Interactive Print - Near Field Communications

Initial products based on organic electronics—thin, light-weight, flexible, and inexpensive to produce—are already on the market.

UPM Raflatac, Seeonic™ and Alliance, a RockTenn company, announced the deployment of a new generation of Alliance’s MAXRPM™, an inventory management system for retail promotional items that uses RFID technology to provide retailers and manufacturers with real-time business insights of retail promotion performance at the item level.

IDTechEx announced a new report “RFID Forecasts, Players & Opportunities 2009-2019”, which addresses the global RFID situation. Areas of growth, undersupply and oversupply, and trends are given based on extensive new primary research.

Los Angeles Marathon organizers have implemented an innovative RFID solution that provides highly accurate time-tracking for road races and athletic competitions, while reducing the cost and complexity of successfully executing these large-scale events.

More than 750 people from 31 countries attended the annual IDTechEx Printed Electronics Europe conference and exhibition in Dresden, Germany in early April. The event, which is the largest on the topic, hosted the annual awards to recognise outstanding achievement in the industry.

FLETCHER, N.C.—TOP Food & Drug, a leading grocery store chain in Washington State operated by Haggen, Inc., has implemented a program that could serve as a model for other retailers seeking to move beyond the traditional way of discount pricing to improve customer retention and store profitability.

TAMPERE, Finland—UPM Raflatac and Blue Spark Technologies have announced a recently formed partnership specifically targeting the development and launch of new and innovative products and applications in the emerging battery-assisted passive (BAP) RFID market.

Recently, the commercialization of printed electronics has progressed from conductive patterns to batteries, displays, sensors, resistors, solar cells, lighting and transistor circuits, increasingly in combination.

TAMPERE, Finland—UPM Raflatac has been invited to join the advisory board of the University of Arkansas RFID Research Center, an academic laboratory conducting seminal research on the use of RFID in inventory management.

According to a newly released report from NanoMarkets, an industry analysis firm based here, organic electronics (OE) manufacturing has advanced to a stage where companies are now capable of producing electronics devices in volume that can compete with products offered by the traditional semiconductor companies.