Creating “interactive experiences” is essential for live events, be them face-to-face (f2f), virtual) or hybrid (a mix of f2f and virtual). Interactive experiences are one of the reasons that justifies being present,  a way to connect attendees with each other, with the content and with the speakers.

Creating interactive experiences is also an over-hyped expression that’s often brought out to justify mobile technology or other kind of rube-goldbergian mechanism that participants end up by not using (not intuitive enough, too complicated, no real value added, etc). An art installation by Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama dubbed “The Obliteration Room” shows how a great interactive experience is created and while this one was aimed to kids, it summarizes some of the key factors to create one (more on that below).

Kusama created a totally white room and provided thousands of colored stickers to kids that over the days placed them wherever they wanted, co-creating the new looks of the place.

Starting point: White Room

Work in progress: kid with colored stickers

Final result: room full of colored freckles

Essential Ingredients for a Great Interactive Experience for Your Event

While working on summarizing the process, I came through with a few things that might seem obvious to you but if you analyze many efforts that are made at conferences they totally miss these points.

(A typical failed experience I see over and over again is one including QR codes as an entry point and expecting people to start interacting with them out of the blue. It fails because of one or more of the following: people don’t know what a QR code is or how to use it, they don’t have a smartphone a QR code reader in it, don’t have internet access or it’s not provided by the event, the experience is dull or not worth interacting with in a third place, because of this they don’t invite other attendees to take part in it).

A great interactive experience should:

1. Be designed for all attendees and not just for a specific group
2. Be easy to use (ability factor)
3. Motivate people to take part of it (motivation)
4. Include a trigger that acts as a call to action for people to take part of it
5. Have results that are memorable (wow factor), that stimulate conversation

BJ Fogg, founder of the Standford Persuasion Lab,  created a Behavior Model framework that combines the simultaneous presence of Motivation, Ability (easiness of use) and a Trigger (call to action) for a given Behavior to happen.

Fogg distilled several successful behavior recipes that can be applied to create such an interactive experience, one of them being Simple, Social, Fun. This formula is behind the success of popular iOS apps like Instagram and can also be applied in a low tech environment.

Consider how Kusama’s installation mentioned above satisfies these three conditions: it’s simple to use (give out a few colored stickers to the kids), it achieves its result by social interaction (several people applying the stickers inside the white room) and it’s fun for the kids to do too. The visual result is amazing (wow factor) and am sure than many of the kinds had it photographed it with their parents mobile phone and shared it with their friends (and other parents too).

What kind of simple, social and fun interactive experience could you create at your next event? (And if you do create or created one, I’d like to know about it! Pleas email me the details)

Photos where taken from Colossal and Courier Mail AU

Evernote (web) goes by the tagline “remember everything” and it’s latest free app –Hello (iTunes)– becomes a faithful follower of that motto specifically built to help you remember people you meet (for example at a conference).

The features are straightforward and the use quite simple. Meet someone, push the + button and hand over your phone so that your new contact can snap her own photo and add the contact info that she wants to share. The app will also keep track of the location, related calendar entries (for example, the one that says you were at a certain event) and then sync all this info with your Evernote account.

• Pros: simple, practical, syncs with desktop and other platforms for convenient searchability, Mosaic interface for searching through the faces of people met
• Cons: it could feel awkward to pass over your phone to a new acquaintance for her to snap her own photo. Still not a fast/practical enough competitor to paper business cards (but a welcomed entry to the contact exchange universe)

How to make it more useful, especially for events? Release an open API so that other applications can create  features that then sync back to Evernote. One practical example could be that of building a collective faceroll of all the attendees by allowing individuals to contribute the photos&contacts they snapped to the total list of participants.

Still, as Joe Brockmeier writes in this ReadWriteWeb article, Evernote’s Hello has a few critical flaws that will prevent it from massive usage (some are: only available on iOS, no possibility of exporting contact  info to your Address Book, awkward feeling in having people typing their own info in your phone… especially if compared to how easy it is to exchange paper business cards). But hey, I’m sure that with the release of Hello, Evernote will get more users… which is after all their goal.

Read more about Evernote Hello on their official blog.

Interesting interview to Phil Libin, Evernote’s CEO, on the importance of concentrating your efforts for creating great free products while following a freemium business model.

Photo by Alex Drennan on Flickr

This is the first guest-post by Ana Silva, specialist in Enterprise 2.0 and social media, and scholarly on serendipitous matter (more on Ana at the end of the article).
Serendipity, the art of looking for something and ending up finding something else, at times more valuable than the thing you were looking for in the first place, is generally seen as something that happens in our personal lives, as portrayed in Hollywood movies.

Truth is that this interesting concept has been making its way into businesses, especially in the field of innovation (just think of “accidental discoveries” such as post-it notes) and has long been present in the world of the Web with services such as StumbleUpon. In fact, Eric Schmidt calls Google search a “serendipity engine”.

The Power of Pull

The notion that serendipity can be stimulated or facilitated is increasingly cited by authors and futurists such as Ross Dawson or John Hagel. In his latest book, The Power of Pull (Amazon), Hagel stated that “Serendipity can be shaped: We can make choices that will increase our ability to attract people and resources to us that we never knew existed, leading to serendipitous encounters that prove enormously valuable”.

Conferences and other events can be great places for increasing our probability of engaging into serendipitous encounters, with other people and also with new ideas, especially those in emerging arenas that attract a diverse set of participants and speakers.

While the participants should attend with a proactive mindset towards serendipitous happenings (it’s for their own benefit after all), it’s the organizer’s duty to design a conference experience that increases the possibility of serendipity happening.

Ideas for event organizers

• Strive for diversity in speakers: invite diversified speakers, offering different perspectives or experiences on a given topic (this can be of course easier for more broad events than very theme-focused conferences). E.g.: if your event caters to the academic world or a specific industry, invite non-academic speakers or people working in other fields/industries that can provide a radically different point of view, spark new ideas and collaborations or just enrich the content being shared at the conference

• Curate your audience: try as much as possible to appeal to a diverse crowd of attendees (don’t confuse this with trying to appeal to everybody) but also the “right” attendees. More than half of the value that your event will be providing comes from the new connections born during breaks and networking time, though these aren’t just any type of connections. You need participants from different walks of life that can provide useful to each other and be relevant for future collaborations. You should make the effort to have valuable people on and off stage alike

"Good conferences don't have 'same old faces' - Twitter exchange between @elsua (Luis Suarez) and @jobsworth (JP Rangaswami)

• Use Twitter as a serendipity engine: conversations on Twitter before, during and after your event can be a valid channel to connect with other community members (past/present/future participants), so make sure you have an “official” Twitter hashtag and that it’s present in all your communications. Stimulate its use by sharing interesting content (the kind that you would like to read yourself, not [just] marketing yada-yada). Ask questions, involve speakers (many of them are probably on twitter too), get involved in [useful] customer service but also listen to what your community is saying (and act accordingly). During the event provide Internet connection to make it easier for the conversation continue

• Design the physical space to favor encounters: provide coffee areas that are comfortable and attractive for people to hang out, not too spacious, not too small (coffee is a powerful link between people… alcohol too but that might be inconvenient). Create meeting points with appropriate signage for those that need a reference area to find each other. South by Southwest creates a huge “Lego pit”, an area with Lego building blocks, for people to meet each other… and entertain themselves or their kids if they arrive early. [more on the Lego pit here]

• Facilitate introductions: not everyone is a natural born networker. Sometimes having a searchable database of the attendees or suggesting 10 people to meet at the event (matching people by interests, activities, etc) can kickstart encounters. The best introductions though are made by humans. Have your community manager (or someone else from your team that knows the audience quite well) to work as a “Concierge” during the conference. Participants could tell her what kind of fellow attendees they want to meet and the concierge can make the appropriate introductions in situ

• Help break the ice: if the group is small enough consider changing the display of the room and having everyone presenting themselves. If this is not possible, simply imagine some ice breaking exercise that helps put people more at ease

Hug ice breaking moment at Ignite Portugal - Photo by retorta_net on flickr

• Game serendipity: very much in line with the previous point, people love games and this can also help drive serendipity by stimulating interaction. E.g.: At UXLX, each attendee got a deck of cards with interesting info on one particular UX-related personality. There were different cards but everyone got a certain amount of the same one. In order to get the full deck of cards -a sort of souvenir of the event- participants needed to talk to each other to trade their cards, helping break the ice

Card trading at UXLX 2011 [Photo by UXLx in Flickr

• Give serendipity time: plan many session breaks that are long enough for attendees to have time to socialize & meet each other

Ideas for attendees

• Seek diversity: the world of conferences and events, once “dominated” by the same old events, is now much more varied. Meeting people from diverse backgrounds in a setting where different perspectives give rise to interesting conversations can be a powerful serendipity engine. Participate in new or different events which could provide content and connections that are complementary to your job or industry. Even attend events that are totally unrelated and could be a source of serendipitous inspiration!

• Prepare in advance: check if there is a Twitter hashtag for the event and browse through the tweets prior to attending. See if anyone in the tweetstream catches your attention and check their profile

• Turn the serendipity engine on: during the conference and in the days after continue checking the event’s Twitter hashtag and other online streams for interesting connections

• Step out of your comfort zone: avoid sticking the whole event with your familiar group of acquaintances and instead go speak to strangers during the coffee breaks and other pauses

• Change seats: in a long event with different sessions try seating in different parts of the venue for each session, preferably close to strangers

• Get social: to facilitate serendipity you’ll need to get social! This means taking advantage of all opportunities to engage into conversations with other attendees: mingle during the breaks and go to the dinner and after-party events

Ana Silva (twitter, blog, linkedin) divides her time between strategizing collaboration and social media initiatives for a large manufacturing company, teaching Enterprise 2.0 at the Oporto Business School, and organizing conferences on the impact of social media on areas such as citizenship and the future of work.

If you haven’t yet, watch the following genius campaign that British retailer TESCO implemented in the South-Korean subway. Their local branch called Homeplus had the goal of becoming the n.1 grocery without increasing the number of stores. It was a win-win proposition because TESCO increased its business by offering a service that people waiting at the metro station find useful.

Now how could this be applied to conferences?

Transforming “Waiting Time” During Registration Into “Useful Time”

TESCO studied the market and found that koreans were the “second most hard-working” people in the world and for them doing grocery-shopping once a week was a “dreaded task”. Through the campaign, and with the idea of letting “the store come to the people”, TESCO realized that “we could change their waiting time into shopping time”, which had the practical outcome of increasing online sales by 130%.

Watching the crowds waiting for the next train reminded me of a typical scene during most conferences’ opening: the registration area. Not only most people don’t like to wait for picking up their badge, but often they also stress-up and start generating bad rep/buzz (e.g. through social media) and enter your event with a negative feeling.

These are a few ideas that came to mind to make shift that painful waiting time into something [more] useful to the attendees:

1. Improv-Networking: have staff-moderators stimulate those in the queue to introduce themselves to the person in front and behind of them. Benefit: you now know two people at the conference!
2. Program Info: deliver the printed program  (if you have one) as soon as people enter the queue so they can catch up on what will happen during the event. Benefit: they will be busy checking out who’s speaking when, where are the rooms located, etc
3. Useful Info: provide useful information like wi-fi user/password so participants can setup their mobiles/tablets while waiting. This could be done through self-standing computer screens that rotate the useful information. Benefit: attendees will spend a few of the waiting time in configuring their phone and won’t have to ask later on for this info
4. Mobile Coat-Room: instead of having people queueing twice (once to pick up their badge, twice to check-in their coat or luggage), have mobile hanging structures near to the queue so that the staff of the coat room can already pick up coats and luggage that will be then carried to the “real” coat room. Benefit: after they pick up their badge, participants will be ready to enter the event and don’t have to queue twice
5. Self-Service Coffee: place tall tables with coffee, cups (a la Starbucks, with the appropriate lid), sugar, spoons, etc so that attendees can pour themselves coffee while waiting in line. Benefit: make the wait more pleasurable by bringing the breakfast to the participants where they actually are

Can you think of any other tactics to transform boring waiting time into useful attendee-friendly time? Please share it in the comments below!

Hat tip to Ines for showing me the Homeplus Korea video.

Reflecting over a busy year of conferences and the main characteristics that made my experience as an attendee better, I always come back to event size and intimacy.

In his recent article “An industry challenge: build “MicroSXSW” to bring back fun times at SXSW”, Robert Scoble complains on the big size that South by Southwest (Interactive) has gained over the last editions and the negative consequences that it has brought (over crowded, long waiting/queuing times, packed spaces, absurdly high prices of hotels and “big massive parties where you collect a lot of business cards but don’t have any good conversations to show for it”).

As a conference organizer it is your responsibility to address this issue by acknowledging the causes and designing into your event experience several moments for smaller groups to gather, increasing the possibilities for good conversations to occur.

Networking at the TED Salon in London

“It’s no longer about how big your… party is. But it’s about how awesome your conversations are.” (in one of the comments to Robert Scoble’s article)

I often felt the same as Scoble during this year’s edition of SXSW but it was partially compensated by the fact that it was my first time there and that I had a bunch of friends I could rely on when things got too big. I mostly skipped big parties (or left after a short while) and instead enjoyed the most dinners, lunches and random breaks, with the biggest of them having something like 8 people.

At Le Web ’10 I suffered something similar. The event was very productive due to the 8 or 10 meetings I manage to organize using the matchmaking tool Presdo Match, but in general it felt too crowded (3,000 attendees). I knew at least 50 people that were attending but we never bumped into each other. At peak moments the exhibition and networking areas were so full it was difficult to move around.

A negative feeling at several other events was a caused by a mix between the number of people, noise (product of too many conversations taking place at the next time), inappropriate spaces and lack of intimate areas in which to comfortably talk or drink coffee. I attended something like 30 conferences during 2010 and it was at those where the audience size was something around a couple of hundreds (let’s say a maximum of 300) where the people dynamics worked best.

As an attendee I prefer small events but as a conference organizer I often aim to organize big(ger) events. Not all is lost though. While satisfactory human interaction is limited to smaller numbers, large events can take action to keep those dynamics almost intact.

BBQs at SXSW are one of the best networking excuses (or viceversa?)

Create and encourage meetings before, during, after and related-to your conference

Scoble’s proposal (or rather provocation) to finding a solution is something like:

Kill the big parties. Instead, follow Zappos’ lead. This year they hosted a bus. It could only hold about 30 people (it had its own bar, after all). But the time I spent on that bus is still my favorite experience at SXSW. Why? Because it forced a small handful of people to sit together and talk. Even if it was just for 15 minutes it was nice to have an intimate experience with a small number of other people.

To me the Zappos bus was the prototype of the “MicroSXSW experience.”

The MicroSXSW approach could work, especially if the organizers also make it part of their job to encourage smaller gatherings. SXSW has a good chance of achieving so because during the days of the event the whole city of Austin transforms into a venue composed by hundreds of smaller locations (bar, restaurants, concerts, parties, multiple conference rooms).

TED Global, a 650+ people event, has that micro-gathering feature in its nature: the many programmed lunches, dinners, breaks and side activities (from running very early in the morning to drinks and parties in the late evening) fostered constant micro events with the added value that most speakers participated in them. So one day you could be sharing a TED Run with other attendees, have lunch with different delegates, TED Fellows and speakers and spend the closing event punting in the river with the organizers and a bunch of other people you hadn’t yet met.

The solution can come from several different fronts. In the case of SXSW I handed over my experience to serendipitous encounters. Instead at Le Web I had scheduled several meetings beforehand using the online tool provided by the organizers. Often I’m lucky enough to have a great connector (as defined by Malcolm Gladwell) friend that introduces me to people that matter [to me].

Take into account that newcomers and veterans of your events might have a different perception so engage with them differently. Send them ideas and existing opportunities to meet and ask for suggestions. Encourage tip-sharing on a dedicated forum. By recognizing the existence of the “size issue” you are showing them that you care for their individual experience.

Relay & Networking area at New Media Days in Copenhagen

In a previous article I wrote that the 2010 edition of Le Web had about 3,000 attendees which could be both a networking blessing or a nightmare.  For me it was the former as I managed to have those 8 or 10 meaningful meetings that justified my stay in Paris. I was able to do so thanks to Presdo Match, an online tool for messaging and scheduling meetings during conferences which makes it easy for the attendees and exhibitors to find each other based on matching interests, enabling them to securely communicate and schedule one-on-one meetings at an event

Eric Ly (linkedin, twitter), previously a co-founder of Linkedin, is the founder of Presdo which launched the scheduling tool Presdo Match in September 2010.  In the video below he describes the features and future goals for Presdo Match.

I’m not surprised that Eric had received meeting requests from several of the other conference organizers attending Le Web, as facilitating networking between attendees is one of the main goals we have when organizing an event. There are not many good off-the-shelf tools out there that can be easily implemented and building your own is often not a road we want to follow (costs, maintenance, constant tech updates, etc). As he said at the end of the interview, “It seems we touched a pain point here”.

I’m looking forward to a product demo to understand Presdo Match’s full potential and maybe use it in one of my upcoming conferences.

Pros

• Seamless integration with Linkedin: you see rich profiles and who from your network is attending the same event
• You can view the other delegates attending
• Attendees can easily send messages, meeting requests and schedule them
• The system automatically offers which are your free times and a list of pre-established meeting points to choose from
• Mobile version compatible with any smartphone (based on html and not a proprietary OS app)
• The People Genius provides personalized recommendations on who to meet, and they can find out who they know from their social network is attending the event
• Offers several ways to search for interesting attendees (name, company, keywords)

The People Genius suggest people with similar interests

Cons

• If you have one, it duplicates your attendee network (Le Web didn’t have one)
• The design is rather basic and dull – it’s not clear how much control the event organizer has to personalize the page to its event look & feel (when will we see a tumblr-design like tool?)
• The “like” feature generated a lot of undesired emails during the days previous to the event. You could decide not to receive any emails at all or a single one for each activity regarding your profile (people that liked you, requested a meeting or sent a message). I would have preferred to receive a daily summary
• Photos were too small (especially on the mobile site) and it was often difficult to identify a person you’ve never met before (especially with 3,000 attendees filling up the networking areas at Le Web)

Screen captures from Presdo Match on my iPhone

Revenue model

While Eric didn’t say it directly, I believe they are open to do barter agreements in order to generate a critical mass (in 4:38 he does mention the interest in doing “a successful pilot first” and then establishing a long-term working relationship ).

On their website they present a revenue model consisting of either an individual fee of 3,99 USD for each attendee or  a lump-sum for the event starting at 999 USD.

Why didn’t Linkedin do it?

That’s one of the first questions I asked myself. As with digital business card exchange, I wonder why does Linkedin ignore these two extremely valuable features. While Linkedin is the number one professional profile database/social-network, it offers a poorly designed “In Person” function in their iPhone app and nothing at all for event scheduling . It would improve the attendees experience (by not having to set up a new professional profile on a different platform) and would surely generate new revenues.

Currently Presdo Match creates a separate attendee profile for each event but Eric mentions that they “want to eventually enable kind of a database of profiles that people can have in the Presdo Match system so that they can reuse their profiles depending on what kind of event they’re going to”. In that case I see a potential overlap with Linkedin.

It’s not a perfect world, especially if you already have a network of delegates

Le Web didn’t have their own network of attendees so Presdo Match was satisfied both the need of finding out who was attending (actually Le Web did provide a “flat” list of names, companies and urls of the attendees) and messaging or scheduling meetings with each other. I wonder how would Presdo Match tie in with a conference that already has a user database (aka community) with profiles, photos, messaging, etc but no scheduling tool (I’m thinking of events like Lift and TED). As a conference organizer (and as an attendee), I wouldn’t like to ask the delegates to duplicate their profile just for the scheduling, as they already spent time filling in my proprietary database. Also, what happens with the user profiles after the license agreement with Presdo has ended? (My guess: you lose everything and in the future you’ll have to ask attendees to go through the whole process again).

In conclusion, the conference market needs tools like Presdo Match and if they make the right moves and associate with some of the popular ticketing platforms (Amiando, Eventbrite, etc) they might pick up a sizable share. If they ever create a unified profile that can be used for several events, it would make sense to have a freemium formula like the ticketing platforms (free for free events, payed for events with a ticket price).

It’s clear that Loic and Geraldine Le Meur have righteously created what’s the “Number 1 Internet Conference in Europe”. If there is one particular characteristic to define Le Web (web, twitter, facebook, youtube) is that it is a huge networking machine, with the 2010 edition attracting around 3,000 attendees from 60 countries (mostly European but with a good dose of Americans and a few Asians and Middle-Easterns).

Loic Le Meur, founder of Le Web

Le Web is less about what happens on stage–with its ongoing parade of entrepreneurs, managers and web-stars–and more about the networking and deal-making that takes place elsewhere around the venue (this year dislocated in 3 buildings of the Les Docks center).

It’s not that the “show” is boring. Rather most speakers won’t share any real news to those already following online the happenings of web world. Michael Arrington from TechCrunch asked interesting questions but top Google exec Marissa Mayer doesn’t give off any unexpected news and does not engage in the controversies that Arrington is trying to spark. Dave McClure gave useful tips for startups and Gary Vaynerchuk made a powerful closing of the event. Yet, Le Web is not a place to discover new technologies and companies like at, say, South by Southwest (though there was a startup competition).

The killer feature of this conference is the networking. If you ask around you’ll hear things like “everyone that matters in my industry is here” or “I come here to do business. It’s no longer cold and food is abundant unlike before [citing a situation that happened in 2008] and I occasionally listen to an interesting speaker”. In fact I spent most of the second day at the Nespresso Lounge in a series of back-to-back meetings that I had organized using the networking tool Presdo Match (more on it in an upcoming article).

Three thousand attendees, most of them paying for a ticket somewhere between 1,000 and 2,000 euro, is an amazing result if you consider that Le Web is managed mostly from San Francisco by Geraldine, the producer, and a small team in Paris. In fact, I know of several full-time conference organizers that envy those results badly.

A packed conference room during Marissa Mayer's interview

But at times this high attendance also felt overwhelming. It’s a lot of people. Forget about intimacy. I knew very well at least 50 other attendees and we never even bumped into each other.

A few tips to improve the odds of meeting people would be:

Make the meeting-points VERY obvious

While Presdo Match was like manna from the skies to set up meetings, the meeting-points were not clearly indicated. It would have been great to know beforehand that there were 3 predetermined meeting points, for example by including a reference to them in the pre-event email “Prepare your Agenda for LeWeb” that was sent on November 25.

An official meeting-point

The meeting-point hidden behind a few people, imagine when there were hundres of them

The ideal meeting-point (not kidding!) - Photo by Roswellsgirl on flickr

Make the names on the badges HUGE

The badges had a clever disposition, with a pocket to hold the name tag, the program booklet and a two point lanyard. But the names were small, small, small… it was very difficult to read them even at close distance. Sometimes, when you’re trying to meet someone for the first time, being able to read the name on the badge from a few meters apart is extremely useful.

The Le Web badge - practical but name is impossible to read, even from a short distance

Don’t seclude speakers in a VIP area

As I said, Le Web brings a high number of speakers, most of them current actors of the Internet world. In most cases it’s difficult to meet them or make an appointment to talk business as when they are not on stage they are gathered in a VIP area where “regular” attendees cannot access. Positive exceptions were people like Dennis Crowley, Gary Vaynerchuk or Robert Scoble that decided to stay amongst the attendees, something that was widely appreciated. After all, they are enabling new business opportunities for themselves too.

All in all, Le Web was very positive for my professional activities: shared time with old friends, maid new acquaintances and opened several paths for new projects. Thanks Loic and Geraldine, see you next year!

Timo Arnall (web, twitter, linkedin) is a designer and researcher working with interactive products, media and emerging technologies, with a specific focus in Radio-frequency identification (RFID) and Near Field Communications (NFC).

After his recent presentation at Mobile Monday Amsterdam, we discussed on the use of RFID/NFC technology to stimulate social interaction during conferences, and how it compares to traditional [paper] business cards when it comes down to exchanging contact information.

Timo emphasizes that to stimulate successful social interaction through RFID or NFC technology, which usually requires the users to hold a physical object (an RFID tag like the Poken or Mediamatic’s iK tag, a NFC enabled mobile phone), you need to find activities that are simple and intuitive.

Timo Arnall at Mobile Monday Amsterdam – Photo by Matt Cottam

He describes the RFID photo booth (description by Timo, description by Mediamatic) that has been used at PICNIC during the past years as a good example of a physical object that stimulates social interaction (disclaimer: I currently work for PICNIC but was not directly involved in the development of the photo booth, which happened prior to me joining the company). In short, you walk into the booth (also with other people),  you touch an icon, it takes a photograph and it tags you and your friends on the event’s social network.

“Very simple, no one really questioned how it worked. It provided an excuse to know other people”

Timo is particularly interested in the “between spaces” in conferences, like those that happen in between sessions when you meet other people. In order to further stimulate social interaction amongst the attendees, he suggests you find activities that don’t need full attention: “not full-on immersive games but stuff that you can do casually”. Using the technology (or the gadget that conveys it) shouldn’t be the main goal but a means to generate a specific behavior. It doesn’t have to interrupt but build on top of (a behavior).

RFID/NFC vs. Paper Business Cards

During the last decade, first with the Palm Pilot and now with the iPhone (+Android phones, etc) there’s been a splurge of apps that have been developed for exchanging contact information (like Bump), which should be a rather useful tool for conference goers. The truth is that they never clicked, except withing a few, highly homogeneous and geeky audiences (more on this topic coming in a further article).

According to Timo, with RFID gadgets (like Poken or RFID enabled phones) “it always feels a bit forced. I have a hard time believing that business cards are going to be replaced”.

Does this mean that digital interaction is doomed in the realm of [physical] events?

“I think the real incentive for doing digital interaction is doing something more than business cards. It’s doing something about media, entertainment, something that’s engaging, [...] different and playful, not necessarily about the utility of exchanging information between people”.

Watch the interview with Timo Arnall:

I apologize for the disturbing background noise, I didn’t have an external microphone available (my bad). Since then I have updated my gear by adding a Sennheiser MKE-400 shotgun microphone to my video camera. I hope that future videos will positively benefit from it.

Bump (web, twitter), the mobile app for Android and iOs mobile platforms, has recently upgraded its service by adding your LinkedIn profile to the information you can share (or “bump”) with other people.

As the official website describes, “Bump is a quick and easy way to connect two phones, simply bump them together. Share contacts info, pictures, calendar events, and even connect on social networks with just a bump”.

Until now you could share your contact info from your own agenda/contact manager plus your Twitter and Facebook profile, meaning that when you bumped with someone they were automatically added to your agenda, Twitter and Facebook contact lists. Through the LinkedIn integration they have added probably the best business networking tool out there, tapping on LinkedIn’s huge user database.

The new feature allows you both to send an invitation to connect on LinkedIn and find shared contacts on the LinkedIn network both from within Bump. For LinkedIn this is a good way to further sustain their leadership in the professional online networking arena.

This feels like a move in the right direction if -ever- a digital tool will replace a traditional paper business card. Though I love technology and digital interaction, I don’t see it replacing paper cards anytime soon. The experience is still full of bumps -no pun intended – and not immediate. It also requires that both parts involved have a compatible platform (while iPhones and Android phones are quickly becoming the standard in a certain business environment, Blackberries still have a strong presence in the corporate world and Nokia also has a broad userbase… yet) and a rather geeky spirit. I’ve been carrying Bump (and other contact networking tools) in my phone for what feels like ages and I hardly ever used it [successfully]. Only at SXSW, which had a high density of the geeky kind did I see some people use it rather frequently (not me though).

[Via the LinkedIn Blog]

Renato Valdez Olmos holding the E-connector

You might think that My Name is E, a Dutch startup, is just an service related to the exchange of social business cards like the that of competitors Poken and Mingle360. While this is true, it is only half of the story. Today it is basically an online platform that allows people to share business cards, though in their development roadmap they have much higher objectives.

The philosophy of the team behind My Name is E (where E is a flexible name that stands for “electronic”, “emotional”, “everyone” or whatever other meaning the user will give it) is that of empowering the “choice of the user” through the concept of touch. Touching objects or people through a physical device that can be your mobile phone, the E-connector or in the future other gadgets, will create a digital exchange through a physical action (they call it “online information in the physical world”).

I have recently visited Renato at E‘s headquarters in Amsterdam. Listen to him explaining present and future features of My Name is E:

My Name is E has a huge potential in conferences and events: think of those conferences from which you come back packed in business cards and brochures that rapidly end in your trash bin. Apart from the ecological point of view (tons of paper copies produced but very few of them are effectively transmitting the message they were created for), we are overwhelmed by information and classifying it or being able to search through it is becoming a real challenge. Imagine RFID tags and QR codes applied in conference booths, posters, cards, etc and that you are able to choose with which of them you want to interact by just passing your “reader” over it. The reader can be the E connector, or your mobile. The connector, an extra piece of hardware that you will reluctantly carry in your pocket, is a transitional technology until our mobiles will be online by default (in most Western countries only a minority of mobile phones are constantly connected to the internet as it is still rather expensive for most users) and/or will have NFC RFID technology incorporated (it should happen in the next 5 years, in Japan is already a reality for many devices).

It is all about the experience rather than what object people use to exchange information. According to Renato Valdez Olmos, Chief Technology and Product Officer of My Name is E, this year is about connecting people (e.i. exchanging business cards) and the next one will be about connecting people with the environment (e.i. connecting people with objects) and the interactions derived from those experiences.