Issue #209 | Oct. 8, 2009 | by Andy Kowl

The crowd here at the first day of the Taiwan RFID show was diverse. Besides many local companies, I met attendees from Korea, Australia, Germany, Czechoslovakia, Singapore and a solid handful from South America.

It is a celebrated fact, both at the larger TAITRONICS show which the RFID event is part of, as well as yesterday's Taiwan Business Alliance conference promoting investment in this country, that relations with the mainland are on a fast, upward curve.

"If you want the news," confided the wife of an exhibitor from the People's Republic across the Taiwan Strait upon seeing my press badge, "it is that our government paid all the expenses of about a dozen companies to attend this trade show." As a citizen of the world, this warning relationship is a good thing indeed.

China has moved from 7th place to third in the largest number of RFID projects during just the past 12 months, according to Raghu Das, CEO of IDTechEx. Although I hardly needed to travel the globe to catch up with our occasional RFID Street columnist, the perspectives he offered in his talk today were keen as always. China has also invested $6 billion in national identity cards, using HF.

It is easy to forget "some of the most commonly talked about markets are currently among the smallest, such as consumer goods and apparel. . . A single order for tagging salmon (in Oregon) is larger than all the retail uses of RFID," Raghu pointed out.

In other wet developments, Chris Diorio, chairman of Impinj, said he has seen UHF interrogators read tags positioned a meter underwater. We've come a long way, baby, since the days of wondering how we would ever get around the natural enemy of RF, liquids and metal. Impinj has been running tests, not without success, on metal bins containing a 36-pack of soft drink cans, a 32-pack of bottled water, two large roasts, a roll of aluminum foil and other RF-killers.

The land of OEM widgets
In the investment summit yesterday, there was much talk about how Taiwan needs to break out of being primarily a source of items used by OEMs to build their products. Until the natural evolution of establishing and promoting brands that buyers can feel comfortable with, that cannot happen according to the speakers at the event.

Hundreds of exhibit booths today confirmed this. There were enough LEDs, in more shapes, colors and sizes, to light a forest-full of Rockefeller Center-sized Christmas trees. There were connectors, circuit board components, cabling, fans and industrial vacuums, mini LCD screens, meters and wiring accessories throughout the gleaming convention adding up to the ultimate shopping spree for any electronics manufacturer.

A few dozen RFID suppliers rounded out the list of exhibitors and I will be reporting on them next week and beyond.

Signing off for now, from Taiwan,
Andy Kowl, editor