A new hosted service from SkyeTek  is designed to apply RFID technology for mobile users and applications.

With MetaFi, sales and account management staff in the field can use RFID technology to track, monitor and manage products as they move from the factory to customer sites. This field data can be integrated via Web services interfaces with a variety of backend inventory, invoicing, and customer management applications.

The results are more current and more accurate field inventory data, faster invoicing, less time spent by sales staff on manual inventory updates and paperwork, and slashing both over-stocks and out-of-stocks, the company says.

RFID deployments are growing fast, with the most popular applications being asset tracking, personal identification, supply chain marketing, and retail management.

“Mobility is a kind of ‘next frontier’ for RFID,” says Michael Dortch, an analyst with Aberdeen Group, a technology research company based in Boston. “RFID tagging of pallets in warehouses is pretty much proven, but being able to track tagged items as they move, on a conveyor belt or across a yard or parking lot, presents an additional set of challenges.”

Chief among those challenges are technologies for capturing and integrating this data into an enterprise’s core operational applications and processes, according to Dortch. “It's going to take solutions such as MetaFi to enable the integration [that] users want and need to take maximum business advantage of the data generated by RFID in motion,” he says.

And SkyeTek is not the only vendor seeing a mobile opportunity. By year-end, Microsoft plans to release BizTalk RFID Mobile, which will let Windows CE 5.0 and Windows Mobile 5.0 handheld devices collect RFID data, push it back to BizTalk Server, and from there to an array of other enterprise applications. The idea is to create a platform for mobile RFID application development.

SkyeTek’s idea is to minimize if not eliminate the need for such coding, by creating a ready-to-use, Web-based mobile RFID infrastructure, consisting of handheld RFID readers, software agents, and a hosted server with a Web-based console. The wide-area wireless connectivity comes from Wi-Fi or cellular data services and wireless handhelds, such as smart phones, loaded with the MetaFi agent.