Venu Gutlapalli from Tag-n-Trac joins us on this episode of IoT Nuggets. He’s here to talk about their IoT device monitoring, specially designed sensors that track for location, temperature, and usage, to provide real-time data across supply chain, retail, and pharmaceutical industries.
Who is Tag-n-Trac?
Venu and his cofounder have backgrounds in wireless from years at leaders like Qualcomm and Texas Instruments. During this time, they focused heavily on first generation IoT for location, condition IoT device monitoring, and asset tracking-type applications. Through this experience they saw the need for a platform that could solve the EDGE data acquisition for the lowest cost. With the second generation of IoT leaning towards this model as well, they developed Tag-n-Trac as a hardware-enabled SaaS platform. They now work with multiple verticals including pharmaceutical, retail, healthcare, and any vertical that needs real-time monitoring and visibility.
Next Level IoT Device Monitoring
A lot of companies are saying the same thing, but Tag-n-Trac takes a different approach. They looked at the current products in the market and noticed that they weren’t fully solving the end-to-end piece of the supply chain visibility. Instead, they took the bulky tracking device and reduced it to the size of a sticker.
This sticker can then be added to a package or asset you want to track. It uses a cellular network or gateway to send updates to the cloud about location, temperature, humidity, or tampering. The best part is that you can easily scale this device to mass deployments of real-time visibility.
Each sticker includes sensors, modem, battery, and flex circuitry. All the electronics are printed so it can be easily disposed when no longer needed. It’s environmentally friendly so there’s nothing hazardous and it won’t require special disposal. You might think that all this technology packed into a disposable device would be highly expensive, but Tag-n-Trac’s goal is to get these devices to a really low cost at a high volume deployment
Where Did This Idea Come From?
Venu and his partner looked at what previously scaled in the supply chain, and what was not scaling currently. They initially looked at RFID which had struggles in scaling, but after six or seven years it was able to get billions of volume and able to go at a unit level for a very low cost. What started at $1-2 per unit has decreased to 2¢ per unit.
When they looked at IoT device monitoring, they wondered if there was a way to replicate that RFID model into the rest of the ecosystem. They felt the time was right with the technology coming together and their experience with silicon to define it to meet this type of manufacturing process.
Need IoT Device Monitoring?
Get in touch with Venu and his team through their website.
To connect with our IoT consulting professionals, reach out to BH IoT Group.