RefTech’s new product to help raise exhibitor confidence

Event technology provider RefTech has launched the Autonomous Scanning Pod (ASPod) to allow visitors and delegates to self-scan their badges on entry to an event, and at key check points such as entry to seminars. The ASPod has been designed to help remove human contact and thus reduce the risk of Covid transmission.

Simon Clayton, chief ideas officer, RefTech said it was an important move in accordance with how people feel about their personal safety. He said: “As exhibitions and larger events return in 2021, organisers will be looking to harness technology to create a safer environment and to build trust with their audiences. The ASPod will remove some of the peripheral human interaction traditionally associated with events, and focus the interaction on the exhibitors, and therefore go some way to helping the delegates and visitors to feel more Covid-secure as they enter and move around an event.”

He added: “We all know how critical it is to collect visitor data and this is an effective way to ensure that data is collected with the minimum of human contact. Much of the confidence we need to build to bring people back to events will come from us embracing new and safer ways of interacting.”

The ASPod allows visitors to be incentivised to scan badges – ie ‘Scan your badge and get a copy of the slides sent to your email address / made available on the event app etc.’ with the organiser able to manage and co-ordinate all of this in the system.

The ASPod can also be used by exhibitors to collect data and is part of EventReference, RefTech’s powerful event management system and event app.

EventReference.com launches new features to enable Covid-19-secure events

EventReference.com, an event management platform, has launched new features to help organisers arrange Covid-19-secure events. It also now available for a six month free trial.

EventReference.com allows event organisers to manage online event registration, appointment setting and diary management, event management, paid registration, event reporting, badging and scanning. The new features enable organisers to stagger delegate entry to events, communicate with delegates before arrival, and to manage attendance numbers and departures. The platform also links to an event app.

Simon Clayton, chief ideas officer of RefTech, the creators of EventReference.com, said: “With everyone now turning their attention to social distanced solutions for meetings, event organisers and venues are going to need technology to help them to follow government guidelines. The new guidelines encourage on-line registration and appointment setting – all of which EventReference.com already handles, and the new features enable organisers to manage delegates in a covid-secure manner. We believe that EventReference.com is the most technologically advanced event management system on the market today, and we are offering all organisers the opportunity to trial it for free for six months to help them plan their Covid-secure events for the autumn.”

Event organisers can start their free trial, build their own event registration pages and use EventReference.com to start to manage and plan their next event. They have up to six months to plan the event, and then if they choose to make the event live, the subscription will start.

EventReference.com launches new features to enable Covid-19-secure events

EventReference.com, an event management platform, has launched new features to help organisers arrange Covid-19-secure events. It also now available for a six month free trial.

EventReference.com allows event organisers to manage online event registration, appointment setting and diary management, event management, paid registration, event reporting, badging and scanning. The new features enable organisers to stagger delegate entry to events, communicate with delegates before arrival, and to manage attendance numbers and departures. The platform also links to an event app.

Simon Clayton, chief ideas officer of RefTech, the creators of EventReference.com, said: “With everyone now turning their attention to social distanced solutions for meetings, event organisers and venues are going to need technology to help them to follow government guidelines. The new guidelines encourage on-line registration and appointment setting – all of which EventReference.com already handles, and the new features enable organisers to manage delegates in a covid-secure manner. We believe that EventReference.com is the most technologically advanced event management system on the market today, and we are offering all organisers the opportunity to trial it for free for six months to help them plan their Covid-secure events for the autumn.”

Event organisers can start their free trial, build their own event registration pages and use EventReference.com to start to manage and plan their next event. They have up to six months to plan the event, and then if they choose to make the event live, the subscription will start.

Is AI going to revolutionise the events industry?

AI is a very interesting tool, and one that’s making a huge impact on many sectors, but contrary to some of the things I’ve read, I can’t currently see how it will have any big impact on events.

The most common form of AI that is being talked about in our industry at the moment is “Machine Learning” (or ML). In machine learning, as its name suggests, the machine learns how to figure things out - this is how systems have been created that can classify the photographs that we’ve taken and that have been uploaded to one of the photo platforms. Go to Google Photos and search for “flower”, “cat”, “dog” or “Mercedes” (or whatever keywords will work for your photos). You may be surprised by how accurate these things are!

In ML there are two forms of training and one or the other is required for the machine to learn something - these are called supervised and unsupervised learning. 

In unsupervised learning you give the machine a set of “things” - they might be data records or photos - and you let the machine group them into sets. These sets will have characteristics that the machine has identified but you won’t necessarily know what they are. The task here is to look at the resulting sets and try to figure out what is common about each set in order to figure out what the machine “saw”. In this sort of ML, there is a high rate of instances where the results aren’t any use and you then reset and start again with a slightly different approach.

With supervised learning - you give the machine a set of “things” but now, you tell it what the desired groupings are too. If we give it 30,000 pictures of cats and dogs and we tell the machine that set A are cats and set B are dogs then the machine will go away and try to learn how to differentiate those sets.

It is important at this point to stress that ML is best at problems like this where it is really hard (if not impossible) to write a set of rules to explain the problem and how to solve it. Think about it - you couldn’t come up with a list of characteristics that would define what differentiates a picture of a cat from a picture of a dog yet you can easily look at a photo and tell which is which.

Another really important fact about ML is that you won’t be able to look inside the resulting process and necessarily know what it is doing. If you give it a photo that is a cat or a dog and it identifies it correctly, you won’t necessarily be able to understand exactly HOW it did that but if the result is correct enough of the time then that isn’t really a problem - in that situation anyway.

Let’s take a look at a specific example of a potential “match making” process and why AI can’t do it. The example is fairly simple and will probably be familiar to most of us in the events industry. I often stay in hotels and I tend to use one or two online platforms to actually book my stays.

This means that both these platforms have hundreds of records of my hotel bookings and yet, they couldn’t possibly identify why I booked any of them or accurately predict which hotels I might be likely to book in future because there are simply too many variables that the platforms have no concept of. My choices could be based on my knowledge of the hotel’s air conditioning (or lack thereof), the height restrictions of the car park, whether I’m driving or getting the train, whether I’m going to a meeting later in the morning or working onsite at a venue until silly o’clock, whether I just fancy trying a new hotel or a specific one, whether it’s for work or pleasure, or even whether it’s close to that restaurant that I like and dozens of other reasons. AI could never know all of those factors because there are too many personal reasons for my choices.

These booking sites take millions of bookings every year and will have gathered vast quantities of data and have enormous IT budgets but they can’t choose a hotel for me because they don’t know enough about me and my motivations for this particular booking.

Bear in mind that these sites generally ask how my stay was and often get my feedback on what I did and didn’t like but they can never ask enough questions to truly understand why I made that booking - mainly because I’d then be bored of the survey and wouldn’t complete it!

So how does that apply to the idea of AI automatically making appointments for people at events? Well, I’ve seen some people claiming that they have “AI platforms” that can automatically match make and create appointments for attendees but I don’t believe this. 

Think about the last exhibition you attended - you might be able to explain to another person some of the reasons why you do or don’t want to meet with a particular exhibitor but that might be as simple as “you’ve worked with them before and don’t want to again” or “they have a reputation that you don’t like” or “you already know and work with them” or plenty of other reasons. Can the alleged “AI platform” mine this information from your provided registration data? No. I’ve even seen one platform claim to mine your social media feeds for your preferences which sounds fairly horrific from a data privacy standpoint but even then it certainly wouldn’t be able to infer anything useful about who i want to meet from my social media accounts.

Even if we assume for a minute that these AI algorithms could find all of this data. To be able to train it it would need to know if its selections were correct, so we would need to tell it the result of tens of thousands of meetings that had been scheduled. The trouble is, nobody can know whether it was actually a good meeting straight afterwards (unless the potential customer placed an order there and then!). It might have seemed positive but then come to nothing - alternatively, I might only find out that it was an amazing meeting 18 months later when a huge order comes in. That information never filters back to the organiser in my experience so there are no metrics for what constituted a “successful meeting” and so therefore the AI cannot learn. 

Facial or voice recognition are slightly different things and may see some good results in our industry because those models have been trained in all sorts of other industries with millions of records and so they should work well. For other AI tools, unless we can find AI algorithms that have been trained outside of the events industry that will work without any changes then I doubt it’ll happen. I’d love to hear from people who are really using AI in anger and can explain to me how they’re training those ML networks. 

As it stands, I suspect that those claiming to use AI in our industry are just using the term as a marketing buzz word – they aren’t really using AI because they just don’t have the data it needs but I’d love to be proved wrong.

One massively damaging data breach after another...

2018 saw a number of large companies suffer from huge data breaches, but it’s so commonplace these days that every announcement seems to follow a standard process: we read about it in the press, mutter to ourselves ‘oh that’s bad’ and then we move on to read the next news story.

For the companies involved, they, too, go through a standard process: they will most likely suffer a significant dip in their share price, a big dent in their reputation and then a sizeable PR bill as they try to recover their public image and smooth the waters.

This was the case for Marriott Hotels when, in November, they announced that half a billion customer records were compromised. This breach can be seen as completely inexcusable, demonstrating not only a lack of technical security, but also a complete absence of organisational security, too.

But with a breach this big, Marriott should also be worried that they could follow in Equifax’s footsteps and be subjected to a class action law suit.

In 2017 Equifax, the consumer credit reporting agency, suffered from one of the most highly publicised and sensitive cyber security hacks in history, when personal information for around 145.5m individuals was exposed. It was data relating mostly to Americans, but also Canadian and British consumers were exposed.

The incident prompted over 240 individual class action lawsuits in the US and then a rare 50-State class action suit was served on the company. It is reported that Equifax has spent over $88m as a result of the breach and that their profits have fallen by $35m. Their CEO stepped down in the wake of the incident and then the company’s CIO and CSO retired a week after the announcement, too.

This fall from grace has been very publicly documented, but will it have any impact on other businesses? I doubt it. I am not aware of any great impact on Marriott’s cyber security efforts.

Think of data security as a line. At one end we have an encrypted hard drive, buried deep in concrete under a 100-storey building. It’s extremely secure but not at all usable. At the other end of the line is a computer in a public space, connected 24/7 to the internet with no password protection. This is very easily accessible, but incredibly insecure. Security policy is about finding the right point on that line between those two extremes. All organisations have to decide for themselves where the right balance is between usability and security for them.

Organisations should be asking themselves: ‘Could we do more to prevent a data breach?’ The answer will always be ‘Yes’, but then someone needs to evaluate whether the options are sensible, practical and affordable.

And there lies the rub. It could cost a company a sizeable chunk of cash to implement the necessary changes, but the alternative could be a lot worse. AIR Worldwide has estimated the breach will cost Marriott around $600m, so even if the cost of getting it right were as much as $20m, it would only be a drop in the ocean compared to the impact of a breach.

There are a lot of companies out there who will never learn from these examples. They are just sticking their heads in the sand and assuming that it will never happen to them, because in the words of Del Amitri: ‘And nothing ever happens, nothing happens at all - the needle returns to the start of the song and we all sing along like before…’

Simon on: The Cookie Monster

Pretty much every website in the world uses cookies, and a few months ago the ICO (Information Commissioner’s Office) published new guidance on their use, meaning that the majority of websites are now in violation. But have you seen any difference in the way that the websites that you visit work? Have you actually changed your own website? I can safely predict that the vast majority of you haven’t because a lot of major websites haven’t either. This is partly because a lot of people aren’t aware of the new guidance yet!

So, do you need to bother? Whilst we haven’t yet seen any fines for non-compliance, it’s worth knowing that the ICO, and their European equivalents have been busy of late, they have grown bigger teeth and been working very proactively rather than just reacting to reported data breaches. The German internet provider 1&1 was fined £8 million for poor customer security ID checks, and in October the same regulator punished a German property company with a bigger €14.5m fine for holding on to people's personal data for longer than was necessary. Here in the UK, between July and September 2019 the ICO issued fines to 340 companies for failing to pay the mandatory data protection fee that all organisations that process personal information are required to pay. 

With this new vigour in mind, let’s explore how most websites are in violation of the ICO’s latest guidance, and what you need to do about it:

To explain: a cookie is a small piece of data that a website will place on your device to either make the website work (known as essential cookies) or to enable the website to feedback information about the visitor’s usage (the non-essential cookies). Most of us are aware of the ‘this website uses cookies’ banner that appears and we all merrily click ‘yes’ because we just want to read the page  - digging into the options and selecting boxes is simply too time consuming and provides no discernible benefit.

The latest ICO guidance says that opt-in permission needs to be explicitly given BEFORE the non-essential cookies are placed, but the vast majority of websites actually place both the non-essential and essential cookies onto a user’s device as soon as they visit the page along with a cookies message “asking” for consent. For a website to be compliant, the cookie permission banner should now tell you that it is placing the essential cookies and then ask you to specifically choose to accept the non-essential cookies (the ones that feed Google Analytics etc.). 

Strictly speaking (according to PECR) the reason this has changed is all to do with permissions and ownership. Installing non-essential cookies enables a website to use the end user’s computer and so permission needs to be granted by the user, it can’t just be taken. These non-essential cookies offer no real benefit to the user but most people are nice (or lazy) and often choose to accept them anyway which is good for us.

The often used ‘by continuing to use this website you are agreeing to cookies’ is not valid consent under the higher GDPR standard either because they have already placed the cookies. This is the IT equivalent of asking for forgiveness rather than permission!

In one corner we have the ICO, and in the other we have the marketers who will want to ensure that their websites are still using analytics in order to measure audience engagement and to enable targeted remarketing to provide better revenue streams. So how do we comply with the ICO guidance? I talked to the ICO and they were pretty vague and non-committal but they didn’t shoot down my suggestion which is that every website needs to now have a very prominent cookie permission box with two options; option one would be ‘accept all cookies’, and option two should be ‘accept only essential cookies’ The first option could be in a bright colour, whilst the second is grey to help steer the consumer to the option that you’d like them to take - as long as the options are clearly laid out, then you will be ok. This box also needs to block your website and shouldn’t be able to be bypassed by visiting another page on the site.

Only AFTER the user has clicked to allow non-essential cookies can you place those cookies on their machine.

I’ll be keeping an eye on how the ICO takes it from here, and if it builds on the proactivity already demonstrated in 2019. Given that we’re now at the mercy of both ICO prosecutions and potential class action prosecutions - we all need to consider our decisions very carefully.

Simon on: Analyse This

Google Analytics (GA) was launched in 2005 and over the past 15 years has become the most widely used analytics service on the web, but with the introduction of the ICO’s new guidance on cookies, it could signal that it is time for companies to review how they use it. I do wonder how much of the data that GA creates is actually useful and actionable. Does the information really influence business or marketing decisions? Or does the majority just confirm what you already knew about your audience or simply provoke a ‘that’s interesting’ reaction?

The traditional event cycle means that most websites are pretty quiet for six months of the year and then there’s a frantic marketing push pre-event. If you have thrown all of your marketing at an event (like many organisers do) then how can GA tell you which techniques have had an impact?

Another thing to consider is that Google Analytics is free for a reason; the data it collects is feeding the massive Google machine and is doing this for their benefit, not yours. You’d be rather naive to think that they’d give a powerful, world-class analytical platform to us free of charge purely for our benefit.

Perhaps a return to the more simple, log based analytics may mean less but more useful and usable data?