How about a pair of socks?
Cisper, the Netherlands-based RFID distributor that supplies readers, antennas and tags to customers across Europe and India, spent day one of RAIN in Action handing out branded socks. I have agreed to wear mine on Wednesday 30 September. So if you are in Madrid this week and you spot a pair of unusually trendy socks coming towards you, that will be me. Come and say hello.
RAIN in Action is the annual conference of the RAIN Alliance, the industry body behind UHF RFID built on the Gen2 air interface, and it is running at the Novotel Madrid City Centre from 29 September to 1 October 2026. Day one opened with a networking session, which did exactly what it was supposed to do. It is genuinely good to put faces to a year of email, and there were a lot of them.
Why the world needs RAIN enabled smartphones
The first session I sat in was led by Paul Muller, who leads RAIN Reader Smartphone Integration at the RAIN Alliance, with Steyn Geldenhuys, CTO of Sieveo, and Zoe Venter, product designer at the same company. Sieveo is a German systems integrator in the Utsch group, better known for RAIN RFID in vehicle identification and for DigSig, an approach that lets a tag be verified offline.
The premise was a good one, and it is the most persuasive framing of this argument I have heard.
An online retailer knows almost everything about a visit. Where the customer came from, what they looked at, how long they lingered, which part of the screen their attention went to, the whole path through the site. A physical shop, which is still where most retail happens, knows almost none of it. You know what went through the till. Everything before that is guesswork.
The proposition is that a phone which can read UHF tags closes that gap, and brings customer engagement, loyalty and Digital Product Passports along with it. Put that capability in the customer’s pocket and the shop floor starts producing the kind of data the website has had for twenty years.
I like the argument, these are the types of jobs I have worked on with one of my companies for customer engagement.
The NFC problem
The presentation stated that RFID is not currently enabled in phones. That is not right, and the distinction matters.
Practically every smartphone shipped today contains an RFID reader. It is called NFC, it runs at 13.56 MHz, and it is high frequency RFID. It is how contactless payment works, how a hotel key card works, and how a great many product authentication and engagement campaigns already work. The reader is in the pocket of almost every customer in the shop, right now.
What phones do not have is UHF, the 860 to 960 MHz band that RAIN uses. So the honest version of the claim is not that phones cannot read RFID. It is that phones cannot read this RFID.
Which leaves the real question: what does UHF give you that NFC does not?
There is a decent answer available. Range, for one, since NFC is a touch and UHF is a metre or so. Reading many tags at once rather than one at a time. And the strongest argument by some distance, which is that the UHF tag is already in the garment. It was put there for the supply chain, it survived to the shop floor, and it is the same tag the retailer already paid for. An NFC engagement campaign needs a second tag added for the purpose. A RAIN one does not.
That is the case, and I would have liked to hear it made.
The privacy question, which is not going away
The room raised privacy, and it was the sharpest exchange of the session.
If a phone can read the tags on a person, it can read the tags on a person. Consider a handbag. If a four thousand pound designer bag carries a tag that identifies what it is, then somebody walking behind the owner with the right phone learns that the bag is worth stealing. The tag turns a judgement call into a lookup.
Extend it and it gets less comfortable rather than more. Everything somebody is wearing, read at a metre, by anybody, without their knowledge.
This is a solvable problem. There is real work in the standards on what a tag discloses to an unauthorised reader, and tags can be killed or short-ranged at the point of sale. But it has to be solved before consumer phones ship with UHF readers, not afterwards, and an industry that puts the reader in a billion pockets without answering it first will have the answer written for it by somebody else.
Two practical things
The stated read distance was around one metre. In my experience any quoted read distance should be taken with a pinch of salt. Range on a real deployment depends on the tag, the material behind it, what else is in the room and how much of the customer’s hand is wrapped around the phone. A metre in a demonstration is not a metre in a Tuesday afternoon shop.
Nobody asked about battery. A UHF reader is an active transmitter, and phone makers count milliamps like misers. If putting a RAIN reader in a handset costs meaningful battery life, that is a conversation with Apple and Samsung rather than with our industry, and it is the sort of thing that decides whether any of this ships.
RAIN sensing
The other session worth reporting was the Sensors Working Group, led by Sara Amendola, CEO of Radio6ense, who leads that group for the RAIN Alliance. It was run as an open discussion rather than a formal working group meeting, which was the right decision.
The subject is what happens when a tag reports a condition as well as an identity. Temperature, moisture, strain, whatever the application needs, added to the identification that RAIN already provides. The session covered where the working group has got to, then handed over to members for use cases across healthcare, logistics, manufacturing and retail, and opened up into a discussion of where the market actually needs this, what is blocking adoption, and which applications are worth chasing next.
The invitation was explicit: the group wants new participants and new use cases, and it is looking for cross-collaboration with the other RAIN Alliance working groups. If sensing is relevant to what you build, that is a door being held open.
More tomorrow
A good first day. The smartphones session will stay with me, partly because I disagree with a piece of how it was framed and partly because the underlying argument deserves a better hearing than it got.
We are reporting from Madrid all week. Come and find me and we can talk, and if you cannot spot me, look for the socks.
