07 May RFID Journal Live Conference and Exhibition
Although more than fifty years old, Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is gaining in market acceptance and market awareness.
This was clearly demonstrated April 27-29 during the seventh annual RFID Journal Live Conference and Exhibition in Orlando, Florida.
The show featured 175 exhibitors from across the world who offered case studies covering all aspects RFID applications. More than 50 end-user case studies were presented by major market players including IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Bank of America, Boeing, Motorola, Monsanto and Procter & Gamble. Topics covered aerospace, apparel, consumer packaged goods, defense, food, government healthcare and logistics.
Korea had its own pavilion where several new products including RFID Tags, RFID multi-language printers, and fixed-mount and hand-held portable RFID Readers were displayed.
The show’s new theme encouraged attendees to look at RFID technology through a much larger prism, broadening their overall definition of RFID and realizing this technology has applications that reach far beyond track and trace of inventories.
As the needs increase to identify all contents of 6million-plus large ship cargo containers moving around the world’s ports each day, and as prices of the RFID tags, readers and printers continue to drop dramatically, RFID technology will find new uses.
An RFID-equipped shipping container from ODIN technologies, the Smart Container unveiled at the show, provides the industry’s first fully automated, global unit level tracking capability. The Smart Container will advance visibility, awareness and tracking for global supply chain and logistic functions, delivering unit level management control from the factory to the front door.
The well-organized show through case study sessions of real world implementation of RFID technology gave the 2,500 people attending the event opportunities to lean many new ways RFID can solve complex supply chain problems.
Even in the down turned economy, the conference exuded an upbeat attitude that RFID is an important technology for tracking and tracing inventory items of all sizes shapes and forms through global supply chains, plus much more.