Providing enhanced social interaction services for industry exhibitors at large medical conferences

Large medical conferences offer opportunities for participants to find industry exhibitors that offer products and services relevant to their professional interests. Companies often invest significant effort in promotions that encourage participants to spend time at their stand (e.g. providing free gifts, leaflets, running competitions) and register some contact details. Attendees will use the conference to find others who also share similar professional interests, as well as keep up to date with developments on products such has pharmaceuticals and medical equipment. From both perspectives, a number of improvements can be made to enhance the overall experience by using existing active RFID technology: Vendors would be able to more closely monitor the success of their promotions with statistics on the stand's visitors, as well as find more potential customers by using real-time visualizations; Participants would be able to log their social interactions, keeping an electronic history of the people they have met. The SocioPatterns project and Live Social Semantics experiments have recently demonstrated a scalable and robust infrastructure that would support these kinds of improvements. In this paper, we propose an infrastructure that provides enhanced social interaction services for vendors and participants by using small active RFID badges worn by attendees and attached to fixed location

Providing Enhanced Social Interaction Services for Industry Exhibitors at Large Medical Conferences

Large medical conferences offer opportunities for participants to find industry exhibitors that offer products and services relevant to their professional interests. Companies often invest significant effort in promotions that encourage participants to spend time at their stand (e.g. providing free gifts, leaflets, running competitions) and register some contact details. Attendees will use the conference to find others who also share similar professional interests, as well as keep up to date with developments on products such has pharmaceuticals and medical equipment. From both perspectives, a number of improvements can be made to enhance the overall experience by using existing active RFID technology: Vendors would be able to more closely monitor the success of their promotions with statistics on the stand's visitors, as well as find more potential customers by using real-time visualizations; Participants would be able to log their social interactions, keeping an electronic history of the people they have met. The SocioPatterns project and Live Social Semantics experiments have recently demonstrated a scalable and robust infrastructure that would support these kinds of improvements. In this paper, we propose an infrastructure that provides enhanced social interaction services for vendors and participants by using small active RFID badges worn by attendees and attached to fixed locations

An exploration of the techniques, outputs and outcomes of circulation management at exhibitions

Purpose – To establish how and why exhibition managers manage circulation, this study explores the techniques (specific activities used to influence circulation), outputs (tangible enhancements in the performance of the exhibition resulting from changes in circulation dynamics), and outcomes (benefits of those enhancements to exhibitors, attendees and the exhibition organiser) of circulation management. Design/methodology/approach – In face-to-face interviews, ten exhibition managers were asked how and why they manage attendee circulation, which also involved a card-sorting exercise to elicit tacit circulation management knowledge. Four different experienced exhibitions managers from three continents were asked to validate the findings. Findings – Four types of techniques were identified: magnet, layout, curiosity & playfulness and guiding techniques, with these implemented to achieve five outputs: greater footfall, better exposure to exhibits, enhanced navigation, greater buzz, and managing congestion levels. The results further show that circulation was managed to achieve a variety of organiser-, exhibitor- and attendee-related outcomes. The study uncovered a large range of factors influencing the employment of circulation management techniques. Conflicts in outputs resulting from several techniques are highlighted, requiring the exhibition manager to establish which outputs and resulting outcomes take priority over others. Originality/value – This exploratory study is the first study to propose a circulation management model for the exhibition context, equipping exhibition managers with knowledge to strategically manage attendee circulation

Information Outlook, April 2001

Volume 5, Issue 4https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/sla_io_2001/1003/thumbnail.jp

A Design Science Approach to Virtual World Implementation of Trade Fairs

Virtual world technology platforms, which allow users from distant places to congregate virtually for entertainment or other purposes, are growing into useful tools for businesses and consumers. Besides other applications, the concept of same-time, different-place gatherings can also be used to organize virtual trade fairs that are complements or extensions of physical tradeshows. This paper describes a design-science approach to the development of a virtual world technolo-gy platform specifically aimed at creating virtual tradeshow events that bring show attendees and exhibitors together. After describing the design and development of the virtual world tech-nology platform and some of its applications, we report its implementation in a career fair setting organized to facilitate interaction between would-be employers and students at a university.. We also conducted a preliminary evaluation of the effectiveness and efficiency of this virtual event by surveying employers and attendees. Although the event effectiveness is rated aver-age, this exploratory analysis reveals that the virtual events are quite efficient in terms of use of resources. The overall effort to develop the virtual events is minimal as compared to the number of additional attendees that can participate in the event, reducing the cost per new lead gener-ated. As the technology evolves further to enhance richness of the interactions, these virtual events will become major applications of virtual worlds. Available at: https://aisel.aisnet.org/pajais/vol4/iss2/4

Teaching and learning in virtual worlds: is it worth the effort?

Educators have been quick to spot the enormous potential afforded by virtual worlds for situated and authentic learning, practising tasks with potentially serious consequences in the real world and for bringing geographically dispersed faculty and students together in the same space (Gee, 2007; Johnson and Levine, 2008). Though this potential has largely been realised, it generally isn’t without cost in terms of lack of institutional buy-in, steep learning curves for all participants, and lack of a sound theoretical framework to support learning activities (Campbell, 2009; Cheal, 2007; Kluge & Riley, 2008). This symposium will explore the affordances and issues associated with teaching and learning in virtual worlds, all the time considering the question: is it worth the effort