Technology Trends

Corbin Ball, the leading US-based international consultant on meetings technology, was a keynote speaker at the recent Meetings & Events Australia National Conference on the Gold Coast. This was the third time he’s addressed MEA since 2000, underscoring the importance of information technology to the meetings industry. He’s an exceptionally gifted communicator and provides insights gleaned from his global travels.
trends:

He identified the following 10 trends:

1 Wi-Fi and broadband Internet will be in nearly all public meetings spaces. The rate of Wi-Fi deployment in convention centres and large meeting hotels is skyrocketing. Even McDonalds is starting to provide “free” Wi-Fi access.
2 More mobile products. With access to wireless broadband, today’s mobile phones will evolve to long-lasting mini-PDA phones that will have high-speed Internet access through multiple channels, including Wi-Fi, bluetooth and even faster wireless formats. A number of products are being developed on these mobile platforms for the meetings industry, including mobile registration, networking, surveys, audience response, interactive programs, electronic attendee lists, product directories, lead retrieval and more.
3 Tablet PCs will develop as a platform to manage meeting specifications and site inspections.
4 RFID (Radio Frequency Identification), the barcode of the future, will work its way into a number of lead retrieval, access verification and attendance tracking systems in the next few years, despite concerns regarding privacy.
5 Web services (NET) are emerging as the new platform for meetings technology products. The benefit is that it becomes much easier for different programs (for example, online registration and housing) to work together, even if not made by the same company. As there is a huge range of web-based technology products for meeting planners, with more than 1,100 categorised links at www.corbinball.com/bookmarks, this interoperability between programs will be of significant benefit, as it will allow the planner to more easily mix-and-match different applications.
6 Voluntary standards will continue to make slow but steady progress. APEX (Accepted Practices Exchange), lead by the Convention Industry Council (www.conventionindustry.org) in North America, will provide technology standards in this next year for resumes/work orders, request for proposals (RFPs), housing, and meeting/site profiles. It will only be by adopting standards that the meetings industry can truly digitise its business process. This will reduce laborious clerical inputting and proofreading that both meeting planners and hoteliers/convention service managers are now required to do for nearly every meeting.
7 Procurement will increasingly drive more meeting purchasing decisions, especially for large corporations. Combined meetings consolidation/attendee management software will save large companies millions of dollars annually due to increased efficiency.
8 Technology will assist in strategic meetings management to track and communicate return on investment (ROI) metrics to all meeting stakeholders – many of the products listed in Prediction 7 will lead the way.
9 Matchmaking programs, popular in the singles scene, will work their way into the meetings arena to bring people of similar interests together at meetings.
10 People will use broadband Internet (wireless and wired) to make phone calls around the world at little or no cost via VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol). Calls can then be more easily linked in with data management and customer relationship management systems to better serve client needs. The change will happen for wired and mobile phones and will impact on the way the meetings professionals communicate.