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Comment by megamark16 | Hacker News Reader

Well, from a business perspective, if you're a company with equipment (medical, electronics, tools, etc) you could have employee "check out" equipment with their phones. If you're a company that works with documents (engineering, legal, what have you) you could attach barcodes to physical copies (shoot, you could overlay them on the digital ones to so they print off with the doc itself) and use them to easily pull up a record of the document. These are just a few uses that come to mind, but basically anywhere that you need to identify something or someone, you could use this as a starting point and build out from there.

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To target this use-case they would need to limit the number of wide-eyed, open mouthed monkeys they use on their sales page.

No problem: take the same technology, rebrand it have a "business-oriented" name, make a different landing page, then sell both versions.

That's what we do (track medical devices, pallets, documents, etc., with barcodes and RFID).

The biggest barrier by far for this market is the status-quo: if you have to add even a few steps to employees’ current workflow, the project will have a much harder time getting off the ground.

You could implement this sort of tracking in a very non-intrusive way with RFID: put an RFID scanner in the supply room, which reads the employees' and equipments' RFID tags such that the monitoring system knows that employee X left room Y with equipment Z.

Hasn't this sort of thing been in production for years with UPS/WalMart/etc?

Yes, we have a variety of rules and methods to do things like that, but you might be surprised at how many issues there still are. In the Wal-Mart case for example, they spent years trying to get compliance from their suppliers, and in the end they had to cut back on their goals and requirements because of the extra steps (and costs) needed.

Also, RFID as a commercialized technology is still relatively new (even though it's been around for a long time), and there are a lot of technical hurdles that most people don’t know about. For example, a standard, Wal-Mart style RFID tag won't read if you hold it close to the body (or put it in a pocket), or put it on metal or liquid; in those cases, you have to use a special tag, or a battery assisted tag ("active rfid", which can be much more expensive), or an "RTLS" tag (wifi, ultra-wideband, etc). It's all really interesting (to me anyway), but the industry has had to spend quite a bit of time getting over all of the hurdles that are non-obvious (like any industry I suppose).

Interesting to see some real-life perspective on this issue. Seems the trade-off is cost vs convenience.

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