Posted by Patrick Sweeney on Sat, Apr 17, 2010
ODIN once again had a major presence at RFID Journal Live. We've been a big sponsor since Mark strarted the show in 2003, or was it 2002? The show has come a long way since the table top displays in the hallway of the McCormick center in Chicago.
The biggest thing I noticed was most of the sessions were "standing room only". There appeared to be more people showing up than the show planned for. I spoke at the RFID in Aerospace breakout about FOD prevention and RFID Tool Tracking, and there were ten people standing in the back. When Carlo Nizam, ODIN's client from Airbus, opened the show with his keynote there were 50-60 people standing in the back of the packed hall. I would estimate there were 1,800-2,000 people in the audience. He gave some of the exciting progress around the A350 program and other projects they are working on. It was fantastic when Carlo said "ODIN makes asset tracking so easy a caveman can do RFID" that a Caveman actually got up from the front row an stormed out! Mark Roberti apologized to the audience if they offended any cavemen.
There was a lot of new and interesting technology, we'll get into the weeds of in the coming weeks. The ODIN-Savi announcment was the biggest attended press conference of the show, accoording to the management and that is generating a lot of buzz.The reader manufacturers had a couple of new launches, and there were some very interesting tag developments (inlcuding more Gamma resistant tags for RFID in healthcare). Rush Tracking showed their new forklift,Sirit and Motorola had some exciting new reader technology the ADT booth seemed packed with retail folks. Lots of people asked me about using active RFID and passive RFID on the same platform. And as always the networking was awesome. We'll give some more technical updates next week.
ODIN has closed five new deals in the last six weeks, and we were swamped at the show. Lots of end-users concerned with physics and attaining 99.9% read rates. Many had tried using RFID on their own and were tired of cobbling things together. This means either the economy and industry are at the inflection point, or that ODIN is winning a much larger share of the market. I get the feeling it's a combination of both. We had almost twenty of our clients at the show including two new major clients, and they had a great time being ushered around by our team learning about the technology. There's a lot happening this year, and Mark Roberti once again did a great job of pulling all the players together in a big way. Orlando is also waaay better than Vegas. Attendees were much more engaged and indsutry folks had a lot clearer brighter eyes!
Posted by Patrick Sweeney on Sat, Mar 13, 2010
This past month's Journal of Computer Science and Information Security had an interesting article on using an algorithm that converts Sanskrit prose into poetry automatically following the metical rules of Sanskrit prosody (which is no easy task considering the euphonic conjunctions area real bear). So what does this have to do with RFID?
In a month ODIN will once again have the honor of awarding the IEEE award for best research paper in RFID. We're doing this at RFID Journal Live! in Orlando. ODIN has sponsored the IEEE RFID Award for three years and has not done it for press (most people have never heard of it) nor do we do it for product development (the Sanskrit idea says it all there). We do it for the same reason I wrote RFID for Dummies - to drive the industry forward.
The young men and women who are applying for the IEEE award are the ones that two, three, five years from now will deliver the true breakthroughs in RFID. The technology which will take us a quantum leap forward. Right now they may be figuring out how to use an RFID tag to measure the molecular density of a Peanut Buster Parfait, or trying to make a bicycle's bottom bracket generate UHF energy - and we applaud them for this creative thinking. However the real value comes in the "unknown unknowns" they discover as they chase after some strange idea like converting Sanskrit.
Through that level of creative R&D and freedom to invent tomorrow's massive breakthroughs will come. As always ODIN supports the world's best RFID engineers through our sponsorship of IEEE and we look forward to seeing what's in store for this year's winners. Please join us in Orlando for the award of the paper of the year, and let each one of these engineers know your proud of them for making a difference in our industry.