“On the 25th anniversary of the universal barcode in 1999, the barcode community gathered around Sanjay Sarma and his colleagues and said, “Let’s do this.” “Our idea,” says Sarma, vice president for open learning and the Fred Fort Flowers (1941) and Daniel Fort Flowers (1941) Professor of Mechanical Engineering at MIT, “was to track everything in the supply chain.” Some companies knew they had too much inventory. Others didn’t know where their inventory was. Consumers couldn’t find the right sized shirt while that shirt was sitting in the back room. Food was going bad and shelves went un-stocked. Things got lost in the supply chain. So, Sarma, along with research scientist David Brock of MIT and Kevin Ashton, a visiting researcher from Proctor and Gamble, came up with a low-cost radio frequency identification (RFID) tag. “At the time, it was a crazy idea,” says Sarma. “But it stuck.” RFID tags, which had been around for several decades, were clunky and expensive — partly because of the amount of data placed on the tags. “We used to say, ‘Someday the internet will be everywhere’ — this was late 90s — and we didn’t have the word ‘cloud’ yet. So, we used to say, ‘Someday, you can write the data in the sky,’” says Sarma, who developed new standards for RFID, new manufacturing processes, and innovative ways to use them in the supply chain. The supply chain industry adopted the protocol, and standards-making efforts shifted. Auto ID Labs laid the groundwork for the standardization of RFID technology. It took sensing of identity — the job of RFID and barcodes — and made it universal. Auto ID Labs, where Sarma remains active today, emerged from the MIT Auto ID Center. “In many ways that effort also laid the groundwork for what is now called the internet of things,” Sarma says.”