It was bound to happen sooner or later. CES are going to embed an RFID chip into attendees badges to keep track of which booths they visit. The data from this can then be used to see how popular a particular booth was, then obvious decisions can be made about that booth or the content at next years event.
I predict this becoming more and more common amongst conventions / trade shows etc.
Using RFID to track attendees is a great idea, but I’d like to see an extension of this and allow people to view where they’ve been after an event. One possibility is to display a floor plan of the venue and each booths that you attended / were interesting in would be highlighted. This could be broken down by date, given some events are multiple days. The app/site could allow the user to click on one of the active booths and get more information about what they were offering, a link to their website and even a photo of the actual booth they visited.
An even more advanced system would integrates with social networks i.e. a facebook app, that allows your friends to be alerted or view in real time which booth your at. You would visit a booth, the RFID tag would register your at a particular booth, then a photo of that booth would be displayed to your friends. i.e. ‘Jason is @ xyz booth, checking out zyx games’.
Photos of all the booths would have to be taken in advance and the RFID information would have to be uploaded to the net. But the possibilities for this technology appear very bright indeed.
