|
Social networking
Birds of a feather take wing with wearable computers that hookup like-minded professionals
By Cathy Chatfield-Taylor
How do you initiate conversation among people who don’t know each other? Try asking a silly question: “Who’s your favorite character on Gilligan’s Island?”
Posed by the interactive nTAG name badge, that query, among others, prompted more social networking than ever among the 1,300 attendees at the PTC/User World Event, held June 13–16, 2004, at the Gaylord Opryland Resort & Convention Center in Nashville, TN.
“Initial greetings can be stiff and sometimes don’t take place. nTAG offered a novel way to address that,” says Kevin Johnson, Executive Director of PTC/USER Inc. (www.ptcuser.org), a Hull, MA-based independent user group for Parametric Technology Corp. (PTC) products. “We had a significant increase in interaction among people who don’t know each other.”
Developed by nTAG Interactive (www.ntag.com) to take the place of traditional badges, the nTAG device is roughly the size of a personal digital assistant and weighs about six ounces. It has an LCD screen and three buttons (“yes,” “no” and “scroll”). Attendees wear nTAGs suspended from a lanyard, and the devices communicate with each other using radio frequency identification (RFID) technology.
When people come within two to five feet of each other, the nTAGs display three tidbits of information that they have in common, drawn from a pre-populated database. From the universities they attended to the software products that interest them, attendees can use these conversation starters to introduce themselves. If they want to exchange contact information, they scroll to the command and press “yes.”
Excerpt from "Social networking," EXPO, April 2005. Copyright 2005 EXPO Magazine, Overland Park, Kan. |
