Our story begins, quite literally, a decade ago, when on December 31st, 2011, reelyActive co-founder Traian hand-built the first reelceiver prototype for Jeffrey to successfully validate.
We started simply by tinkering with Active RFID.
What began as a pure technology endeavour soon took on a bigger purpose and mission: developing context-aware technologies to enrich the physical human experience.
We evolved into a purpose-driven organisation and never looked back.
Last year, the global pandemic completely upended physical human experiences. The void nonetheless fostered hope for open collaboration to restore our collective need for in-person interaction.
We were optimistic about the pandemic serving as a catalyst for enduring, positive change.
Instead, vaccine vendors stubbornly resisted the open source model, brazenly putting profits ahead of people, while Facebook became Meta, betting their profitability on digital interaction over physical.
Not quite the enduring, positive change we envisaged...
Did that really surprise anyone? Sadly no. But as humankind faces a growing number of global challenges, wouldn't it be nice to have been pleasantly surprised by what motivates modern innovation?
This Owl-iday special wouldn't be such a downer otherwise!
And so we once again cite Buckminster Fuller: "You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete."
When fighting is futile, we are better served by building.
Yes, that is indeed the enormous task ahead: the transition to a new model. Fortunately the open technology architectures have come of age, awaiting only critical mass adoption.
Simply embrace change to make the existing model obsolete.
So, if you too believe in a better future, we encourage you to take a tangible first step to see where it leads, like we did when we tinkered that hardware prototype on New Year's Eve a decade ago.
It's owl about the journey, not the destination.
Happy Owl-idays from the reelyActive team
Take care of—and take action for—what you believe in.