Dear Santa,
I saw you at the shopping mall just the other day but you were occupied with other business, so I left you alone. I’ll give you ten points for the impressive entourage!
How has year 2017 been for you? Good funnel and outlook for 2018, or is that still too far away to say?
Me? Thanks, family is good, the dog and the house as well. However, as the next year is again just around the corner, I really wanted to write you this letter from the RAIN man’s perspective.
Please Help Retain the Talents
Both in your organization and ours it’s only natural that people come and go. I mean, it must be hard for your little helpers to keep those huge inventories accurate and muscle around all the odd-shaped packages, such as pianos and snowmobiles! Some of them surely get tired and steer their careers towards less seasonal operations. It’s the same at our end, with the difference ours is a little less seasonal and our helpers are taller than yours. The mileage is rough for both.
Talent pool in the RAIN business is still scarce, and it takes time to train the new superheroes. With that said, as we both need to keep our operations efficient and scalable, I would very much hope for two things:
- Keep the best talent motivated, committed and in-house
- Endorse standard procedures (or de-facto standard, as your chimney entrance)
Please Just Give Us One Name to Work With
Radio Frequency Identification went by the name RFID for a long while, but it seems we’ve run out of space under the same umbrella with so many very different technologies: LF, HF and UHF. First came NFC Forum and rebranded a hefty part of the portfolio. After a while RAIN Alliance was established to nurture UHF RFID under a new brand, RAIN. However, not all the stakeholders got onboard the RAIN train, which means plenty of branding confusion especially in the retail-domain, where EPC numbering brand by GS1 further complicates communication.
Please, let there be light, co-operation and goodwill among all the stakeholders, and show them the way. We saw GS1 and RAIN shake hands already in Lille in February 2017, they should just get the puzzle finally completed:
Please Supply RAIN Smartphones for Teenagers
Many seasoned RAIN-believers start to attract shades of gray at their temples. I’ve recently been told I’m among them. It’s not that we wouldn’t be as bright and innovative as always, but the youngsters think and act differently.
I’d like to see teenagers inject some craziness into our industry.
After a decade of waiting, could you finally come up with a reasonably priced RAIN enabled smartphone with fair battery capacity that we could give for them? Good things would happen. And I want one, too!
Please do not brand the phone “tubular”.
Please Show E=mc2 for RAIN
On the component level, after a decade of hard work, we have the basic performance metrics for both RAIN tagged items (TIPP) and readers (reader sensitivity testing). Please show everybody how the system level performance can be reasonably estimated based on those performance metrics! I mean the environment is a difficult variable, but on your discretion, just define a new variable , like you gave the speed of light “c” for Albert Einstein.
That’s all! Travel safe, protect yourself against frostbites and watch out for those house-securing-bulldogs. Stay hydrated as well – I know the costume doesn’t ventilate too well.
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