03 February, 2004
category: RFID
Technology – story – canada.com network
“Business conference name tags could soon be doing as much networking as the people wearing them. Developers of the technology behind the name tags, dubbed nTags, see a huge potential in their application for everything from post-seminar interaction to conducting customer and employee surveys.
…
nTags reveal to the two parties relevant business and personal details that might otherwise take hours of small talk to uncover.”
From the nTag website:
“The look of the tags can be made to fit any setting with a customizable face label. Users interact with the tags through the LCD displays and through the three control buttons. The tags interact with each other through an infrared connection.
nTAGs communicate with the central server through the radio system, which uses a highly-reliable, short-range technology called RFID (radio frequency identification). The RFID system provides location detection, scans data off the tags, and downloads data into the tags.
The central server holds the master copy of all the participant profile data. The server also collects data that is scanned off the tags and serves as a control station for managing nTAG applications.”
The system extends the concept of a business card, but at $30 to $90 an nTag, advantages come at a price. RFID News editors believe nTags would be most appropriate for events with technically inclined guests. General business conferences might be better suited investing extra money into materials and programming.