STocks in the RFID industry

[Zyce]

      I think the RFID industry (those little radio transmitters in consumer products like clothes, etc) as a whole has a lot of potential for growth and thereby solid returns on my $. The logic behind my thinking is that there is already popular demand for the product, the only missing piece of the puzzle is whether or not producers of RFID can cut down costs to as low as 5cents per tag so that everyone can afford it. therefore, the problem is that RFID technology is not yet at the stage where its cost are low enough. but as we all know, with electronics and related technologies, costs ALWAYS goes down given time because technology improves. So it is my opinion that the RFID sector makes for a solid long term bet


     However, there are qutie a few companies and i was wondering if there are any experts on RFID stocks and could point me to some of the companies w/ the most potential.

forbes has a pretty nice write up here;  http://www.forbes.com/investmentnewsletters/2005/11/23/rfid-nano-wolfe-in_jw_1123soapbox_inl.html?partner=yahootix

let me know what you guys think!

[maris]

anad

[dickfromalberta]

 i think blld is one to take a look at. It includes rfid and cargo security. HAS just cut a deal with pfizar to handle all the  northamerican shipments. They are being looked at by fedex & i believe ups.  A large grocery chain has cut a deal with them also but they cannot divulge the name. THE  stock jumped 55% but has retraced as of late.

[trender]

I agree RFID is becoming a large market. If we can selectively weed out the good companies in this sector there is alot of room for growth and profit.

[SeeingGreen]

Yep, agree have to find the ones with a sound business plan, revenues, and potential for growth
.

[traderich]

yeah this  industry has great promise.

RFID ripples through software industry
Sun, SAP, Oracle, IBM integrate RFID data into mainstream applications

By  Ephraim Schwartz
September 26, 2003

Big name vendors including Sun, SAP, Oracle, and IBM have caught the RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) buzz. Spurred in part by a WalMart edict that requires suppliers to tag all shipping cases and palettes with RFID by 2006, the vendors are rewriting their enterprise applications to integrate RFID data.
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"Walmart's marching orders are heard across the industry," said Joshua Greenbaum, principal, Enterprise Applications Consulting.

The changes on queue include RFID extensions to Oracle's database and application server and SAP R3 applications, higher-level integration of RFID with Sun's SunOne integration platform, and integration with IBM's DB2 Information Integrator to facilitate the handoff of data from RFID readers to enterprise applications.

Most industry analysts argue that RFID tagging is a transformational development that will ultimately change the way businesses plan, price, distribute, and advertise products. But for the present, enterprise application vendors are extending their products to handle an expected boom in RFID data.

Until now, a bar coded item used to sit on a retail shelf and did not generate any data until it was scanned by a bar code reader. And then the data was read only once.

RFID, on the other hand, is a passive technology that does not require human interaction to scan. A reader can extract location and product description data from a tagged item every 250 milliseconds. Some readers are capable of reading data from 200 tags per second. The result is a data increase of more than one thousand times above traditional scanning methods.

In response, Sun Microsystems is developing a middleware product to manage the influx of RFID data to filter out noise and duplicate data, according to Solutions Product Architect Sean Clark.

Currently in its pilot phase and commercially available by first quarter 2004, Sun's middleware will comply with Savant, an industry standard for this aspect of RFID filtering. "Savant acts as the buffering layer between readers and enterprise applications," Clark said.

In addition, Sun is writing a software component that will implement its version of the RFID industry standard EPC (Electronic Product Code) Information Service.

That component will act as the track-and-trace database for the EPC network of users, running on top of Sun's J2EE server. "Companies that participate in the network exchange data with one another," Clark said.

The EPC component will also integrate with Sun's Identity Server for security. Longer term, Clark said, the SunOne Integration EAI and B2B servers -- to be merged in about 18 months -- will be reworked to tightly integrate RFID data.

"We do some of this, but now it is generic. It will be more specific to vendors, like SAP implementations," Clark added.

SAP for its part is piloting a number of application innovations with Proctor & Gamble to incorporate RFID data into SAP R3, according to Raymond Blanchard, business development director at SAP's Business Solutions Group, Manufacturing.

The pilot is described as an AutoID infrastructure designed to shield applications from erroneous data while integrating only the contextually relevant data. "It can map the arrival of a palette to the bill of materials and close out the order to cash process," Blanchard said.

The infrastructure works, in part, by providing a unique identifier within R3 to each event. Blanchard said SAP will also support RFID data in its advanced planning optimization suite. "It will be event driven rather than planning driven," Blanchard said.

In a second stage, SAP applications will be designed to enable sharing information across enterprises using the NetWeaver platform, for example.

The significance of RFID data cannot be overstated, according to Greenbaum. "Location and product description is at the heart of the commerce chain," he said.

Oracle is attacking the new data stream on three fronts, according to Jon Chorley, Oracle's director of Inventory and CPG Development

The next iteration of Oracle's Application Server 11i.10, which will be released in nine and 12 months, will have extensions that talk to RFID readers. Once read, Oracle's e-business suite will give its customers the ability to use the data to kick off a business transaction.

"When a palette comes off a truck or is loaded onto a truck it can create a receipt without user interaction," Chorley said. In the future, he continued, business processes will change with wide spread adoption of RFID. Database capabilities will have to be extended to reflect more complex queries such as tracking the life history of a container of milk to see how long it was outside its temperature tolerance.

"That kind of query is extremely difficult to construct, and it is a performance challenge using current techniques," Chorley said.

IBM demonstrated its RFID capabilities earlier this month at the Electronic Code Symposium. Big Blue was able to track and handoff RFID data from manufacturer to warehouse to distributor to retail to sale without actually moving the data between systems.

"We can access all of those systems, federate the data from multiple, heterogeneous sources, and have it respond to a single database query," said Dan Wolfson, distinguished engineer at IBM Software Group. The capability was demonstrated using IBMs DB2 Information Integrator product launched about 3 months ago.

Once RFID technologies begin handling item-level tracking, such as an individual can of soda, it will give managers an increased ability to see into their supply chain. However, companies will need to move from so-called constraint-based planning applications to applications that can react in real time. "It will blur the line between execution and planning," Oracle's Chorley said.

That's an opinion shared by almost all of the players in the RFID industry. By designing models that are based on data captured through RFID, companies will have computers, not people, directing the distribution of goods, pricing models, and advertising models.

"It will be better than what currently exists today, because it is based on real-world data, and computers can digest thousands of more variables to make decisions," Sun's Clark said.

[hiwind]

can anybody compare RFID with Blue Tooth Tech?

Will blue tooth replace RFID in the future?

[metro]

hiwind

IMO the two are in no way related. RFID are the the tags you find on some prescription drugs containers. They are basically small tags that contain information and can be read by a receiver. At some point in the future if all store items use such tags you could push you shopping cart through a scanner and receive a print out with no need for a cashier. It is now used more in wholesale as Walmart has a deadline for its suppliers to start using it in the future,

Blue tooth is a wireless communications system or specification like is used to send signals to your headset from a mobile phone or from your computer to a printer using no wires. Just do a google search and you will find all information.

Some RFID stocks I keep on my RFID tab are

ADSX, AIDO, ALAN, AWLD, AXSI, CKP, CSCO, CTGLF, IBSS, RPDT, SBL, VPGI, WJCI AND ZBRA

[masternic35]

Hi Metro,

I've been looking for the last 10 months in a good RFID stock, you seem to have researched the Industry a little.

In which 2-3 Companies would you put your money ?

Somewhile back I bought some Zbra but the share is too bulky to be able to make good gains on it. I had settled for a small 9% profit.