Apr. 20, 2011—RFID Journal has been employing radio frequency identification in various ways at our events since 2003, when we first used the technology at our very first RFID Journal LIVE! conference and exhibition.
One way in which we utilize RFID is by encoding information about each attendee in a transponder that is put inside that individual’s conference badge. When the attendee visits an exhibitor’s booth, that vendor can capture the person’s information by scanning his or her badge.
For the past several years, we have used passive high-frequency (HF) RFID tags based on the ISO 15693 air-interface protocol. This year, at the request of NXP Semiconductors, we switched to tags provided by ITN International, a company that employs Near-Field Communication (NFC) technology. ITN provided our exhibitors with new Samsung Nexus-S smartphones, which have a built-in NFC reader.
Here is a YouTube video explaining how the ITN system works:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gh9O2aih3U.
The smartphone offers flexibility over our previous lead-retrieval system, which just captured data, by allowing users to append notes and edit information. There were a few hiccups, unfortunately, as the phone is a brand-new model. There were occasional problems with reading tags, and some folks told me that entering notes took getting used to. But it’s clear that NFC technology is starting to come into its own. On the day I returned to my office after LIVE! 2011, in fact, I received an e-mail from a person whose firm provides conference services—he wanted to learn how to use NFC!