Retail RFID Gets Real

The “Deflate-Gate” scandal that swirled around quarterback Tom Brady and the New England Patriots cast worldwide attention on the seemingly mundane process of keeping track of game balls. Just a week earlier, another former NFL legend, Emmitt Smith, was at the National Retail Federation (NRF) show promoting a technology that could help: RFID. Smith is founder and chairman of a mobile identification company called PROVA with a solution called Gametag, an embedded NFC (a form of RFID) tag used to track a ball’s history and protect against counterfeit.