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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."
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.
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.