RFID in the intergalactic battle
Posted by Patrick Sweeney on Thu, Nov 03, 2011
A friend of mine and I were recently arguing over who was the greatest interplanetary villain of all time. Clearly, Darth Vader is at the top of the list. But there are tons of other great villains that could vie for the top of the list.
Think about all the work that Sigourney Weaver had to do, or how much effort Arnold Schwarzenegger put in to kill their respective aliens. Arnold was lucky enough to be involved with both the Terminator and that other ugly looking thing in the jungle. I haven't even touched on the Klingons, Orin the merciless who was the Orkan that tried to blow up Fonzie. The point is there's a lot of great alien villains out there.
The same is true of RFID tags today. As RFID gets more and more mature the debate about performance in superiority becomes more and more emotional - less and less scientific. As we've seen in recent benchmark tests, the latest iterations of silicon in all top tier RFID tags are extremely high-performing. Compare the worst performing silicon today to the best performing silica just 3 years ago and the differences are remarkable.
With RFID Moore's law has clearly been outpaced.
We are at the point where RFID is a viable technology in dozens of industries from healthcare to asset tracking to retail to even social media.
When the technology becomes more about emotional argument over brand and less about empirical performance data then it’s close to becoming invisible. When technology becomes invisible it becomes ubiquitous.
RFID is finally marching down that Road to ubiquity. RFID software works accurately, RFID tag prices are half of what they were a couple years ago, and ROI is well proven.
Recent articles in everything from Wired Magazine to the MIT technology review point to the trend that RFID has made it into mainstream technology. You can bet on at least one Alien now, and for sure an Impinj, a Motorola, an NXP, an Avery, a Zebra and a few others. What's your company doing to make the most of this technology ahead of your competitors who are you picking as your winner?