a High Memory RFID Tag Benchmark, and last year we tagged thousands of metal products successfully with RFID, we even have an operating system for RFID readers that works on all the major readers improving performance and taking care of much of the physics of RFID. The next leap forward is using RFID for social media and to interact with the virtual world. That will happen in 2011 and beyond.
In the next five years every mobile phone will have UHF RFID, NFC will come out in the next year or two but quickly be replaced by something with a long enough read range to be really useful. And who knows in another five years you maybe able to automatically “Check In” on Facebook or Foursquare to the Top of the World with an RFID enabled mobile phone.
PS – to see the video of Kenton calling from the top of Mt. Everest here it is: