Do you know what RFID is? Media investment executive Marian Hewitt does and has shifted her career accordingly.

RFID is radio frequency identification, a generic term for technologies that use radio waves to automatically identify people and objects.

Many of us know it as the way we sail through highway toll booths with "speed passes." But it's also widely used to track inventory, even cows, and to capture information about customers.

The host of technologies that fall under the more general auto-ID umbrella include bar codes, smart cards, voice recognition, some biometric technologies (retinal scans, for instance), optical character recognition (OCR), and radio frequency identification (RFID).

There's nothing like a new technology to spawn a newsletter and events enterprise (although RFID has been around quietly since the 1970s). And that's just what RFID Journal LLC is--a b-to-b magazine, the newsletter RFID Journal, and an events company.

Marian Hewitt is its newest employee, vice president of business development. She has left The van Tulleken Company, the media M & A company where she was a partner and known to many newsletter publishers. Prior to van Tulleken, Marian worked on M & As at Simon & Schuster, John Wiley & Sons, and Macmillan U.S.

Marian Hewitt, 708 Third Ave. 6th Floor, New York, NY 10017, 212-209-3833, ext. 1024, [e-mail], www.rfidjournal.com