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Smart Badges For Better Meetings
Roland Piquepaille writes "In an article appearing in the November 15th issue of New Scientist, we're told that the 500 attendants of the last Pop!Tech conference were carrying intelligent badges to put around their necks. EurekAlert! has released a version of this article, "Hello, will you be my friend?" These nTAGs, distributed by the nTAG Interactive company, contained personal details about their wearers. And as the nTags can communicate with each other via infrared links, they are able to send alerts when they see a good match between two owners. This doesn't come up cheap: expect $40 to $100 per badge per day, depending on the event. More details and references are contained in this overview which also includes pictures."
Everyone works out regularly, they have a 12" thingie and are millionaires.
Whitfield Diffie, an engineer at Sun Microsystems Laboratories in Palo Alto and the man behind the concept of public key cryptography, felt that the devices were an invasion of privacy. He created a stir by hacking into his nTAG to put it into sleep mode. And to the delight of some delegates and the frustration of others, he set up his device to do the same to any other nTAG it talked to.
reminds me of the time i used my laptop to 'give a cold' to my cousins furby via it's infrared port between it's eyes.
Great!
Now I don't actually have to talk to people to know I am uninterested in them.
This is going to simplify my life a lot.
Wax on, wax off baby!
As I recall, several years ago things like this were the rage in Tokyo. Aparently they had three settings; Want to Talk, Want to Hug, Want to Get Down and Dirty (in Japanese obviously), and came in a male and female model. If someone of the opposite sex with a matching setting walked close, both devices would vibrate, you then had to look through the crowd for the other person looking through the crowd.
While the idea of these things is good, they make it very difficult to avoid people you'd rather not waste your time with. The loud, twitchy, obnoxious, guy everyone is trying to stay away from better not have the same likes and dislikes as you - or 'Beep! Beep! Beep!' the badge will let him know you are a potential friend.
This is probably going to make it even harder to collect all kinds of plastic toys to bring home for my kids. Are there other reasons to go to a conference?
What if people started wearing themse tags all the time, and the receivers became ubiquitous, maybe with an earpiece. Say you're at the grocery store, and you pass by someone you don't recognize, like a long lost relative, or that friend of a friend. Perhaps that one Halle Berry lookalike who is really into Linux. A conversation starts that might not have, possibly changing your life.
But seriously. Perhaps it could lead to a sort of in-person IM or friendster..."hey, you on aisle 9, are you really into Everquest, kittens, and bondage? Me too!"
Of course, there's the risk of spam, hacking, and stalkers...
Actually, didn't someone propose just this sort of thing with cellphones?
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
Badges Badges Badges Badges....Mushroom Mushroom.
I remember going to Java One years ago (4 years maybe) where every attendee got a Java Ring - it's a Java processor that's embedded into a ( signature-type ring)
Basically, everyone's coffee preferences were stored on a central database, and to get the coffee you liked, you just touched the ring to the receptor. These days you'd use bluetooth I guess.
The ring idea was quite cute though - it was powered by the receptor, with the binary communications channel being rectified internally to produce power as well as transmit information. Ok, so you couldn't do that with bluetooth, it'd have to be always on, but there's probably still something you could do...
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
Believe it or not, people actually have the inborn ability (instinct) to find compatible people around them. Adding this technology will only serve as a device to exclude undesireable contact moreso than to find desireable interaction.
"Oh sorry, I'm really only interested in people who, like myself, have intimate first hand knowledge of the X-Men's superpowers."
In the end, you will have the same groups interacting as they always have, and the ego stroking will show no deviation from what has been seen before. It will just be more efficient.
And for those guys looking for meaningful one night stands, you'll still be spending the night with your old friend "Rosie Palmer".
holy shit.
we already have no idea how to talk to people who have different ideas to us. hell -- we're so scared of them we'd rather bomb them than talk to them.
now comes a device which can pretty much guarantee we can now go our entire lives never having to talk to another person with a different to us.
"you mean i can set this thing so that i only ever meet people who believe in the creation theory??? yeee haaar!!"
this is the reason we're in the shit that we're in people. don't you think it's time to use technology to help us start including... not excluding?
prof. h.
Again... It's just a guess. I think the whole idea is just dreadful to begin with, but whatever floats your boat. (I certainly wouldn't pay for it.)