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This issue sponsored by Zebra:

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Need to meet RFID compliance mandates? Want to boost business efficiencies? Both? The smart label printers/encoders and RFID Ready printers in Zebra's full RFID family are upgradeable to meet future RFID protocols and protect your investment. They support a variety of 13.56 MHz or UHF transponders, and many are EPC compatible.

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DC Velocity Exclusive Feature Article

John Johnson
Senior editor
email

RFID or the highway ... or both

The retail supply chain may still be searching for a return on investment for RFID expenditures, but trucking companies are embracing the technology with an eye on driving both in-house efficiencies and customer gains.

"The overriding premise behind RFID in transportation is that there is real value there," says Mike Dempsey, company strategy leader at RedPrairie Corp., a Waukesha, Wis.-based company that provides RFID and other supply chain technology solutions. "Clearly, everything that went on with Wal-Mart and the other big box retailers has aided RFID technology overall, regardless of whether you think there is ROI in the retail supply chain. The mandates helped to bring some attention to the ROI driven applications in the transportation sector."

In fact, Old Dominion, a less than truckload carrier based in Thomasville, N.C., has invested nearly $4 million to outfit its entire fleet of 12,000 trailers with RFID tags and install readers at its 150 service centers. click here to read on...>

More RFID News

RFID may boost container tracking
RFID technology is expected to provide a lift for electronic container tracking that thus far has been sluggish. ABI Research says that although a lack of widespread government mandates and standards have hindered container tracking, interest in using RFID for the tracking application has grown significantly in the past year. In addition, ABI says key market events will spur growth, such as last month's partnership between Hutchison Port Holdings and Savi Technology to further the installation of active RFID checkpoints throughout the world. "Partnerships between the information technology firms and ports are the stepping stones to widespread adoption," says ABI Research analyst David Schrier.
[ More information ]

Microsoft talks up "super important" RFID
In a speech delivered at Microsoft's TechEd conference in Orlando this week, senior vice president Paul Flessner said that Microsoft will make RFID available inexpensively and plentifully from a Windows perspective, and that RFID represents a "super-important play for us." The company announced that it is developing software for use with Windows and its SQL Server product that will smooth out problems many companies are having loading data from RFID tags into databases, and making that data available to gain further efficiencies.
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Reva enters the RFID landscape
Reva Systems, a venture-backed company focused on delivering the industry's first network-centric architecture for RFID implementations, announced its arrival on the RFID scene and its business strategy on Monday. The firm believes that when its Tag Acquisition Network product is ready sometime later this year, it will enable RFID pilots to advance to scalable, repeatable, and reliable enterprise-wide rollouts.
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SAMSys reveals Gen 2 solution at Metro Group
SAMSys Technologies will use this week's Metro Group RFID Congress in Cologne, Germany to showcase its new Gen 2-ready RFID readers. The readers are the first of its products capable of reading tags that conform to the new EPC Gen 2 standard. Specifically, the MP9320 v2.8 reader is the latest addition to the SAMSys family that, in addition to Gen 2, supports a full array of legacy UHF protocols.
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TI, VeriSign to battle drug counterfeiting
Texas Instruments and VeriSign are confident that a new collaboration between the firms will stamp out drug counterfeiting in the pharmaceutical supply chain. The companies introduced a model for Authenticated RFID that has the potential to enhance security and chain-of-custody controls in the pharma sector. The Authenticated RFID model will combine ISO/IEC standard 13.56 MHz RFID and PKI (Public-key infrastructure) technologies in a two-stage approach to fight the counterfeit drug problem. TI and VeriSign are developing the model to support item-level authentication at the pharmacy, and the implementation over time of a supply chain infrastructure to validate transactions at any point along the chain of custody.
[ More information ]