There are over three billion mobile phone subscribers globally. This is more than the number of flush-toilets and televisions combined! Eighty percent of the world’s population is within mobile phone coverage range and this will increase to 90% by 2010. This mobile revolution will transform the way that humans communicate, get information, find our way around, buy things, and the way that event professionals (already a highly mobile lot) will do business.
There is a confluence of technology trends driving these changes:
Advances in phone hardware
Mobile phones increasingly are being used for far more than making calls. At a minimum, they have basic text message and web functionality. Increasingly they are becoming mini-computers more powerful than desktop computers of just a few years ago. Advanced web browsing, geo-positioning, video, and contact management capabilities are just the beginning. The recently released iPhone (www.apple.com/iphone) is a sign of changes to come with very advanced web browsing, and audio/video playback capabilities. Other smart phone competitors are close behind. Each year will provide more powerful processing capabilities in smaller, more convenient packages.
Advances in web technology
The web is becoming the principal delivery vehicle for software. The days of specialized, platform-specific software purchased, installed, maintained and updated on your computer are rapidly drawing to a close. Google and other major players are investing in web-based mobile tools, most of them at little or no cost to the user.
Advances in the networks (broadband internet access everywhere!)
The wireless networks are also evolving to provide broadband (high speed internet) capabilities through many channels (EV-DO, Edge, 3G, 4G, Wi-Fi, Wi-Max and others to name a few from the alphabet soup of acronyms). Everywhere you go, broadband internet, the carrier for the mobile web software tools mentioned above, will be available.
Advances in Geo-Positioning (GPS) Technology
Nearly all phones sold today are GPS enabled – calls can be triangulated from receiving antennae to determine where the caller is. However, full GPS mapping capabilities, already available in some phones, will become common cell-phone feature in the next few years.
Near Field Communication (NFC)
NFC (near-field communication - www.nfc-forum.org, a short-range wireless technology is widely used in Japan with trials in the United States, Germany, Finland, Netherlands and a few other countries) will turn cell phones into a secure credit or debit cards. A chip embedded in a phone will allow you to make a payment by using a touch-sensitive interface or by bringing the phone within a few centimeters of an NFC reader. Your credit card account or bank account is then charged accordingly. This technology has great potential for e-ticketing and lead exchange as well as will be mentioned below.
Mobile phone for meetings and events
These converging mobile trends will have several meetings related applications:
Mobile-based conference agenda, exhibition guide, and networking guides:
LogOn (www.log-on.nl) Event Assistant, winner of the 2006 EIBTM WorldWide Watch for Technology Innovation, provides a web-based mobile phone guide to help conference attendees to explore the conference agenda and how to connect with exhibitors and other conference attendees. This is an example of several emerging mobile web-based products.
Mobile city guides
Phone-based city guides and mapping programs will become increasingly helpful to convention goers in unfamiliar cities. The iPhone and legion of competitors to come, with more robust web functionality, will make the many excellent location-based mapping websites (such as Ask City http://city.ask.com and Google Maps http://map.google.com) much more accessible. Additionally, mobile products such as Google Mobile Maps (www.google.com/gmm) offer directions, real-time traffic, and satellite imagery.
Geovector (www.geovector.com) is an example of a mobile-phone based mapping tool allowing users in Japan to search for movies, restaurants, buy tickets, make restaurant reservations and more and get step-by-step GPS-based guidance on how to get there. Similar systems are in development for the rest of the world.
Advanced mobile-phone GPS capabilities will likely help attendees find hotels, reception locations, rooms in a convention center and navigate efficiently while at events.
Audience Polling and Surveys
Interactive audience response keypads are excellent tools that engage attendees and can provide very useful data. The challenge is that rental fees for these systems can be expensive costing up to US$10 per person per day. In the future, when a speaker or event organizer would like to use audience voting capabilities, attendees will be able to pull out their phones and use them as a voting keypad. Already, companies such as Log-On offer text messaging (American Idol-like) voting using mobile phones. In the future, using web-based survey products, this will become much easier with the ability to graph the results instantly on the screen.
Networking
There are many excellent web-based as well as proprietary hand-held business networking products which help people of like interests to find each other at events. The challenge is that the standard web-based tools are not very mobile and the handheld tools can be too expensive for many groups. Better web-browsing functionality in phones will allow the benefits of both – high quality conference networking system that is mobile and at lower cost.
This will likely be tied to a conference messaging system giving the meeting planner the ability to make broadcast announcements to all attendees or a subset (for example in the event of a major session change) and attendees to send messages to other conference attendees.
One good contact made at a meeting can often pay for the price of the entire trip. Using mobile phones to assist in finding these contacts will be a significant help to the industry.
Lead Exchange
The current system where exhibitors are charged large sums by registration companies for bar-code or magnetic bar code scanning equipment will likely become obsolete in the next few years. Using near field communication (NFC) enabled mobile phones, attendees will be able to easily exchange contact information. This can be between two phones or between a phone and an NFC-enabled badge and will be a simple as tapping the two devices together. ITN (http://www.bcard.net/Solutions.asp#nfc) is already working on many of these applications. Similar technology could be used for access verification (with an imbedded ID photo), for electronic tickets, continuing education unit (CEU) tracking, tote bag distribution and more.
Online Registration and more
There are more than 1,500 technology products in 30 categories designed to assist in the meeting planning process (www.corbinball.com/bookmarks). Many of these tools are web-based. With the increasing functionality of web-based mobile products, these tools will be increasingly accessible via mobile phones.
Online registration is just one example of many. A mobile-phone based registration solution could work as follows:
- The prospective attendee receives a mobile-phone email for an upcoming conference.
- The registrant clicks on the link to the registration page.
- Using “auto-fill” functionality, the registration form is entered and payment is made with just a few clicks.
- The return confirmation email contains a printable receipt and a confirmation bar-code (or NFC e-ticket).
- The attendee uses this mobile phone bar-code or NFC e-ticket to instantly check-in onsite to get the badge.
These are just a few of the many ways that mobile phone will likely change the events industry. Mobile phones are already the most ubiquitous technology product on earth. The next generations of mobile phone will revolutionize meetings management and the business process in general in very significant ways.
