SkyeTek transforms businesses with radio waves

WESTMINSTER – Many IQ award winners are looking toward the future, but SkyeTek is taking tomorrow’s technology and looking to see just how far its function can be extended.

SkyeTek is the winner of a 2006 IQ Award for innovation in communication products and services.

SkyeTek is using the power of high-frequency radio waves to change how the world does business in literally hundreds of industries. Its engineers are adapting RFID (radio frequency identification) standards to be used with the latest hardware and software so that the technology can be integrated into new and different products.

It works like this: An RFID “tag” is equipped with a tiny antenna and microchip. That unique identifier can then be applied to any traditional inanimate object, be it a pallet of goods being shipped to a retail outlet, a library book, a drip bag for a hospital or a bus pass. When the tag comes within proximity of a “reader,” the information on its chip can then be read, written to or tracked.

It’s like a barcode – on steroids.

“SkyeTek’s products are innovative in the sense that they make the integration of RFID technology into anyone’s products easier, cheaper and faster,´ said Chief Executive Rob Balgley. “An RFID setup has a greater read range than a bar code, contains more information and doesn’t require line of sight.”

The company was founded in 2001 as a work-for-hire shop by SkyeTek’s founder Sean Loving, an innovative RFID engineer. His profound appreciation for the technology’s potential led to SkyeTek’s catbird seat in the industry today.

“Sean has 14 years of experience in the RFID domain and a real fascination with the technology,” Balgley said. “He was the guy creating a name for himself by building reader technology that not many other people understood at the time.”

Today, SkyeTek employs 35 people in a 16,000-square-foot operation in Westminster that combines the manufacture and sales of RFID readers with visionary research and development.

But the company’s best asset isn’t in the hardware, which is created using the least expensive equipment. It’s in SkyeTek’s AURA (advanced universal reader architecture), a software platform that allows the company to adapt to any manufacturer’s tags and integrate RFID into nearly any product.

“We don’t believe the way to create a pervasive market for RFID is to use expensive hardware,” Balgley observed. “We’ve developed the business in such a way that the real value is in the architecture and the software. Our competitors have very expensive, very sophisticated hardware platforms, but their software is fairly inflexible. That makes it hard to modify the product easily because all the changes have to be made in the circuit board. With software, it’s just a matter of changing the code.”

With the built-in flexibility of the AURA platform, SkyeTek is able to adapt its technology to meet the needs of a more diverse customer base. Where most RFID manufacturers are focused on the supply chain logistics of massive customers like Wal-Mart, SkyeTek wants to make RFID available to any company that would find the technology useful.

“We envision hundreds of thousands of RFID-enabled applications in hundreds of vertical markets,” Balgley said. “One of the ways we’re unique – and in fact, one of the ways we measure our success – is in our ability to RFID-enable a large number of unique applications. It creates a whole new class of customers.”

The company already has landed more than 50 customers, ranging from big names like Intel and Socket Communications to innovative institutions like the Exploratorium science museum in San Francisco.

The uses of RFID technology seem boundless, from product tracking to long-range access control for automobiles to linking medical products to specific patients.

However, some consumer advocates have expressed concern over the potential privacy and security aspects of RFID. It’s an area that SkyeTek is actively addressing with the latest security measures determined by industrywide standards.

“Like any technology, there’s a certain amount of social responsibility to RFID,” Balgley said. “There are real concerns, and there should be a healthy, constructive, empirically-driven debate.”

SkyeTek’s investors believe in its value as well. The company was able to raise $8 million in venture capital in August 2005. But the company’s unique view of the RFID industry necessitates a different operating structure as well.

“We’re not a vertically integrated company,” Balgley explained. “We’re a second- or third-generation RFID company where our technology can be used in a lot of different applications. We believe that the future of RFID is as a feature in other products. The business model is also innovative in that it allows companies to license our technology without forcing them to buy a product that might be redundant to what they’re already using.”

Balgley is pleased to see RFID expanding into other businesses that might not have thought about using it previously.

“People who wanted to have RFID see it as an incremental value,” he observed. “It’s something that can drive top-line numbers, whether it’s productivity, safety or loyalty or revenue, but many businesses couldn’t afford to build in that functionality. Now they can, and it’s a big step forward.”

SkyeTek Inc.

11030 Circle Point Road, Suite 300, Westminster, CO 80020

720-565-0441

www.skyetek.com

Rob Balgley, chief executive officer

Employees: 35

Primary service: Developer of

RFID technology

Founded: 2001

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