RFID Journal LIVE 2017 and some interesting seminars

Listening to Alanson Sample, a scientist from Disney research, presenting a new way of using standard UHF inlays. By monitoring changes in the rf-field from a UHF-tag, he can track objects and identify four different types of interaction events. He simply turns a standard UHF inlay into a sensor tag. Good work!

A lot of seminars around Internet of Things, or “Internet of Everything” that are commonly used by many of the speakers. As Michael Liard put it – IoT is still “buzzy”, since the strategies are “fuzzy”. What he means is that a lot of companies see a potential market in IoT, but we are not quite up to speed with what we want to do. Old solutions tend to be the same, we just put them in a new box and brand them as IoT-solutions. Maybe he is right?

A very interesting NFC/IoT presentation by Cameron Worth from SharpEnd Agency. His company managed to make 40 000 bottles of Malibu Rum NFC-enabled. This lead to a direct interaction with the end-user of the product. A “dead object” starts to communicate with your mobile device. One of Mr. Worths’ main point is that now and in the future our connected devices will have a small or no visual interface, i.e. smart wearables, and that means NO place for ads or banners. Instead, we need to interact directly with the customer via the physical product and one way is using NFC labels. Take a look at the SharpEnd Agency, new exiting projects and solutions will come.

It could be a new technology with tremendous potential or just a theoretical solution that will never work, but I was really amazed. Mr. Pengyu Zhang from the Stanford University presented a solution where a new kind of tag uses a standard WiFi network to power the tag and then transmit its own WiFi signal. It is called HitchHike and the first test showed a reading distance of up to 30 m. Amazing result! Check it out: https://github.com/pengyuzhang/HitchHike

Finally, different types of Beacons and sensors connected to those seem to be the big next step. Interesting, since Areff is working with that type of solutions as well.

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