Simon on: Apps - What are they good for?

Exhibition apps are about as useful as a chocolate teapot, says Reftech’s Simon Clayton.

Exhibition apps are about as useful as a chocolate teapot – I’ve made this statement before, but recent experience has prompted me to discuss the subject again.

The vast majority of exhibition apps are simply awful – they are clunky, slow to use or just don’t enhance the visitor experience. Many of them seem to have been designed for a conference rather than an exhibition – and anyone in the industry knows that they are not the same thing. Some apps are ‘ok’, but is ‘ok’ enough to warrant the time and spend?

Exhibition apps are only used for a few days at most (for the duration of the event), so the user has to get to grips with the app very, very quickly. This means that the user experience needs to be as slick, fast, uncomplicated and as pain-free as possible. The gain has to outweigh the pain because people are busy, attention spans are short, and even just a few extra seconds load time can be make or break the experience.

I’ve recently witnessed exhibition organisers pay huge sums of money for an app that on the day turns out to be as useful as a one legged man in an arse kicking contest. But enough of the sarcastic comparisons, I’d like to look at why this happens.

I think it could be down to smoke and mirrors; the spec is discussed and exhibition organisers are promised the world but in reality they don’t have the technical expertise in-house to see that the product spec is fundamentally flawed and could never deliver.

The organiser trusts the app provider to deliver on their word, but when they don’t, the development is too far down the line, the show is almost upon them and the app budget is spent. They end up with a less that perfect app that cost them a small fortune.

I keep reading articles about app fatigue – how ‘we’ are getting fed up with apps and often view them as simply more crap that we just don’t need. I personally get rather frustrated by the daily requests to update my apps – I don’t have many of them, but I still seem to be updating five per day, which means that I delete many of them anyway. They can also eat up phone battery – even whilst not in use – which is one of the reasons why so many people carry back up power devices.

What’s the solution? First you should question whether your exhibition actually needs an app in the first place, and if you do, then plan out its functionality and more importantly, the key visitor benefits. Consider yourself as a customer – what are the apps that you regularly use and why do you use them? If you were in your visitor’s shoes, will the app appeal to you?

Get the basics right – think about the visitor and what they really want from the show experience and build the app around them. Get your techies involved from the start and ask lots and lots of questions. And then ask more questions and ask for proof that the app will deliver.

How hard can it be to create a fast loading and truly useful exhibition app? I think I’ll go and find out…

Simon on: Don't Knock It

The recent Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas has just prompted a whole range of reactions from the press – ranging from the ‘wow’ to the fairly sarcastic. One article highlighted the array of technology created, ‘to solve a problem that just isn’t there’. It criticised the tech industry’s current obsession with sensors to record pretty much everything we do from sleep patterns to the fitness of our pets (I kid you not).

People who read my columns may think that I would echo this sentiment, but I don’t. Sometimes what’s not relevant for one person is actually very useful to another. For example, one journalist was rather scathing about a device designed to monitor sleep patterns – ‘How do I manage to go to sleep at night without knowing my bed is monitoring my heart rate?’ – but that device could prove very useful to someone with life threatening sleep apnoea.

There’s also a lot to be said for pushing the boundaries and experimenting even if the return on investment isn’t immediate. As the president of 3M once said, you can’t stumble unless you are moving.

The barcode was invented 20 years before the technology to read it. The Apple iPhone was only possible due to the advancement of individual components coming together at the same time. But it has to be fit for purpose.

A beauty manufacturer has recently come under fire for creating a hairbrush that reads your hair, telling you how dry it is, how tangled etc. It sounds plausible until the $200 price tag is revealed, and then it could sound ridiculous, unless of course it’s bought by a salon that can use the brush to analyse clients’ hair and then recommend further treatments. This way it becomes a tool to sell more treatments or products – which totally changes the value proposition.

There’s some great technology being used right now to track Wi-Fi and Bluetooth signals in all sorts of public places – from shopping centres to airports and even the London Underground.

Dublin airport is a prime example where they are tracking passengers’ mobile device’s Wi-Fi and Bluetooth signals to measure the length of time it takes to go through security.

The issue of privacy has been raised though. Dublin airport claim they are only listening to the addresses of the devices which wouldn’t reveal any personal information. This data is also in the public domain and you can easily stop this data collection by turning off Bluetooth and Wi-Fi on your devices.

 The problem is that our phones can also leak all sorts of private information if companies listening to these signals are less scrupulous. There is a huge lack of awareness around this issue – most people simply don’t realise that their phones are leaking data this way. Once they have tackled the privacy concerns, this could be a great use of technology, but only because it’s a regular day-to-day issue. They can constantly review variances from their baseline data and judge how things are trending over a long period of time.

So often technology like this sounds amazing, but just isn’t applicable for events. When you are holding one or two relatively short events per year there isn’t time to get baseline data to make variances meaningful. Even if you had enough data, what are you going to do with it? Visitors take different paths around the show but the hotspots within a show are always going to be where the most interesting stands are (or where there is free food and drink!).

While interesting, I can’t see this type of technology being used in events yet. Despite the hype, ibeacons haven’t made any tangible impact on events, but I’m keeping a careful eye on all of this stuff. I’m a gadget freak and I love technology, but I am totally against tech being used with no proven justification or ROI.

RefTech Research: 62% of Exhibitors Not Following Up Leads

Independent research conducted by event technology provider RefTech has found that 62 per cent of exhibitors do not follow up on leads collected at a show.

The research was conducted at a major international business tourism exhibition. RefTech created a fake event management company – complete with website, business cards and a request for proposal (RFP) for an international event – then visited 106 stands belonging to a range of suppliers, destinations and venues.

The visitor approached the exhibiting personnel, explained the event brief, left a business card, asked for their badge to be scanned and requested more information after the exhibition.

Of the 38 per cent of exhibitors who did follow up on the interaction, 19 per cent responded with a personalised email and 19 per cent simply added the visitor’s details to a mailing list.

Seven stands completely ignored the visitor, despite them standing waiting for around five minutes.

Having a scanner helped; of the companies that scanned the visitor’s badge, 50 per cent followed up post-show.

Simon Clayton, chief ideas officer, RefTech, commented: “Our research shows that exhibitors still aren’t getting the basics right. There are so many tech products being promoted to help exhibition organisers and exhibitors, but they need to concentrate on the basics – simply to follow up on leads generated from attending. This research is not in isolation; it echoes results from past research we have conducted at events and personal experience too.

“Recently I visited a stand at a tech exhibition and was genuinely interested in placing an order for an expensive piece of tech, but the sales person didn’t follow up so I ended up purchasing it from a competitor instead.

“I’m saddened by this but not surprised. Why would a company pay thousands to exhibit and then not react to the leads generated from the activity? It’s madness.”

Simon on: What's your dirty little tech secret?

The news that Volkswagen fitted millions of its vehicles with a software-based cheating system made me think about the fact that a lot of us have dirty little tech secrets hidden in the closet.

Someone at Volkswagen did it deliberately but the CEO who resigned said he wasn’t aware of any wrongdoing but he probably should have been aware! The most important aspect of this story for me is that these secrets can burn your house down because people become complacent.

When it comes conferences, actively looking at what you should and shouldn’t be doing is the key approach rather than waiting for something to happen which forces you to take stock of everything.

It’s no secret that online security is a gripe of mine, but for many it is just another thing on the to do list that continues to be put off until something goes wrong.

That’s the main lesson for me. Don’t put these technological issues off. Sort out your back-ups, ensure your passwords are stored correctly, and keep your data secure, because although everything may look great from the outside, those dirty inside secrets have a habit of biting you when you least expect it.

Originally published in Conference News

Simon on: ITCM – Should we be using virtual reality in the events industry?

Hotel chain, Marriott recently introduced its new ‘Vroom Service’ which offers guests room-service delivery of a virtual reality (VR) kit, taking them to places including Rwanda and Beijing via a Samsung Gear VR headset.

But does this kind of technology really have a viable place in the events industry, or is it simply another gimmick which people will try only once out of curiosity?

To find out my thoughts, read the whole article as featured on ITCM by clicking here.

TalkTalk's pathetic attitude to security

Over the past few days it has emerged that TalkTalk have been subjected to a "sustained cyber attack" if you believe the way it's told in the news.

That may be superficially true but rest of the story may be a little less appealing for TalkTalk and it's customers. Based on a number of different security sources I've read, it appears that the site was actually attacked using a mechanism called "a SQL injection attack". The first thing to say about that sort of attack is that it is an incredibly basic attack that ANY website that uses a database should protect against and protecting against it actually isn't difficult.

The next important thing to know is that this isn't an isolated incident for TalkTalk. The rather incredible fact is that this is the third time they've been hacked and lost data in the past 12 months that we know of! For the most serious of those hacks (in terms of quantity of data lost) to have been because of some really poor programming proves that nobody at any level of their organisation is taking data security seriously enough and heads should definitely roll.

Based on data leaking out onto the internet, it looks like TalkTalk didn't actually encrypt much (if any) of the data - in fact there are already plain text passwords coming out in data that is reported to be from the attack. Given that the majority of people take a terrible approach to passwords mean that a very large percentage of those customers will have used the same password for other websites and that's where the real pain can start.

TalkTalk said "a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack - one that overwhelms a website with traffic, taking it offline - was used as a smokescreen for the attack" - the thing I find strange about that statement is that a DDoS attack is highly unlikely to have any effect on whether a SQL injection attack was possible so that explanation seems itself to be a smokescreen for the press and public.

The last bit of this whole situation that's bothering me is that the Institute of Directors have called for "urgent action to tackle cyber-crime" which the press seem to be reporting as if the Government need to do something. I don't know how the IoD actually meant it but it's actually businesses that need to protect themselves. 

This attack is like TalkTalk leaving the doors to their headquarters unlocked while the premises are empty all night and then being surprised when they return in the morning to find they've been burgled. There are definitely things that all businesses should be doing to protect themselves but if they can't get the absolute basics right then they're all screwed!

Simon on: Periscope - friend or foe for meetings?

Twitter’s acquisition of the live video streaming app, Periscope earlier this year seems to have caused quite a fuss within the industry – so I thought I should explore the facts.

I recently attended a presentation on the subject, where the speaker was adamant that the industry ‘must take the step with hybrid meetings.’ 

Hybrid events have been with us since the 1970s. The vast majority of events are now using video to engage a virtual audience and so should therefore be described as ‘hybrid’. The practise is in fact so commonplace that we need to lose the term ‘hybrid’ and start calling these events, simply, ‘events’.

Rant over, Periscope and its live streaming capabilities is a gimmick that I haven’t yet fathomed a tangible use for - especially when you consider that YouTube launched its own live streaming channel back in 2008, and look at the impact that had on the industry.

There are two possible avenues to take; the official route whereby organisers use it to stream live footage of their event, and the non-official use by members of the audience. 

Savvy organisers will not spend money on anything unless it enhances their event and I can’t see how live streaming will do that. It’s too late to use it to attract more delegates and it’s a fair-sized investment in time and money just to ‘create a social buzz’. 

Some people may bemoan that delegate use will flout privacy and copyright issues but the tools to film an event have been in audiences’ hands since the first smartphone was launched in 2005, yet we don’t see many delegates filming then posting conference content on YouTube. 

There are other drawbacks too. Periscope is currently only viewable on a smartphone – so is a delegate really going to watch an entire conference (or even one whole session) on a tiny screen? And videos created via Periscope disappear after 24 hours, so anyone who misses the original broadcast may miss out on the meeting entirely.

For those championing the idea of driving awareness through the app – if you saw a snippet of a meeting’s content online, would you really remember it and be inspired to attend the following year? Probably not. 

But if the organisers filmed the event, posted it on YouTube and used all their channels to promote it throughout the year, then maybe it may influence you.

Before we all get excited about this new shiny tool, let’s use the tools we already have to much better effect.

Originally published in M&IT