Part of our job is to help our customers figure out what is truly revolutionary and what is just hype. We frequently tell our customers that we were the first sale that the manufacturer must make. They first must convince us that their product is worthwhile. And we are a tired bunch; we have seen fads in our industry come and go. Further, we are long-term thinkers and want our good customers to be our customers for life. That means we cannot go around pushing a flash-in-the-pan product that is not worth the money.
The worst part for us is that many of these flashy (but not worth it) products are brought to us by our customers. That can make it tricky to break the bad news to them that this great new product or service is (in our opinion) not worth it.
Recently we have been hearing a buzz around RAIN RFID. There is even a RAIN Alliance that you can join, including catchy pictograms showing how all this technology works. Products such as tags and readers are branded as RAIN this and RAIN that. All nicely packaged with a great website.
But at the end of the day, it is just a reorganization of the acronym. RFID stands for Radio Frequency IDentification. RAIN stands for RAdio Frequency IdentificatoN. Same words, just picking different letters. It is just a rebrand of the acronym, trying to breathe some new life into RFID. All based on the GS1 UHF, Gen2 standards in ISO standard 18000-63.
We at EMP are all in favor of standardization. We were in the Wi-Fi business when there were no standards and cannot imagine the RFID industry without them. Also, great strides have been made recently in passive RFID, not in the core technology itself, but the readers and, more importantly, in the data storage. Most use cases for RFID struggled with what to do with all the data generated, and cloud computing has aided this drastically.
We are here to help you cut through the noise and realize the value of new technology and ideas because we strive to be your trusted source for years to come!