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It's not the first time attendees at IBM's Information on Demand conference wore badges with embedded radio frequency identification (RFID) technology, and it won't be the last. A sign at the registration desk gave conference-goers a chance to opt-out.
Mary Ann Alberry, IBM's conference manager, says 6,500 people attended the conference and approximately 2% chose not to wear the badge with embedded RFID tag.
The passive Gen 2 chips (ultra high frequency, 928 MHz) from Alien Technology carry a 24-character electronic product code transmitted by Motorola readers with help from WebSphere to a backend system and cross-checked against name, title and company information stored in a DB2 database. As a person walks through the door leading into any one of the 70 conference sessions, a RFID reader above the threshold logs the chip's data, says Art Borrego, chief executive at Austin, Texas-based Alliance Tech, which designed the system.
"We are trying to respect people's privacy," Alberry says. "We're using the information from the tags to do more accurately budget the event, track food and beverages, be audit ready, and plan better sessions by looking at attendance in the rooms what are the most popular sessions."
Alberry says the raw data from the tags can help with security issues if an emergency occurred on site and conference organizers had to track someone down. The technology also lets conference organizers know the number of people who receive meals, so they can carefully plan breakfast, lunch and dinner to make sure food arrives at the scheduled time, creating an audit trail to control conference costs. In the future, IBM may use the RFID technology to target attendees who opt-in with marketing materials if attendees.
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