Many of you, like me, went to great schools with very talented people. We have a tremendous amount to be thankful for; our health, our freedom, our families and the God-given talents with which we were born. We’re morally obligated to use our talents to the best of our ability. What’s sad is that many of our brilliant peers ignited the economic meltdown by ignoring that obligation. It’s not too late for them to help fix it however, with the right investment of their talent.

The RFID industry is exemplary of investment our country needs to help rise from the flames. RFID is technology worth investing in, since it can impact so many areas of infrastructure from national security to automated manufacturing to reducing energy costs to making life easier for everyday Americans. But it needs focus from our new President as part of his “New new deal.”

There are three important priorities President-elect Obama must focus on:

1) Re-building a future-oriented infrastructure,
2) Enabling a maneuver-oriented DoD for rapid response
3) Catching the US industrial base up to speed of 21st century technology.

One of my classmates, Matt Magee*, was top of his class at both UVA and Harvard. What is he doing now? Financial engineering. Is he adding any value to the US economy? Is he building anything lasting? You and I both know the answer. If there was one guy from my class of brilliant people I would have picked to start a company with it would have been him. We need the Magees of the US to start building lasting value.

Matt Magee is symptomatic of the USA. GM is a pension company, Sears is a hedge fund and the rest of our country is following like lemmings by day trading and running up credit cards – manufacturing spending. By investing on those three priorities the USA can win where we’ve won for hundreds of years –technology innovation we can feel, touch, and use. The problem is we are subsidizing GM when we should be subsidizing Tesla.

The iPhone and iPod, The pilot-less Drone, the Mars Lander and even Michael Phelps’ LZR shark-suit are examples of ingenious people innovating to build real things. The money invested in all of those products combined doesn’t come close to what was blazed in the Ponzi-scheme manufactured by NASDAQ’s former Chairman.

What worked three generations ago won’t work today. The new administration must invest in technology innovation to support those three priorities. Green data centers, RFID automated value-chains, ADS-B air-traffic systems, thin-film solar panels, SMART Containers, intelligent traffic routing, baggage tracking and similar enabling infrastructure need investment; not roads, ramps and roundabouts.

RFID is a great enabler for smart people to change our world, from making border crossings safer and more efficient to helping build more laptops faster to keeping luggage from getting lost. RFID is a catalyst for improvement you can touch and feel.

Obama needs to foster RFID-enabled infrastructure investment. More smart people need to jump into this industry. If you’re Matt Magee – ODIN’s hiring., Send me your resume and let’s build some lasting value and help our country emerge from the flames.