RFID is the center of attention today at the Sam M. Walton College of Business at the University of arkansas. Today its RFID Research Center officially opens a new laboratory. The lab will be a neutral, third -party, multidisciplinary facility.

Here is an extract from the press release:

"Fifty-year-old technologies rarely have the potential to transform the business landscape. The University of Arkansas and 24 industry-leading companies believe one technology --- Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) --- can do just that; they have joined forces to support a multidisciplinary neutral, third-party research and testing facility, the newly formed RFID Research Center, a subunit of the Information Technology Research Institute in the university's Sam M. Walton College of Business."

The RFID Center has quite a cast of big name sponsors: Wal-Mart, Microsoft, Cisco, Deloitte, Tyson, ThingMagic, Zebra -- the list goes on. From a sleepy southern state to becoming the center of the RFID world, I guess Arkansas, the home state of Wal-Mart, is where it's at these days.

The press release is very detailed with more useful information than you typically find in a release, so I loaded it online. Read the whole release.