eWeek reports about a novel product for monitoring and reporting every liquor, beer and wine serving at the establishment.

Beverage Metrics consist of RFID equiped tilt switches that can be attached to the bottles. Each time a bartender pours a drink, the data is transferred to the server via RFID. The software is not merely recording how many times the bottle is poured, but it factors in the tilt of the bottle, the duration of the pour and the bartender’s pouring style to calculate how much liquid is leaving the bottle.

POS reconciliation matches the served brand with the POS ring-up and recipe. Each pour is automatically reconciled with its ring-up, and an unaccounted pour is clearly marked until it is duly entered.

At this moment the costs of this new system are still rather high (arounf $5 per sensor plus a subscription fee roughly equivalent to about 1 percent of revenue), but if it gets a little bit of market share, prices may drop to $2 for a sensor.

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Despite big initiatives by the likes of Wal-Mart, Target and the Department of Defense, and a good bit of hype, tracking goods with RFID tags isn’t going to become commonplace anytime soon, said Sal Iannuzzi, president and CEO of Symbol Technologies.

In time, it will be a very significant market, but whether that happens in ’07 or ’08, I don’t know that, said Iannuzzi. It’s such an embryonic market that it’s not about revenue yet… in some ways you can view it as a startup.

RFID uses radio frequency waves to transfer data between a reader and a tag to identify, track or find a tagged item. (The tracking capability is what has spawned privacy concerns.) Symbol markets both readers and tags.

Technology consultancy Gartner estimates that new license revenues for RFID will total $751 million worldwide by the end of 2006. By 2010, Gartner forecasts worldwide RFID spending to surpass $3 billion. Success will depend on finding popular applications beyond retail distribution centers, analysts say.

Just because bar codes are used extensively in distribution centers does not mean RFID will be, said Jeff Woods, research vice president at Gartner, in a December 2005 report. Businesses are beginning to discover business value in places where they cannot use bar coding, which will be the force that moves RFID forward.

[Source: eWeek]

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