Since many years, a lot of people, sometimes financially interested (chips companies), are always merging two different concepts: "Internet of Things" and "RFID".

To make an analogy (objects VS people), this is as irrelevant as considering identification of people throughout the only biometric passport without taking into account many other contextual solutions: national ID cards, DNA footprints, professional status, personal thoughts, social background, etc.

Fortunately, things are changing and RFID is more and more considered as a mean, amongst many others, to identify and collect, in real time, information in value chains.

The difficulties RFID players are currently experiencing in the deployment of RFID in full open loops, mainly due to their IT approaches (massive information can be nothing without a clear vision on “how to use it”*), is part of this evolution since it places real stakes in front of the analysts.

Therefore analysts that were used to “not seeing the forest for the trees” are now discovering many other dimensions such as “semantic web”, “ubiquitous computing”, “M2M”, “massive parallel systems”, “distributed intelligent systems”, etc. that are converging to the concept of IOT.

This convergence could then be the prelude to a serious work and to a very important next step… Let’s wait and see…

Philippe GAUTIER

  • USA did not anticipate the 11th September 2001 although they did have the available information but hidden behind a huge amount of data. This is the perfect illustration that massive data can be “noise” instead of “information”…