Everything will soon be smart with NFC tags, even beer

When people talk about how one day everything will part of the Internet of Things, they really do mean everything. Technology is getting less expensive that tags containing digital information can be slapped on just about anything to enhance user experience. It's already been posited that RFID tags could play a significant role in Amazon's vision for automated grocery stores. One form of these tags uses NFC, which is what Thin Film Electronics specializes in. Thin Film will show off its NFC tags at the Consumer Electronics Show in the form of "smart beer."

The company is working with Hopsy, a San Francisco-based craft beer delivery service, to get its OpenSense NFC tags on its bottles. People can use their smartphones to scan the tags to get additional beer information, including breweries, foods that pair well with the beer or even videos from brewers.

Efforts like this and Amazon's grocery store are just the beginning of making everything "smart." In fact, Thin Film CEO Davor Sutija said he wants IoT to "include the hundreds of billions of everyday, disposable items that exist in the world." This could lead to a dramatic increase in demand for RFID tags. IDTechEx estimates the overall RFID market was worth $10.1 billion in 2015 and this will reach $18.68 billion by 2026. Passive RFID tags are the biggest market segment. So a world in which everything is “smart” is probably one that buys and sells a lot of RFID tags.