Hello, everyone. And welcome to another episode of Herb's Hot Takes. I'm your host, Tyler Kear, and thanks so much for joining us for another episode of the show. Today starts a five part series on RFID. So we're gonna go through a lot of topics through RFID here in the five episodes. But today we're gonna start off with the most basic question and that is what is our FID? And joining me as always, it wouldn't be Herb Satakes without her billings himself, her welcome to episode. How are you doing? Well, thanks, Tyler. Doing great. How are you this morning? I'm doing well, and I'm excited to dive in to a new series and a new topic here today Herb. So let's talk about RFID. Start off and just maybe give us a little bit of a history lesson. Where did RFID come from? Well, RFID is really exciting for the retail end street, but it is important to know where it came from. RFID is quite simply a chip with a globally unique identifier in it, and an antenna that a reader can read using radio waves. So there's no need for line of sight. We are extremely used to the bar code world in retail. But for RFID, it's a completely different animal. It speeds up a lot of things. But while it sounds like a new technology, it's actually not. RFID was first developed in World War two by the British who were trying to detect friend or foe airplanes. So they didn't want to shoot down their own planes, and they used RFID along with the newly created radar systems to identify the British planes. After World War two, there were some early commercial success in electronic article surveillance. Mhmm. In retail, we just abbreviate that to EAS. And that's quite simply the things that are on garments that set off an alarm if they're not removed prior to walking out of the store. In the 70s, there were some really cool technology developed around door locks for secure buildings, and you might see these in hotel rooms now. Where you walk up with a card, it's got an RFID chip in it, the door is a reader, and it it it will allow you access if you have that. In the eighties, that's when toll tags were you know, starting to come around. And, of course, many of us have to have toll tags to to get around on toll roads these days. That's a really cool technology that can read your unique identifier associated with your account and all of the the billing is automatic. Today, there are two main types of RFID, we we typically talk about those as active or passive. Active requires some power source, typically a battery. And they get longer read ranges. The passive RFID tags do not require a power source, and they are order read ranges, and that's typically what we see in the retail world. In the, you know, it's used all over the place though, RFID is very useful for livestock tracking. So prior to being able to identify the animals that have a particular thing that requires medicine. You would have to spread medicine out for all of the animals in that area. Now you can identify the exact animal that needs it and deliver it just to the ones that have to have it. They also have sensing and tracking in the agricultural world. One of the things that that we've been looking at is actually the newly almost new industry of marijuana grow. Mhmm. The new industry of marijuana growing. This requires tracking the individual plants from seed to the final the nation. RFID excels at that, and you can add sensors for moisture, temperature, and these types, and even light, these types of things that will help a grower of any agricultural product do better and only apply the fertilized are in nutrients that are needed or only apply the water that's needed. The supply chain, the retail supply especially has sensing and tracking RFID applications. One of the other things that we see almost every day is when we pay with credit card, if you were tapping your credit card onto a, you know, a device where you used to insert it, but it's able to read the chip simply by putting it nearby. That's NFC or near field communication, which is a specific subset of RFID. Wow. It's certainly come a long way, and I did not know that the history of RFID went all the way back to World War two. So that that's particularly fascinating. So you talked a little bit about the payment aspect there. But beyond that, how does RFID integrate in and really have an impact on the retail industry as a whole? Well, that's where it's really exciting for us. We've been working with retailers for over fifty years, and this has been an exciting technology we've been following for some time. In fact, going back to the history a little bit, a UHF or ultra high frequency, passive RFID technology that is in wide use by retailers today was developed by IBM in the nineties. So it cost a lot of money back then, and it has definitely come down to a point where retailers are you know, seeing more ROI to be able to invest in the technology. Here recently, Walmart just announced that they were expanding their use of RFID into a number of new areas, including electronics, some toys, some entertainment, items, whenever a manufacturer is required to put RFID tags on forty percent or more of their items than they typically put the RFID tags on all of their items. It's more efficient to manage just the one tag in instead of, we'll do some of them this way and some of them that way. Thank you. So this Walmart announcement is huge. Because as you know, Walmart and Amazon are the big dogs in the retail world. So if the manufacturer is having to put RFID tags on a significant percentage of their items. It's very likely they will just go ahead and tag everything, like I said. And then that will prompt other retailers to start looking at RFID for implementation. It makes it more cost effective for them when they don't have to worry about how in the world are we going to get this stuff tagged? And it's really exciting for retailers because it improves their inventory management tasks. It definitely improves customer experience, and it impacts retail bottom lines. So Herb, as we've talked about on on previous episodes of the show, data scan is obviously known as a leader enabling retailer to self scan their own barcodes, right? So what kind of prompted this dive into RFID for Herb hot takes for this episode of the show? Tyler, we are very excited to announce a partnership just signed with Froquential, Europe's premier RFID company. They have a system called Octoplus, which is an industry leading platform that we are marrying with our deep retail experience. To offer assistance to retailers as they go along their RFID journey. That's excellent, Steph. And I'm guessing People can learn more, read more about this partnership at datascan dot com as well as LinkedIn and places like that. Absolutely. Reach out to me if you if you need more information. Excellent stuff. So that is our introduction into RFID. Again, this is gonna be a five part series. This is just the first episode. So coming up on the next episode, talking about the main drivers prompting retailers to implement RFID. So if you're wondering why is this technology being adopted, well, we're gonna discuss that in the next episode, so don't miss it. Stick around for more episodes of Herb side takes. But for this one, for her billings, I'm Tyler Kern. We'll talk to you again soon.
