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By value, we forecast that in 2009 the value of the RFID market will grow by 23% over 2008, and in 2010 it will grow by 25% over 2009 - not exponential, but still very strong growth.

The IDTechEx Knowledgebase of over 3,500 RFID projects in 109 countries illustrates how this market of over $5 billion is rapidly diversifying.

The US and China vie for the title of the world's largest RFID market, this year seeing them level pegging with $1.3 billion of business, which is looking to quintuple in the next ten years.

One reason why the market for Real Time Locating Systems (RTLS) is growing rapidly to pass the billion dollar mark well within ten years is technology. It is improving rapidly, with new variants for the many new sub sectors of the market that are emerging.

The largest European RFID conference is being held on 30th September and 1st October in Cambridge. With a plethora of new announcements and industry-leaders presenting, Dr. Peter Harrop outlines some of the highlights the speaker programme has to offer.

In this summary of the Active RFID market Dr. Peter Harrop outlines why Active RFID and its associated technologies are receiving such attention and have such high growth predictions.

Passive radar is a term applied to radar that covertly employs other people's emissions as they reveal targets, no signal being emitted by those doing the covert detection. This has military uses. It is not to be confused with Real Time Locating System RTLS using passive tags, a new form of RFID-based RTLS that has burst onto the scene in 2008. This employs passive tags instead of the traditional active tags. The idea is actually about ten years old and it was mooted as a UHF system by Trolleyscan who called it RFID Radar and demonstrated by RFSAW, which uses Surface Acoustic Wave chips that are more sensitive and simpler to make than the silicon chips used by everyone else - active and passive.

The global RFID market continues its rapid growth as record orders up to $0.5 billion each are serviced. This year demand for RFID is on target for $5.3 billion globally as it powers its way to $27 billion in 2018. Indeed, much is now happening in Europe, although it is the US and China that share top slot as RFID spenders at present.

NFC-enabled phones have yet to take off, despite phones with the Sony Felica interface, compatible with NFC, being placed in the hands of over 50 million Japanese in little more than two years - one of the fastest adoption rates for electronics ever. So why the delay? Here Dr Peter Harrop shares insight into the topic summarizing findings from the new IDTechEx report NFC-Enabled Phones and Contactless Smart Cards 2008-2018