Smarter Conference Badges

When a select group of attendees at the Smart Card Alliance’s 2012 Payments Summit show left Salt Lake City’s Salt Palace Convention Center each evening, their credential badges remained useful. 

The organizers of the early February show had worked with ITN International, a firm that provides event badges, and the Utah Transit Authority (UTA) to make several dozen attendees’ badges double as free passes to Salt Lake City’s TRAX light-rail system. This wasn’t simply a matter of informing conductors or putting fare cards in the credential holders. The badges themselves had NFC wireless chips built into them that, when waved in front of the ticket readers, acted just like the rail passes local commuters use.

NFC stands for near field communi­cation and is basically a very small, inexpensive computer chip that can store and send data and perform transactions via radio signals. 

While it is similar to the better-known radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology, NFC smart cards work only within an inch or so of a reader, resolving many security and privacy concerns about users being tracked without their knowledge. NFC chips are the technology in wave-and-pay credit cards like MasterCard’s PayPass and enable mobile payment systems like Google Wallet, which are becoming widely available in new-model smartphones.

NFC also is becoming a popular technology for collecting subway and bus fares, as it lets riders pay and get on much faster than a swiped fare card. New York City’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority 

recently announced a trial of NFC fare readers, and the Utah Transit Authority began trials in February. 

“The test was a success,” says Randy Vanderhoof, executive director of the Princeton Junction, NJ-based Smart Card Alliance, who used one of the NFC badges to ride the light-rail system himself. “People who come to cities for conference events are often unfamiliar with the public mass transit systems,” he notes. “These are often the most convenient way to get to and from the convention center, but attendees lack the knowledge of how to use them. So having conference badges accepted for riding the system is a benefit to the conference organizers, the city, and the attendees.”

Not that use of the technology was limited to mass transit, notes Vanderhoof, whose show has used ITN’s smart card badges for years. “They were also used by the exhibitors as a way to capture badge holder information for lead-tracking services, and getting into the exhibition hall,” he says. 

Other conferences have used ITN International’s NFC-enabled smart badges at the entrance to ticketed sessions, to track attendance at professional education courses, run games, and even to purchase lunch, says Bob James, director of marketing for Bethesda, MD-based ITN International. 

Another client, the North American Veterinary Conference (NAVC), gave its 14,000 attendees a food budget via badges, allowing them to use the devices at concessionaires rather than provide free meals and snacks, James says. That helped the NAVC cut its food bill by 20 percent, because organizers “did not have to estimate the amount of food they’d need and pay for it in advance,” James says. “It let organizers pay on a transactional basis.”

The technology is nothing new in Asia and Europe, James adds, noting that ITN International has issued some five million badges at more than 1,000 events, working with more than 150,000 exhibitors. A transit test at a conference in Amsterdam similar to the one in Salt Lake City won ITN International the 2011 Technology Watch award at EIBTM: The Global Meetings and Events Exhibition last November. 

The badges take only eight seconds each to print and encode at a registration booth, and the readers that ITN supplies are simply standard smartphones that already have NFC-reading capability. In fact, about 30 percent of smartphones on the market today already have such capability, according to James. 

That percentage might increase soon, as the New York Times is predicting that the highly anticipated iPhone 5, which Apple is expected to release later this year, will come equipped with NFC capability. 

The Salt Lake City test “was fairly spontaneous,” says James. “Our CEO was meeting with the head of the UTA, and he agreed to do a test on the spot. Seeing as the technology is basically the same, setting up the cards only took a few hours once final UTA approval was in hand.” 

D. Craig Roberts, technology development director for the Utah Transportation Authority, says his agency is “delighted to have played a pivotal role in this exciting program.”