Game-Changing Event Technology: Bluetooth LE, Social Walls and Open-Data

Protocol

Event Management Technology continues to advance at an incredible speed. Tech conferences have greatly benefited from a streamlined

planning process and unprecedented data collection making targeted marketing efforts and contextualized experiences more successful than

ever before.

For those of our readers who are planning an upcoming tech conference, we’ve compiled a helpful list of a couple of the most influential and game-

changing event management technologies.

Enable Better Experiences for Attendees with Bluetooth LE

Introduced back in 2013 the buzz around beacon technology promised better customer connections and experiences. That same technology is expected to drive $44 Billion in retail sales this year, according to an article published in Forbes.

Beacons are small low-cost devices that use a low energy Bluetooth (Bluetooth LE or BLE) to transmit information over short distances usually up to 330 feet. When active, BLE searches for enabled devices in range to push information.

Event organizers can leverage BLE as a communication medium, accurately detecting where an attendee is at any given moment. Armed with this information, an event organizer can relay, relevant, timely messages via app push notification to attendees.

How Can We Utilize Beacon Technology at My Tech Conference?

Let’s walk through a scenario to help illustrate.

Leverage beacon technology to offer connected experiences across hotels, cabs and venues.

For example, an attendee at CES 2016 will probably have the HotelTonight app, the Lyft app or Uber app and the CES app installed on their phone. This way the attendee already has three different pieces of information to process. An effective solution to this is to make all these four apps share a beacon network and push personalized notifications based on the location of the attendee.

Unacast is one such company that is working towards building and powering the world’s largest network of proximity data, which will in turn help brands to get a greater sense of the offline profile of attendees than the ones gathered within the silos that are specific to a physical location.

For example, once an attendee exits the event venue, a beacon placed at the exit corner will automatically send a push notification asking if he/she is looking for a ride and to type in the destination.

Once that is done, it will automatically open up the Uber or Lyft app (depending on which is easily available) thus allowing attendees to request for a ride in a single tap. (Source: Beaconstac Blog)

So, what’s the difference between BLE, NFC and RFID?All three are wireless communication technologies, but there are a couple of key differentiating factors.

First is distance. RFID/NFC is intended for situations where a smartphone or chip-enabled tag (e.g. conference wristband, ticket, pass etc.) comes in contact with a unique tag affixed to a stationary object; the communication is one-to-one.

BLE is best for situations where a smartphone is present within a particular beacon coverage radius; the communication is one-to-many, making BLE the preferred technology for communicating with attendees within a conference setting.

Some of the biggest players providing Beacon technology include first-mover Apple (iBeacon) and as of last year Google (Eddystone). These providers integrate with the physical hardware devices (or beacons).

Build a Conference Presence by Creating a Social Wall

Social media is a great medium for creating conversations around your brand. The setup for this technology is very straightforward and can be accomplished by creating a social wall.

Social walls facilitate engagement in a couple of ways. Attendee to attendee, organizer to attendee and sponsor to attendee to name a few. As the organizer you have control over what goes onto the wall, having full ownership over your brand and the experience.

How Can I Leverage a Social Wall?

The ground work for a big conference begins, at least, a year out if not more. You can leverage a social wall in a variety of ways.

It can be a means to reach out and begin recruiting potential speakers and panelist as well as key influencers for your event.

Leading up to the event the social wall becomes a place to announce your speaker lineup and hold contests for thing such as exclusive ticket packages.

During the event, an organizer can set up displays onsite to encourage attendees to participate in the conversation increasing your conferences digital exposure and reach.

Further, these onsite displays can also serve up comments and tweets in a real-time social feed during presentations. This enables presenters to address questions on the fly or post-presentation as an alternative to the traditional Q&A.

The social wall can also serve as a means of communicating messages to attendees, such as announcing a promo on behalf of a sponsor during the time of the event.

There are tons of great tools that integrate with social walls, such as “Concerto” the Twitter-based app that can be used in conjunction with a social wall to keep track of social data that relates to your conference.

Easily Sync and Share Event Technology Data

With all the technology that has been created for events, it can be hard to get all the data you need from each individual program into one place.

Historically, in order to integrate data organizers had two options. Use one platform with applications built to sync attendee and program data or leverage APIs to sync data across multiple sources. Both solutions have their limitations. A platform approach is restrictive as no one platform can accomplish everything.

Using APIs can quickly become clunky when adding more than two data sources. There was no good way to easily sync and share data.

The Solution: CDEP

Enter Conference Data Exchange Protocol (CDEP); a fancy term coined by the founders of Slidebox.

CDEP facilitates data integration by making it possible for multiple apps and programs to speak to each other using something they call a CDEP format.

Instead of creating a spider-web of chaos between each app, CDEP makes it possible for the apps to communicate with each other efficiently in either a linear manner (app to app) or in a hub and spoke model (one database to many app sources).

Any changes to the data are centrally managed and automatically synced across all the connected applications, eliminating the need for organizers to download, manipulate and update multiple data sources.

This makes planning and executing your tech conference so much easier, automatically updating and syncing information so everything is easily accessible in one place.

Slidebox’s CDEP was featured in the Innovation Zone at last years IBTM World in Barcelona, Spain, its open-sourced protocol will definitely be one to watch this year.

Staying on the pulse of all the new technology available for conferences can be challenging, but it is

well worth it. Being able to leverage the types of technologies discussed above can give organizers a huge leg up in the

conference game and help to bring in more speakers, sponsors and attendees.