Batteryless Tracking Could Change Supply Chain Visibility

What if you could track products across your supply chain without relying on batteries or manual barcode scans?

In this episode of the Sustainable Supply Chain podcast, I speak with Eric Biel, Director of Strategic Partnerships at Powercast, about how wireless power and RAIN RFID are unlocking smarter, more sustainable logistics. Eric explains how ambient RF energy can power sensors and tags over the air, eliminating battery waste, reducing maintenance, cabling, and enabling real-time environmental monitoring.

We explore how batteryless RFID can support compliance with the EU’s upcoming Digital Product Passport regulations by providing lifecycle transparency from factory floor to disposal. We also cover how Powercast is helping companies like Samsung cut e-waste at scale, and how this same tech is being used in places as unexpected as commercial ovens.

Key takeaways:

• Why barcodes and battery-powered sensors are limiting supply chain visibility
• How RF-powered tags offer low-maintenance, long-life alternatives
• The surprising impact of passive wireless charging on emissions and operations
• What supply chain leaders should stop doing if they’re serious about sustainability

This is a conversation about turning regulation into innovation, and making sustainability practical through smart design.

🎧 Listen in to learn how wireless power might quietly reshape your supply chain.

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Transcript

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It can be used to power a sensor device. It can be used to recharge a battery, a rechargeable battery. But the point is we can send that RF energy over the air, capture it, and then do stuff with it. So that's like true wireless in the same way that you would think of like wifi or Bluetooth as being wireless Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, wherever you are in the world. Welcome to episode 72 of the Sustainable Supply Chain Podcast, the number one show focusing exclusively on the intersection of sustainability and supply chains. I'm your host, Tom Raftery, and I'm thrilled to have you here today. A huge thank you to this podcast's, amazing supporters, Kieran Ognev and Alicia Farag. you really help make this podcast possible. If this podcast regularly brings you value and you'd like to help me keep the podcast going. Support starts at just three euros or dollars a month, which is less than the price of a coffee. You'll find the support link in the show notes of this or any episode or at tinyurl.com/ssc pod. Now you know how everyone's trying to get realtime visibility into their supply chains without burying themselves in batteries, barcodes, and constant maintenance. Well, today's guest, Eric Biel, is the guy who's turning that into a reality. Eric and his team at POWERCAST have figured out how to wirelessly power sensors and RFID tags using nothing but ambient radio waves. That means fewer batteries, less e-waste, and smarter tracking. Exactly the kind of innovation we need to meet new regulations like the EU's Digital Product Passport, and actually walk the talk on sustainability. Today, Eric explains how wireless power is transforming supply chains from powering temperature sensors in commercial ovens to making digital product passports a whole lot smarter. And yes, we even touch on why Netflix characters never plug in their phones. But before we get to that in the next few weeks, I'll be chatting to Pierre Lapree, CPO of spend, hq Chris Condon, co-founder and CEO of Aircon and Air Freight company. Ollie Carpenter, Director of Environmental Risk for Risilience, and Eric Garcell, Director of Enterprise Development for Classiq. But, back to today's episode, and as I said, my special guest on the show today is Eric. Eric, welcome to the podcast. Would you like to introduce yourself? I'd love to, and first of all, Tom, appreciate you having me on here. This should be fun and I've been looking forward to it since I heard about it. So my name, I'm Eric Biel, and I am the Director of Strategic Partnerships here at Powercast. I've been in this role for a few years now, but I've been with Powercast for, I like to say too long. But it's going on just over 12 years now. Working on wireless power things including RAIN RFID, that supports supply chain and sustainability and all that fun stuff. Okay, so Eric, you mentioned Powercast and wireless, so gimme a little bit more detail on what Powercast is and what it has to do with wireless. Absolutely. So Power Cast is a wireless power company and we sort of have three legs to the stool as we describe it for those wireless power options. The first leg of the stool I describe is. Basically what most folks are familiar with. So if you have a cell phone these days, it basically will probably have Qi based charging in it. So that is a inductive based charging mechanism. There's a coil on the phone side, there's a coil on the transmitter side. You set the two devices together and off you go, your charging your device, quote unquote wirelessly. There's pros and cons to that. Obviously it's technically wireless charging, but you have effectively no range, but you are transferring a great deal of power. Standard now is about 13 watts. The second leg is probably what we're most known for, which is radio frequency, RF based, far field charging. So the concept there is very cool. Basically, you have a transmitting device that sends out RF energy into the air. Same thing happens when you make a cell phone call. Your wifi router does this, right? There's energy in these radio frequency signals that are going out into the air, and what we do is we make a semiconductor chip and along with an antenna, we capture some of that RF energy that's going out there, and the chip efficiently converts that into DC power. And that DC power can be used to do any number of things. It can be used to power a sensor device. It can be used to recharge a battery, a rechargeable battery. But the point is we can send that RF energy over the air, capture it, and then do stuff with it. So that's like true wireless in the same way that you would think of like wifi or Bluetooth as being wireless and the ranges are pretty significant. The farthest we've ever gone is about 120 feet. The amount of power you get is gonna be dependent on how far you are from an emitting source. That 120 feet, you're looking at like very low levels of micro watts of available power. So that was a low duty cycle sensor operation. Wake up, take a temperature sensor measurement, blast a Bluetooth packet out, go back to sleep, and it would do that like once a minute or so. But the point is, is like I have a completely passive device sitting way over here and I'm able to provide power to that thing wirelessly. So we dabble in that and that's integrating our technology into our customer's products, working with other folks to, to design antennas for them. Putting all these things together. And in some instances even doing full product design for folks where we take over all of their electronics, their supply chain, their packaging, everything. So we kind of have a full stop shop on electronic product design. And then the third leg of the stool is something we've recently added. We debuted it at CES 2025 in early January this year and its magnetic resonance recharging. So the way I like to think of magnetic resonance is sort of a bridged gap between the previous two legs of the sort of Qi based inductive and the far field RF where it's still a coil to coil type of charging mechanism, but you get much greater freedom of placement of the receiver devices and you actually get Z separation as well, all the while still transferring up like significant amounts of power in the upwards of a hundred watts of power. So the example we showed at CES year was basically a desk. You know, imagine your desk, you have a coil basically sitting under your desk, that's your charging coil, and then all the devices that sit on your desk, including your laptop, the monitor, the keyboard, the mouse, your phone that's sitting there. All of those had receiver coils built into them, and you could set them anywhere on your desk, slide them around, there's no, I have to set it on this pad in a correct orientation. And all of those devices were simultaneously being powered and able to be charged. Those are the sort of three legs of the wireless power stool that we built here, and then we implement this into our customer's products. Anyone who wants to enable wireless power comes to us as sort of the, it's generic to say, but the one stop shop of wireless power. Going along with that, not only are we. Involved in supply chain, just in the inherent nature of our electronics business and the sourcing of our own chips. But we manage these supply chains for our customers too, and we leverage RAIN RFID in those markets to support not only our own products for tracking, but then there's more things we can add on top of it with wireless power technology that I'm sure we'll talk about in a little bit here. Sure. I'm just thinking as you're saying this, that the people who do stock photography must love this idea because anytime you see stock photos of offices, you have monitors, you have keyboards, you have zero cables. The, the monitors are working with zero cable, so Well, yeah, and, it's sort of like if you've ever looked for a house and you see some of the stock photography or the, or the photos they use to, they make it look very good. And One, one caveat of with Powercast is there's some other, other folks that do wireless power stuff and, and a lot of sort of the messaging is a little futuristic. I like to think as far as Powercast goes, I like to think we're very upfront about what the technology can offer, what it can do, but maybe even more importantly, sometimes what it can't do. So if you come to me and you said, I wanna power my blender across a football field, can it be done? Technically, yes, there's, it's not a limit of the technology, but from a regulatory and a safety perspective, yeah, we're not gonna do that kind of thing. The, the number one question folks seem to give us, well, I guess there's two questions we get the most at when we tend trade shows or we're doing media or anything like that. The, the number one question is, can you charge my cell phone? And the answer is, yeah, of course we can do it with the Qi stuff. Of course everyone can do that. But can we do it, you know, through the air while I'm walking around with it and all that stuff. And the answer is yes, but given the limits put on us, just like other devices are subject to like wifi routers, there's a limit to the amount of power we're allowed to put out, which inherently limits how much power we're ultimately able to receive. Can I charge the phone wirelessly through the air? Yes, but it's gonna take a significant amount of time to the point where it probably not gonna be a great user experience. So sometimes you see those stock photos of, oh, I'm just carrying my phone around and it's just automatically being charged. I walk into the coffee shop and then I walk into my home and it's just automatically, and I don't have to think about it. That's a little farfetched, but it is technically possible. So that's the first question I always get. And the second one is given those things I brought up about, you know, power level and safety, they're always asking, well, is this a safe technology? And I give them the same answer. If you are comfortable using a cell phone, holding it to your head, answering calls. This our technology's orders of magnitude lower in terms of exposure. Given the way we use the, the technology and that, it's not next to your body or your head most of the time this is like basically nothing compared to what you'd get from a, a holding a cell phone there next to your head. So I like to think it's safe. Like I said, I've been doing this coming up on 13 years. I'm fine, I know anecdotal, but also we're subject to the same regulations as every other device that's out there in the world too. So no big deal as far as that's concerned. Sure. And who would be Powercast's customers and what problems are you solving for them? Given that we're basically a power source power is maybe the broadest possible market for electronics, right? Every single device that's out there, outside of some RAIN, RFID tags, which we'll talk about it, it pretty much needs a battery or a power source of some kind, right? So our competition is sometimes a wall wart and a wire. With the rise of the IOT, basically things that are out there. Anything that has a small battery is a potential candidate to use wireless power. Some of our, our biggest customer that, that we can talk about is Samsung. So if you buy a Samsung television, they have their Eco Remote that comes with it. And they had a large, this was two years ago, they had a large green initiative. They wanted to eliminate the alkaline battery waste of batteries cycling through the remote controls, which they're a massive company. They're selling millions and millions of TVs. That's millions and millions of batteries cycled through once a year, whatever it is. So they wanted to eliminate that waste. So their eco remote removed batteries from the remote control and opted for basically a super capacitor in its place. And so there were three methods you could use to charge that remote control. It had a USB-C port, so if you needed immediate charging right now, you could plug the thing in. There was a solar cell on the back of the remote, so sunlight and an ambient light could be used to top that super capacitor off. But the most interesting is that our chips are in there with an antenna and we harvest ambient wifi and Bluetooth energy and use whatever is available to top off the super capacitor. So if you're within, you know, signal strength, that's large enough to, to charge that thing, we're gonna take that energy, we're gonna convert it to DC and top that, that super capacitor off. It's out there in huge quantities, but most people don't even know it's there. But huge deployment there in the consumer electronics business. Powercast is coming up on 23 years or so in business, which surprises a lot of folks when they hear about, they think of the wireless power stuff is being extremely futuristic, right? It's, oh, it's Nicola Tesla. They're a hundred percent right. So they're surprised that they haven't heard of it before, but we've been doing industrial and commercial sensing you know, since as early as 2007, 2009. So we've had products out there for a significant amount of time. They're just not the most sexy applications all the time. You know, a temperature sensor sitting in the back of a warehouse building, monitoring that for HVAC reporting or a light level sensor again in an industrial warehouse is not the most attractive, flashy headline to pull people in. But that's what we've been doing, right, for the longest time. Okay. How does the cost of a sensor with one of your chips in it compare to the cost of a sensor that you can power with a battery? Good question. So obviously adding more things to the device will likely increase the cost, and that's no exception with our technology. So you'll have a change from basically a primary non-rechargeable battery to a rechargeable battery. Inherent in that you're going to almost always get a reduction in the capacity of that battery, so it will last less long. But now you have the opportunity to recharge that battery, so you have a smaller upfront cost, definitely in terms of the device itself. Additionally, you need a source for the wireless power in most instances you need a transmitter of some kind, and we make transmitters that act as sources of RF energy. Other sources of RF energy could be RFID readers. So if you have them in your warehouse, that can be an inherent source of RF energy that we can use harvest to dial these things out. The real value though, comes in from downtime, maintenance and things like that. So if you have a battery powered sensor, you're relying on for, you know, temperature automation in, in a warehouse, for example. It talks to your building automation system in your HVAC to control a temperature in a given section and that dies for whatever reason. Now, you are not only losing the ability to control that piece of the building, you have maybe incurred additional heating costs, whatnot, but if you wanna replace that, you have to roll a truck. You're sending a person out to change batteries or to literally throw the device away. There's e-waste associated with that and having to rehook that system up. So there's a an incredible cost associated with that. Imagine if you had hundreds of these in a deployed space. That's a significant pain point with the wirelessly rechargeable nature now, you literally never roll the truck. The cost is incurred up front with, you know, the little, the extra cost incurred from our chip, which in volume is sub $1 for that chip. You've got the transmitter systems or you can leverage existing ones. Again, a lot of warehouse places have RFID systems in them that can be used. But you're eliminating all that additional labor overhead and lost operating time that you might incur the headaches really down the road. Sure. You're also, I gotta think, eliminating e-waste because lithium-ion batteries today aren't recycled as much as they could or should be. Correct. Yeah that's definitely, true. a lot of that has to do with the form factor. If you have lithium-ion batteries in something like a car, they're easy to get to, easy to pull out, relatively,'cause they're big and easy to recycle. And there are companies who are doing that, but lithium-ion batteries in something small like a sensor. Much, much harder to extricate and recycle. So I gotta think there's an e-waste problem there that your solution is addressing, right? Absolutely, for several reasons, I mean. Right off the bat, just the inherent nature of recharging means you're eliminating this, the disposable batteries. So not from the lithium aspect, but just the battery e-waste in general. Right. Which is massive. So you have that. Devices that are single use that might run, even a device that's designed to run several years on a single battery is still gonna end up as e-waste. Whereas if that system is reliable and rechargeable, then. That's a lifetime style device. That could last 20 years or more. Right. So you're, you're picking that up as well. Then you're a hundred percent right on the lithium battery side where that's a ton of waste that people aren't thinking about as much. Cars are easy, right? EVs are easy 'cause the, the batteries are so significant to the whole thing. But phones and all these other small children's toys that have these rechargeable batteries in 'em, they all just end up as waste too. So with wireless power, by extending lifetime, you're inherently reducing e-waste is sort of one of the tenets we kind of look at when we're talking about adding wireless power to something. Okay. And. This has implications as well for things like regulations. Correct? Because I know for, for example, here in Europe, we've got this Digital Product Passport legislation coming on board and you know, this impacts that, right? Right. And I'm not sure what the listeners might know about the Digital Product Passport. It's relatively new to me. Obviously Powercast is based in the United States, but we keep our eye on what's happening in the world basically 'cause you kind of have to think globally at this point. Digital Product Passport is an extremely interesting concept. Sort of a necessary tag or document that accompanies a product through its entire life. It's attached to the device in some way, and the information included on the thing is kind of vast information about the material sourcing, what's in the device, the material composition, where it came from, where it was made, any repair history for the device, disassembly, and then maybe instructions on how to recycle that device appropriately. And this Digital Product Passport might take the form of a QR code. It might take the form of an NFC tag, or it might take the form of a, a RAIN RFID label. Each one has some pros and cons to it. QR codes are great. They're cheap and easy. You can scan 'em with the phone, but if it's on maybe like a piece of clothing and you're washing that thing, QR code's gonna be gone. Right. If it's something that's outside, again, sun is gonna just, the UV is just gonna destroy that QR code. So there's kind of challenges with that. NFC is a great option that's in most phone now too. But you have to be right up on the thing to read it. It's inherently a near field technology but you can store data on it. But the interesting one that's used the most in supply chains and I think has a huge potential for the digital product passport is the UHF tags. They're inherently in a printable process. They're very small and you can fit vast amounts of data on them, and they're unobtrusive you and you can read them with a lot of systems in the supply chain now. And from what I've heard, there's gonna be more and more systems at the consumer level that are gonna allow us to read them too. It'll give you information on that product that kind of lets you not only know about its material sourcing and whatnot, but I kind of take it a step further.'cause again, I'm coming at most things thinking about the wireless power aspect of it. So if we're gonna require digital product passports, and UHF tags might be used to do this. To read a UHF tag, you have to have some sort of reader. And any reader is an inherent source of RF energy. See where I'm going a little bit. So now for a relatively low cost, you can add basically a V out or voltage out pin on these RFID tags, and now you have wireless power available as well. So there's a ton of opportunity from our perspective on not only the, the benefits that would come with the digital product passport from a tracking and, and material, all the information that's stored on it, but now you have the ability to add power to it so that it can do more things. And that's where we kind of come in the in the RAIN RFID space, is that you've gotta have these readers, right? The readers are power. Why aren't we just using the power that's already there to do more stuff? And for stuff on the Digital Product, Passports, if it's electronic devices, now you can inherently have a rechargeable device. If you're gonna have this tag in it anyway, so you can leverage the, the reader's power as a recharging mechanism. And then on the supply chain side, it's like, well, why aren't you, you could monitor temperature for this device as it makes its way through your, your supply chain at the same time. So there's, the high level point is that there is power available. We can enable us to use it to do things and, and that those things can be extremely broad depending on the use cases, example. But given that like the regulations are gonna be required, you start thinking about, well, we have to do it anyway. What else can we get out of this that can influence and make our operations smarter or at the consumer level, make our product cooler or more attractive? And I mean, I gotta think somewhere like you mentioned warehouses a couple of times, but I gotta think factory floors are an ideal one for this because you want to instrument your machines, all of your machines so that you are measuring temperature, you're measuring velocity, you're measuring vibration, you're measuring noise, you're measuring whatever else it is, light, whatever else. Yeah, and it's like almost twofold, right? Because you're gaining this insight in this data on the product asset, whatever it is itself, right? So as it moves through your supply chain, if you see that we're having trouble because the temperature in this area is getting too high, or, you know, this was exposed to a humidity level, that's untenable and that's why we're having problems. So you can optimise your supply chain for the given product that way. Furthermore, you can understand logistics in your own infrastructure about like time spent in different stations. Say, say you're in a manufacturing environment, and when we do this ourselves where, hey, it's seems like this item you know, we're estimating that it's gonna stay at this, this station for 30 seconds on average, and you find out it's there for four minutes on average, you, have a logistical inefficiency that you didn't know existed. But now because you have this ability to monitor time as well as these environmental parameters, it influences how you might do things too. So you get the sort of secondary benefit in your supply chain of increasing efficiency. Therefore the sustainability kind of comes up with that. So you, you get a lot of benefits from, from these kind of things. It's just about having access to this data that you can use to influence the product, the operation. And all those kind of things that come with it. Yeah, and I mean, we've, we've danced around RAIN RFID little bit. Let's dig into it a bit. Can you talk a little bit about RAIN RFID, how it works and what makes it so efficient? So the RAIN RFID Alliance is sort of like this global organisation to promote the use of passive UHF, UHF means ultra high frequency radio frequency identification. So, it used to be only known as sort of UHF RFID, which is a mouthful. It's all just, abbreviations, for stuff that's a lot to say. So RAIN is sort of like trying to become a this alliance promoting tech, the way that other organisations like the NFC Forum or Bluetooth SIG, the Wifi Alliance, like they're basically promoting the use of this technology under sort of the word RAIN, which comes from radio frequency identification. So that that's where RAIN is coming from. So it's sort of a, a link between the radio link to the tag itself and the cloud. So you have this RAIN cloud of, of data, I think is kind of how they're, they're positioning themselves and really what they're trying to do is it's already, if you're in the manufacturing space, so RAIN, these tags are used all over the place to track items through a, a manufacturing supply chain. So, you know, when they ran through a certain step, when they moved from, you know, location A and they showed up at location B if they were lost for any reason, it makes it very easy to scan these things. And, and from a technical perspective, they offer a lot of benefits over some of the other traditional tracking mechanisms that are used in manufacturing, right? Everyone knows barcodes. Yeah. You can scan a barcode with a barcode reader. It's a one-to-one technology, right? You scan this one, you scan this one, you scan this one. NFC tags also used commonly, same thing. It's a one-to-one technology. What's great about the RAIN RFID stuff is that the range on these things is upwards to 10 meters from a standard RFID reader. So you can read these tags in a, in a much bigger space, and it's many to one. So if you have a pallet of goods, you can scan the pallet and get the entire what's on this thing, every single device, basically, and know what's there. So from an inventory accounting perspective, right? You have all these things tagged, but you're speeding up logistically how much time it might have taken you to, to inventory this particular pallet or, or, or shelf or whatever it might be. So there's a ton of sort of sustainability reasons why RAIN is kind of interesting because given the nature of it where you're tracking these things that's like less wasted material less you, you, you're have a better insight into your production sort materials and sourcing so you know what's there. So you can eliminate, you know, overstock and things like that. The increased efficiency we kind of touched on a little bit where it's just time, time, right? It, everything is about speed and knowing the more data, you know, the quicker you can make decisions. By making that more efficient, you have inherent reduced CO2 emissions. Like, I mean, they sort of stack on one another that way. And then from a security perspective too, these tags can be locked. The data can be made such that it can't be edited. So you have sort of a security element to it as well. That's very interesting. So we talked about asset tracking, but they can be used for asset control as well. Sort of like, the way you might see a, a card at a hotel to gain access to, you know, a room that's a one-to-one technology. You can do this with UHF RFID the same way, but over a larger range, so you're not having to scan a specific spot. It just knows where a person is at a given time based on them wearing maybe a lanyard with a tag on it or something like that so you know where folks are. So it's like a real time location system in that way. All kinds of interesting use cases for it. And it, I haven't seen it done, but I, you technically could use it for electronic payments as well based on that security information. There's a con, you could argue there where, you know, NFC might be inherently better because it's near field and you, you have to kind of actively find and scan this thing and it can't be like, oh, I'm reading this information 10 meters away, or something like that. But again, tons of interesting use cases for these tags. And we've got realtime environmental information coming from these tags. Things like temperature, humidity, shock, et cetera, et cetera. How are businesses actually using that data today? Have you come across any cool, or, unexpected applications of this tech that have surprised even you? Yeah, I'll speak to one very interesting one, but again, I'll say that traditional tags are completely passive. They have no batteries and they're just giving you that asset information. So there's usually an, an electronic product code that comes with it, and then if there's any kind of memory is data stored in the memory about where it was made and or maybe manufacturing logs. You only start getting the temperature, the light level, the humidity, the shock, the acceleration stuff when you couple that with our technology to enable wireless power in these things where you're using the power from the reader to do more. So we kind of call that RFID plus, or, enhanced RFID where you're not gonna get that from a traditional tag. You're only gonna get that once you've integrated sort of Powercast's, wireless power technology with that tag. So you're taking the traditional tag asset tracking information and adding this extra data on top of it with the Powercast tag. But a very interesting application of it has to do with commercial ovens in a cooking situation. So we designed a tag that was to be used. So when the, when you're doing like batch cooking in a, in a sort of commercial environment, you might have a, a walk-in oven Okay. they had these giant trays with like hams on them and they would roll the rack into the oven, close the doors, and all of it cooks at the same time. So if you're preparing a ton of food at once, that's how it's done. What they wanted to do was basically put a high temperature RFID reader on the ceiling of the oven. And then put tags in every single ham or food dish in there that had temperature sensors built into them so that they would know what's in the oven, and what temperature it's at, so they know when to take things out. It also could tell 'em where the hotspots or cold spots might be in that oven. what I really thought was cool about it is that the ovens got very, very hot. So from an electronics and a battery perspective, that's a challenge. But given we put all of the electronics in the tip of the temperature sensor, that would be in the food. So the food only got to 165 F if you're cooking chick, you know, one of those safe temperatures, which is drastically lower than like the 400 or more that the oven temperature was at. So the electronics were sort of inherently protected by being in the food. But the use case was something I would've never guessed or tried to do, but an awesome use of the, asset tracking part of it, and the wireless power with temperature reading part of it to enable this kind of very cool application. And once the data gets out, you can do all kinds of stuff on the backend. Like, oh, I'm gonna send a notification to a phone or whatever about, Hey, your stuff's done. So it, it makes the whole process simpler or you're not checking, open the doors, check it, let all the heat out over and over again to check these things. So that was probably one of the coolest implementations that came to mind that I have been a part of. Okay. And what would you say are more standard uses then? So for people who are listening who are thinking about their own supply chains, what would be kind of standard use cases? honestly, like I, I don't know how you would do a supply chain, at least I play in the electronics world without RAIN RFID. But the number one use case that I come across is the ability to gain temperature data on whatever the thing is throughout its journey. One particular application might be cold chain, where like if you're shipping pharmaceuticals or food products, if something gets above a certain temperature in its journey there's something negative that happens with, the pharma product or, or food or whatever it might be, and you need to know that you are maintaining that product's integrity throughout its journey. There's a a use case right there that we see quite a bit. Sometimes folks just like the additional data to understand environmental factors of their manufacturing facility. So when you're talking about RFID plus, like what we can enable, that is the number one use case we see is I just want to get temperature data along with the asset tracking nature of what I'm already doing. And the cost of implementation is, I don't wanna say negligible, but very small.'cause most of the cost is, is in the infrastructure of the reader systems. The readers are the power. They're already there. You're just adding a small amount of cost, our chip to interface on, on the tag side and off you're getting this additional data while with leveraging everything that you've already had in place for your asset tracking anyway. So that's the number one use case that I see in, in the supply chain is getting information of the, of the asset itself from the tag. But then if you want more, the temperature part of it from the, the Powercast, wireless power side of it. And in terms of impact and next steps, what would you say is one thing supply chain leaders should stop doing today if they're serious about sustainability? That's a good question. inefficiency in the supply chain is inherent waste and leads to poor sustainability. So given the legislation that I'm aware of that's come out not just, we talked a little bit about Europe and the Digital Product Passport, but there are things in the US as well about reporting on the sustainability of your supply chain and rules for publicly traded companies that that is going to be issued here, where you're gonna have to consider that anyway. So the, the added benefits you get, how much the RAIN RFID can speed up the logistics in your supply chain. You're gaining that advantage right away. And then having the ability to add the RFID plus to that to even gain more insight to influence your decisions. I just see it as a, it sort of looks like a big step go from io, you know, I'm using barcodes or something like that to getting to RAIN RFID, but given the way that even end consumers are purchasing, they care more about the supply chain, they care about more of the sourcing of the products. You're gonna have that inherent want and need to do RAIN RFID anyway. So the way I see it is that the benefits come from the speeding up of your operation and the additional information you're gaining to your operation to make better decisions and to, to clean up your supply chain so it's cost effective for you in the long run. And it's better for the sustainability for basically globally. And where is all this tech going, do you think? Because I know for example, I was reading that the Chinese are looking at putting massive solar power plants space and beaming the power back down to stations on earth using geosynchronous orbits. That's kind of a long beaming of power. It's not quite where you're headed I, I gotta think, but work it out for me in, in terms of Powercast, where do you see the technology going for yourselves in the next five to 10 years? Awesome question. Thank you for that one. But there's sort of like different stages that you, that you can look out to. You. You kind of touched on the, the futuristic space station, death star type vibe, which it's possible, don't get me wrong to do something like that. A lot of folks, the, the, the dream would be that, charging in general just becomes something you don't think about. And I like the idea. What I see it happening is sort of a combination number one, RFID and the wireless power aspect of that, that will lead to implementation of wireless recharging in a lot of consumer facing devices. Right? So people become sort of inherently understanding of it, just the way that Qi was slowly adopted into things for wireless charging of phones. I think what you will see is that given some of the regulations, you're gonna see the addition of wireless charging put into more and more products. So that's the start of things, but I like to think of it as not one technology doing this stuff, but I touched on the three different styles that Powercast plays in. I like to think that you're gonna have different flavors of wireless charging for different applications where some of the more high powered devices like your laptop or, or I know you're, you're using like a, you know, an interface there for your audio program. All that stuff could technically be completely wirelessly powered. So that futuristic idea of no cords on my desk can be inherently true. Your monitor, your keyboard, your mouse, everything you use your phone. You just set it wherever you want on your desk in the magnetic resonance style of charging might be charging those devices. Then if you're in an office setting, your building automation system is, is gonna be run completely on wireless power. Now maybe there are batteries with those things and they're rechargeable, whatever. But the point would be now you're building automation system and your IOT devices that are sort of doing those lower power functions, those are now also powered wirelessly. So you're gonna have sort of this ecosystem of not having to think so much about keeping devices topped off because just the inherent nature of what you do every day. They're built into it. So, that's kind of like where I see things going and the path that I see forward is that it slowly gets adopted into things like RAIN RFID tags, and then the added functionality you get outta that is just incorporated naturally into more and more products that people interact with every day. So that's kind of the dream on our side and where we see things going and hopefully we can enable and help be a part of pushing that reality into existence.'cause I'm tired of carrying eight chargers with me everywhere I go. I know most people are. Yeah, no, I, I, I gotta think when I look at the streaming services, the Netflix, Apple TV plus, Amazon Prime, et cetera, et cetera, when you look at the people in those series, they never plug in their phones to charge them. They wake up in the morning, the phone goes off, they lift it off the, the bedside table. There's no, there's no cable in it. It's not plugged into anything. It's just sitting there on the table fully charged. So it's always been a bug bear of mine that you never see anyone charging a phone in any series on tv. So I think that you, you've, you've given them now, I think the, the, the likes of Netflix execs and the, the directors of these series, they're all into your future. Yeah. Like we, we kind of gave them an out, right? They kind of wrote something that was un unbelievable into their story, but it's like, oh no, they were just using wireless charging. That must Living in living in the Powercast future. Yeah. Okay. Left field. Question for you, Eric. If you could have any person or character, alive or dead, real or fictional as a champion for wireless power, who would it be and why? This is a cop out answer, but I'm going to just, Nicola Tesla, basically the guy who came up with it. To have him here now. I mean this thing would be done already, right? Just the the sheer level of genius outta that guy and, and just to have him working in the modern day on with what we have available now would be something that would just be so much fun to be around. He might push it even further to the point of being something, you know, crazy like the, your, your, I what you brought up earlier about the, you know, the solar cells and beaming power down. He might try to do something like that, but I just think that would be. Interesting guy to, to pick his brain Hmm. how he sees this stuff being used and his ideas for it. Nice. Yeah. Lovely. I like it. Very good. We're coming towards the end of the podcast now Eric, is there any question I did not ask you that you wish I had or any aspect of this we haven't touched on that you think it's important for people to think about? The only thing I'd touch on a little bit would be we, we talked a little bit about futuristic stuff and, and where the, the RAIN RFID stuff's heading. I thought it was interesting just looking at what's coming. I know Qualcomm is looking at adding RFID RAIN, RFID tag support to mobile phones. So just in the same way that you can read QR codes and you can read NFC tags, the ability to read UHF RFID tags in the mobile phones is very interesting, obviously to Powercast, but also just the fact that if this Digital Product Passport stuff's coming out, the ability to read those items and understand what's in your home or, or to enable you to do things about, like maybe you scan this. This is a little farfetched, but you, you just scan your, with your phone, everything that's in your fridge and, you know, what's there, what do I need to get, what's the status of, the goods in my fridge, things like that. There's already one released by Zebra that has the capability of reading UHF tags. So I think that's the coolest thing that I'm kind of following closely is because the way that the gateway to the future is like, what's the, the phone, right? Because everyone's carrying a phone. So whatever gets into that basically is the pathway to getting these things read and used everywhere else. So that's what I follow the most closely and I find to be the most interesting right now. Mm. Nice one. Okay. Very good. let me, let me ask you, Tom like from what you see, you sit in an interesting space in the supply chain world, what about you in the supply chain world? What do you see as the most interesting thing you've observed recently, or, or exciting things that you've seen either coming down the pipe or even implemented already? Yeah, well, I'm gonna follow your example and cop out because obviously the, the, the most interesting thing that's happened in the supply chain space in the last couple of years has been the rollout of AI and it's, it's different implementations and the different forms of ai. You know, not just the LLMs and ChatGPTs, but also the likes of machine learning, computer vision, natural language processing, all those kind of things and the, the various different ways they've been rolled out and the various different use cases, everything from QC using computer vision for qc through to using natural language processing to take in voice commands and, you know, take that and put it directly into ERP systems using ChatGPT- like LLM systems for looking at trends in supplier data, for example, and pulling out which suppliers might be able to do X, Y, or Z. You know, the, it's completely transforming how we deal with supply chain information and you know, convert it into actionable insights, which is the, the most important part. There's lots of data out there, but there's so much data coming in now, particularly from the likes of the IOT devices we were talking about a minute ago. No one person or even no team of people can analyze that data as it's flowing in, in real time and pull out exceptions. You need AI to do that for you, and then not just the real time exceptions, but over time look at trends and and see where things are going. Yeah, I, I think that's a great point. Even in our own manufacturing processes we've started to look at using it to, for yield reasons or, or for quality control, like you mentioned, where I'm using this system to kind of analyze data taken from maybe an imaging system and like, Hey, is, does this look right? You know, you've run a million down the line and you start to get data to train this thing to be like, this looks bad, this looks good. And you can use that to increase your yield and, and weed out problems in your production line at the source almost. Just something you even five years ago never thought was gonna be something that could be automated like that. Very cool and exciting. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Eric, if people would like to know more about yourself or any of the things we discussed in the podcast today, where would you have me direct them? Definitely the Powercast website, which is www.powercastco.com. You can find information about the wireless power aspect of our things, information about our team there. And then I'm on LinkedIn. You know, if you have specific questions that you think I might be able to answer for you. I'm not hard to find and I'm happy to talk with anybody. Great, and I'll put those links as well in the show notes so everyone has access to them. Eric, that's been fascinating. Thanks a million for coming in the podcast today. Tom, it was a pleasure. Thank you for having me. Anytime. Okay. Thank you all for tuning into this episode of the Sustainable Supply Chain Podcast with me, Tom Raftery. Each week, thousands of supply chain professionals listen to this show. If you or your organization want to connect with this dedicated audience, consider becoming a sponsor. You can opt for exclusive episode branding where you choose the guests or a personalized 30 second ad roll. It's a unique opportunity to reach industry experts and influencers. For more details, hit me up on Twitter or LinkedIn, or drop me an email to tomraftery at outlook. com. Together, let's shape the future of sustainable supply chains. Thanks. Catch you all next time.