Over at RFID Update they have an excellent 3-part article listing the top trends in RFID from 2006. It's really a "year in review" series of articles. Some of the key developments covered from 2006 include:

- In 2006 privacy seemed like less of a controversy, in part due to the industry's more proactive handling of the issue.

- RFID experienced false alarms in the form of public scares that later turned out to be vastly overblown and exaggerated.

- Interest in item-level tagging picked up smartly during the year, to the surprise of many.

The article series ends with this summary of the current status of RFID, in the supply chain at least, with this statement about return on investment from deploying RFID: "That leaves ROI -- or lack thereof -- as the intractable puzzle still begging for a solution. Unfortunately, there appears to be no silver bullet. It will require a combination of falling prices, business case discovery, and developments in data analytics. But the good news is that at the end of 2006, industry focus is trained squarely on this issue."

Read the series in full:

Top 10 RFID Trends of 2006, Part 3
Top 10 RFID Trends of 2006, Part 2
Top 10 RFID Trends of 2006, Part 1