Million-Dollar idea: Convention SmartTags. Steal this now!

Steve Safran July 19th, 2006

At CTAM, Stephen Warley and I were musing that convention tags could be so much more. Let’s bring social networking offline! Embed an RF chip into a tag along with a small amount of memory and an OLED display, and you have an ID badge that could change the way we interact at conventions. It could sense the people around you and change colors according to their relationship to you, (BLUE: This person can help me, YELLOW: This person once worked with me, RED: This person must be avoided at all costs, etc.) If you want to exhange information, throw out the business cards - the RF chip already has your info and all you’ll have to do is tap the badge (a la Star Trek: The Next Generation) to save the information. A little GPS in there, and you can always find your friends and co-workers. All the ribbons that hang below the badges indicating “Speaker,” “Member,” “Founding Member,” “Chair,” Founding Chair,” “Empty Chair,” etc? Give ‘em a special color at the bottom. Maybe something that blinks. I’m telling you - get on this. Then see what you can to to resolve the heartbreak of FTS (floppy tag syndrome) that turns every tag over backwards.