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Wednesday, October 7, 2009
SoundTag’s RFID tags help receivers find shipping crates
By Rodney H. Brown
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Startup SoundTag Inc. is using RFID technology to get a retailer’s shipping boxes to chirp out their locations like a lost baby bird.
The Braintree-based company last month brought in an additional $575,000 in angel funding to help bring its radio frequency identification tag-based SoundTag chips to market. The SoundTag chip is a small blue square that gets encoded with the normal information on any RFID tag attached to a shipping crate — product, UPC number, source and destination. But SoundTag’s software also lets the chip know if it is in a case with particularly time-sensitive material.
When the case gets to the end user, such as a single retail store in a massive chain, the store staff can use a similar RFID reader with SoundTag’s software to find that time-sensitive case in the thousands of cases that came in.
“The tag that we make has an audible sound to it, so that when you are trying to retrieve the box and you pull the trigger (on the reader), and the tag in the box makes a loud audible sound that leads you to it,” said Jeff Freeman, co-founder and CEO.
SoundTag sees two initial markets for the product — retail and the trade show industry. For retailers, having the ability to quickly find a case of sale items that need to get on the floor right away will be attractive, Freeman said, noting the company has interest from “several large retailers that we are not in a position to talk about.”
It also has a couple of test deployments in place with trade show industry companies, he said.
Freeman previously worked for a point-of-sale display maker on the South Shore. Once he conceived of SoundTag, he recruited Tom Dwan, an engineer who is also a Harvard Business School grad.
According to Cambridge-based research firm IDTechEx Inc., there were 1.97 billion RFID tags sold globally in 2008, of which approximately 358 million went to the overall retail industry, from the supply chain to the end shelf. The firm reported that 2009 should see 2.35 billion tags sold worldwide.
SoundTag also touts the greener aspect of its business model from a traditional RFID play. The company reuses its tags, supplying end users with collection bins that SoundTag gathers on a regular basis to be reprogrammed for the next assignment.
Not doing the same thing that most RFID companies do will give SoundTag an edge, as it fills a need in its target markets, according to co-founder and COO Dwan.
“We have a different agenda than the typical RFID tag where they are really concerned with inventory — knowledge of what’s there and what’s come in,” he said. “Ours is really to find stuff once it has come in.”
The company is in the market for more funding, Freeman said, as it seeks to grow toward full-scale production.
“We are definitely going to go for another round of funding. That’s going to be required for us to ramp up,” he said. “We are looking right now, and the sooner the better.”
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