As the use of mobile event apps continues to explode, there is an increasing demand by attendees to have easy-access, barrier-free and, hopefully, cost-free Wi-Fi in the meeting space and in sleeping rooms. Consider these statistics:

• Free in-room Internet access ranked as the most desired guest-room amenity. – Synovate survey, 2011, 6,300 people, 10 countries
  
• 47 percent of respondents said a hotel must cater to their technology needs before they book it, with wireless  access a top priority. – Synovate survey, 2011, 6,300 people, 10 countries
  
• Internet access is at the top of things most guests care about hotels (including luxury, upscale, mid-scale full-service, economy/budget, and extended stay properties) – J.D. Powers Survey, 201
  
• Free Wi-Fi affects the choice of venue (64% yes; 31% maybe/depends on other factors as well; 5% no) – InStat survey, September 2010
  

Increasingly, meeting attendees are carrying around one or more wireless internet-enabled devices. They are business travelers and expect to check email, use social networks (40% of all tweets are mobile), and wish to take advantage of a wide range of mobile meeting and travel apps. For international attendees, the cost of roaming fees is often prohibitively expensive. Wi-Fi is their lifeline to stay connected. 

With this growing need and demand by attendees, planners are pressing venues for free event Wi-Fi and are making this a key criterion for venue selection. Associations such as ABPCO (Association of British Professional Conference Organisers) have a country-wide initiative to promote free basic conference Wi-Fi for attendees (see www.theconferencecloud.co.uk for details). 

The Challenges:

There are many issues involved:

• 60% of travelers in the US, Europe and Australia indicate they already have had a poor hotel downloading experience because the system was slow. – Ttnooz, Nov. 2011
  
• Many facilities are unable to keep up with the demand. The 2011 Consumer Electronics Show (the world’s largest technology show) asked attendees to turn off their phones and Wi-Fi to enable access for the keynote presenters.
• The demand for broadband is exploding for many events. For example, 5,000 attendees consumed one terabyte (one thousand billion bytes) of data via Wi-Fi in four days at the London Frieze Art Fair, Oct. 2011. This is one example of many.
• 90% of meeting professionals have smartphones and/or iPads/tablet computers and 62% use their apps constantly throughout the day (M&C Research Survey, December 2011).
• A November 2011 white paper by iBahn, a major hotel internet provider, notes that 25% of devices on their network are iPads. These video streaming and media consumption devices use 400% more data that the average iPhone,
• 25 million iPads have been sold as of June 2011 (UnwiredView) and an amazing 5 million Wi-Fi only Amazon Kindle Fire tablets are estimated to have been sold in the last three months of 2011(J.P. Morgan, December 2011).
• This explosion of iPad and other tablet computer is driving bandwidth requirements to what is felt by some hotels to be unsustainable levels. To quote David Garrison, iBahn CEO in the November 2011: “The iPad is the final nail in the ‘all internet is free’ coffin.”
• There is a big discrepancy between event organizers and venue managers on whether attendees should receive free Wi-Fi: 90% off organizers say yes while only 48% of facility managers replied favorably (IAEE Survey, July 2011).
• 64% of venue managers and CVB stakeholders feel that show managers have unrealistic expectations when it comes to what they want and are willing to pay for regarding event Wi-Fi (Red 7 Media, Summer 2011).

Some solutions:

The facts are that the Wi-Fi at many venues is not satisfactory (it sucks!) and with increasing bandwidth requirements things are getting worse. What can or should be done?

Here are some recommendations:

• Meeting venues need to plan on high double-digit annual growth in Wi-Fi bandwidth requirements at least for the next five years. The good news is technically this is completely feasible. According to Ian Bull, Head of Sales Business Development for the Wireless Technology Group for Cisco, there is “significant growth potential for Wi-Fi using micro cells and Wi-Fi Hotspot 2.0 technology. Even very large venues with thousands of simultaneous users can be managed in a way that good quality wireless internet signal can be provided.”
• Venues must step up to the plate and build the infrastructure for this growth. This will increasingly be the deciding factor in venue selection.
•   Meeting venues should provide detailed assistance to meeting planners to help them determine the Wi-Fi and internet requirements. It is not enough to reply “yes we can provide Wi-Fi.” Many questions need to be asked, such as: Wireless internet for how many people simultaneously? On what devices? For what apps? In what locations? How much bandwidth is needed? Venues must know their capabilities and limitations well and communicate them to clients.
•   Meeting planners also must educate themselves as well to the specific needs of their attendees, their expectations, their internet requirements, and must be very clear to venues about what they expect in detailed requests for proposal.
  

Dealing with Costs:

A major challenge is cost. Meeting venues are for-profit entities and the demand for internet services is growing exponentially. How can these costs be offset or limited?

Here is my view:

• Venues should provide basic, mobile-friendly Wi-Fi internet access (512kb/s) throughout the entire facility (sleeping rooms/lobby/meeting rooms/exhibit hall) for free without the need for extensive log-in procedures. 512kb/s is fast enough to check email, tweet, and do some basic web browsing but not fast enough to stream HD video, download audio files, etc.
•  Provide a reasonable rate “premium service” for attendees who desire more speed.
•  Charge reasonable rates for specialized services: dedicated bandwidth, dedicated IP address, VPNs, specialized exhibit services, etc. As an example, the Las Vegas Convention Center (one of the largest in the world) in November 2011, launched their internet service plan: free for basic service, $13/day for premium service, and $100 for exhibitors.
• Another option to offset costs is for meeting planners to solicit internet sponsorship. Internet access and mobile apps have many opportunities for splash page or banner ad sponsors. These page views are completely trackable and can provide great visibility to attendees using a much desired service.
• With the increase in smart phones and tablets, cyber-cafes are going the way of the banks of pay phones. Divert the sponsorship funds and other monies spent on these services to help offset the cost of attendee internet access.
• Venues should also look for sponsors.  Meeting attendees spend money at nearby establishments. Many of these businesses would likely be willing to pay for advertising space on conference Wi-Fi services to gain visibility.
• Planners, exhibitors and attendees should expect to pay for premium internet services. Venues are for-profit entities and have every right to charge to cover costs at the minimum.  However, planners and attendees should not be gouged with exorbitant fees.  Hotels, convention centers and other venues should not consider internet services a major profit center any more that they consider providing lights and water for attendees and guests – Wi-Fi has become an expected utility.
• The price gouging employed by a number of upper mid-scale and luxury hotel properties (i.e. US$9.95/day/each device) must stop! Planners and hotel guests commonly will be making venue decisions based on fair policies for internet access.

Wi-Fi challenges will likely get worse before they get better. The increasing demand will exceed the supply as venues struggle to upgrade their internet infrastructure. It will be incumbent on all venues to gear up for these increased bandwidth demands. It will also be important for planners, exhibitors, attendees and venues to educate themselves on the issues and help each other find the optimum way for providing Wi-Fi for events. As Wi-Fi increasingly becomes the communication life-blood of events, we will all need to work toward optimal solutions.

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This article with hundreds of other free articles, dozens of free software tools and thousands of categorized meetings technology links can be found at: www.corbinball.com.

Corbin Ball, CMP, CSP is a consultant, writer and speaker focusing on events and meetings technology. With 20 years of experience running international citywide technology meetings, he now helps clients worldwide use technology to save time and improve productivity. He has been named by MeetingNews Magazine for four years as one of the “25 Most Influential People in the Meetings Industry. He has also chaired the judging committee for EIBTM Technology Watch for meetings technology innovation for the past eight years. He can be contacted at his extensive web site: www.corbinball.com and followed on www.twitter.com/corbinball. Subscribe to TechTalk News, the meetings industry’s longest running and largest technology newsletter sent every other month to over 9,000 subscribers in 70+ countries: www.corbinball.com/techtalk.

This is last in a series of 13 weekly blog postings covering the major technology trends affecting conferences, events and trade shows:

Bonus trend: Despite the economic downturn and the increased use of virtual meetings technology, face-to-face meetings and tradeshows remain viable (a repeat from last year’s predictions).

Virtual meeting and web conferencing usage is up and conference attendance has dropped for some markets in these economically challenging times. However, meetings and tradeshows can still provide very good value for your education, networking, and sales budgets. Events offer unparalleled opportunities to bring buyers and seller together, to build relationships, to brainstorm, to network. For an exhibitor, it is often the best way to meet so many qualified buyers in such a short time. For buyers, it is a great chance to meet vendors of interest – all together in one location, categorized and mapped for your choosing. The events, tradeshow and hospitality industries are relationship-based and events and tradeshow are some of the best ways to build these relationships.

Corbin Ball, CMP, CSP is a consultant, writer and speaker focusing on events and meetings technology. With 20 years of experience running international citywide technology meetings, he now helps clients worldwide use technology to save time and improve productivity. He has been named by MeetingNews Magazine for four years as one of the “25 Most Influential People in the Meetings Industry. He has also chaired the judging committee for EIBTM Technology Watch for meetings technology innovation for the past eight years. He can be contacted at his extensive web site: www.corbinball.com and followed on www.twitter.com/corbinball.

12. “Indoor Positioning Systems” will greatly assist in event and trade show way-finding and navigation.

Standard GPS does not work indoors. Standard Wi-Fi triangulation only gets to about a 100 foot (30 meter) accuracy — not good enough for precise tracking though an exhibit hall, venue or for person-to-person finding at an event.

New technology from at least two companies (Wifarer.com and Sherpa-Solutions.com) promise to overcome these challenges to provide very precise positioning (as fine as 1 meter) by tracking Wi-Fi enabled smart phones, carried by an increasingly larger percentage of the population. These tools will be able to provide:

• precise positioning
• personal navigation through a venue/exhibit hall with optimized routing
• friend/contact finding and networking (with permission)
• location-based content delivery (exhibit discounts or video as examples)
• optimized exhibit hall viewing by product category
• exhibit hall “hot spot” and traffic flow analytics
• several other features will likely develop from this exciting technology.

In addition to venues and convention centers, this technology holds great promise for shopping centers, airports, hospitals and museums. A short video demonstrating the application in a museum can be seen below:

Wayfarer Indoor Positioning System

Check in next week for a bonus trend and a summary of the impact of technology innovation for events.

11. Free, easy to access Wi-Fi is increasing expected by meeting planners

Free basic Wi-Fi broadband internet access is expected by planners for attendees in the meeting room, guest rooms and the lobby. Although some luxury properties are clinging to internet fees as a profit center, internet access is viewed by attendees as a utility similar to lights and water. Planners are saying “do not nickel-and-dime us with add-on charges for basic internet access.” If “Motel 6” can provide free Wi-Fi, so should meeting hotels and venues.

However, the does not mean unlimited access. Internet bandwidth can be expensive and most venues cannot handle unexpected, very large demands.  If 500 event attendees pulled out their iPads to access HD video simultaneously, there are few venues in the country that could handle this without making special arrangements. If a group needs dedicated bandwidth, a dedicated IP address or other internet services, it is reasonable to charge for these. But basic, throttled access (with a minimum of 500kb/second download — fast enough to access email and limited video streaming) should be free.

Additionally, venues need to make logging onto the Wi-Fi network easier. Opening the browser and clicking “OK” is all that should be required.  As mobile devices are being used for internet access with greater frequency, make the logon screen readable in smaller formats as well. Better yet, use autosensing technology and provide a mobile web log-in page optimized for a smaller screen.

See more on the advances of hotel guest room technology at: http://ow.ly/6kJqx.

10. iPads and tablets will provide a new medium for accessing data at events.

The iPad is the most recent of the long-running, game-changing innovations from Apple.  The Mac brought the widespread use of the mouse and graphical user interface to portable computing (1984); the iPod changed how we listened to music (2001); the iPhone revolutionized mobile phones  (2007), the App Store is changing the software procurement model (2008), and the iPad (2010)/iPad2 (2011) is having similar long-term ramifications.

The iPad and other tablet devices represent new ways to access information. Light weight, highly mobile, highly intuitive. The larger screen allow for bigger fonts, easier readability and more real estate to display material in a page-like format. The navigation is intuitive (with your fingers instead of a keyboard and mouse).

Tablets are a natural for events as our industry is a mobile one:

• We do business away from our offices and from our “large screen” computers on a regular basis.
• Most of us don’t carry around notebook computers at events for a number of reasons: weight, security, the inability to access easily while standing, etc
• We constantly need to manage a wide range of data at events. For lack of a better way until now, much of these data have been in the form of paper.

Tablets will increasingly be used at events for interactive conference programs, course notes distributions, surveys, interactive exhibit floor plans, product displays, information kiosks, lead exchange, speaker Q&A, onsite blogging/social networking and more.

See more on the impact and benefits of iPads and tablets at: http://ow.ly/6jdGw

9. Social gaming tools will be used to engage face-to-face and virtual attendees at events

People spend more than 3 billion hours a week globally playing online games! Jane McGonigal in her noted TEDTalk speaks of how gaming can make a better world by deeply engaging people and by encouraging collaboration and cooperation. She proposes to harness gamer power to solve real-world problems.

Online gaming engages people. It can immerse in a different reality. It can be very fun!  …And it will find its way increasingly into events.

On a basic level, location-aware programs such as Gowalla.com, FourSquare.com and Facebook.com/places encourage people to check in at locations. People will win badges and prizes and receive tips from others. This, however, is much more than building loyalty at a favorite restaurant. All of these free online tools have developed options for checking in at events. I believe that these location-aware gaming options can help networking at events.

Scvngr.com  is another online social gaming tool (free for non-profit groups and associations) that engages attendees with treks and challenges. This tool has been used recently at the Consumer Electronic Show and SIGGRAPH shows to guide people through the exhibit hall and to win prizes by performing a challenge such as signing up at an exhibitor web site.

Social gaming is also being used to engage virtual and hybrid meetings attendees. Contests and challenges have been proven to engage people attending virtually. The Cisco GSX hybrid conference had 19,000 virtual attendees with one million views, 13,000 active players of the “Threshold” an interactive espionage immersive reality thriller, 8,000 participants in group chats and 9,5000 playing GSX mini games.

8. YouTube and other social publishing tools will be used increasingly to promote and manage meetings and to engage attendees

Much has been written about the power of Facebook.com and the other social networking sites to engage potential attendees before and event to increase attendance and networking onsite. I believe the wide range of free social publishing tools will also be used increasingly for similar purposes:

• Twitter.com (technically a micro-blog and, therefore, a social publishing tool) is widely used at events with event hashtags to engage attendees before, during and after an event. Planners should advertise the event hashtag well in advance of their events for the broadest utilization.
• Free blogging tools (such as WordPress.com) can be used to create event blogs to increase attendance. Ask your speakers to participate to add comments about their sessions. Invite influential bloggers to your event, and give them internet connections to spread the word.
• Encourage attendees to upload their event photos under a designated event name (using the Twitter hashtag) to Flickr.com so everyone can share their experience. This page can then be used to help promote future events.
• Speakers can share their slides using SlideShare.com.
• YouTube.com (the world’s second largest search site after its owner Google) is potentially one of the most promising event promotion tools around. The old saying goes that “A picture is worth a thousand words.”  A video can be worth a thousand pictures and be far more compelling than web pages or brochures full of text! Video is the most compelling language of the internet.

A few YouTube tips:

a.)   Encourage your speakers to make short video describing what they will speak on and upload this to YouTube.

b.)   Link or embed these videos at your event site.

c.)   Keep the videos short (no more than 3 minutes).

d.)   Record in HD.

e.)   Choose a compelling thumbnail image using the posting tools YouTube provides.

f.)    Enable the comments and sharing options.

g.)   Rename the videos using meaningful names (MPI-WEC-speakers.mov is much better than 38404949.mov)

h.)   Use a keyword laden, meaningful description of the video.

7.  Near Field Communication (NFC) continues to move into the meetings arena

NFC provides simplified wireless data exchange and transactions using mobile devices in close proximity to each other, usually no more a few centimeters apart. It is expected to become a widely used system for making payments by smartphone in the U.S.

The applications for events are significant allowing for very fast, secure and simplified means of:

• Electronic ticketing
• Electronic business card exchange
• Credit card payment
• Easy pick up of conference literature, exhibit brochures, course notes, and other digital documents

NFC has been used in Europe for the past few years (I have personally seen people paying for packing meters and tram rides in Estonia simply by tapping their phone to the transaction device).  ITN International (itn-international.com) has successfully used NFC at events for some time including contact exchange, e-ticketing, and micropayments.

There are also companies such as Poken.com using NFC to provide many of these features with a small, inexpensive (US$18), NFC-enabled “pokenTAG” that is worn around the neck and glows green when information is exchanged. 

The game changer, however, will be when NFC becomes commonly available in mobile phones. Blackberry’s three new Curve models are NFC-enabled as are dozens of Android phones and many Nokia phones. The tipping point, however, may be if the soon-to-be-released iPhone5 will offer NFC.  Whether it is this year, or next, NFC will provide much better and faster data exchange, ticketing and micropayment options for events.

6. Hybrid meetings will extend the reach and broaden the impact of face-to-face events.

A hybrid meeting is an event that combines both face-to-face and virtual experience for local and remote attendees. It will become commonplace for many events in the next few years. Meeting professionals are recognizing that it has become much easier to extend the impact of an event beyond the four walls of the meeting room. A hybrid event can multiply the event’s impact and can recruit new attendees for future events.

Live steaming sites such as LiveStream.com provide easy methods to stream conference video to remote attendees with a range of pricing plans from free to enterprise level. Increasingly, interactive tools such as polling and remote Q&A will engage the remote participants. Twitter.com using event hashtags is currently being used to allow remote attendees to comment and ask questions during a presentation as well.

Skype.com can connect HD video signal from four locations for free. The HD option allows events to bring in remote speakers or groups in high enough quality to project on a large screen in a meeting room.

Google Hangouts (plus.google.com/hangouts) is a great free, new option for events allowing video from up to ten locations to be seen on each screen in a reliable and relatively low-bandwidth format.  Event Camp Europe (eventcamp.eu) has recently used Hangouts to have a “Hybrid Wine Tasting” connecting face-to-face groups from four cities in Europe. The wine was shipped to the four cities, poured and distributed, the wine was introduced and described, attendees held the wines, smelled the bouquets, and tasted them. All five senses were engaged simultaneously in multiple locations!

Conference recording and distribution is becoming cheaper, faster and much more capable.

Conference recording has been around for decades starting in the days that audio-cassettes of the presentations were mass-produced onsite and sold in the foyer. Recent technology advances have made it possible to quickly and relatively inexpensively distribute speaker video, audio and visuals over the web in real-time and on demand afterwards.

This technology to do this was simply not there just a few years ago. The price of high-definition video cameras has plummeted (we are even carrying them around as mobile phone feature). Accessibility to reliable broadband is as available for most meeting facilities and the price is dropping. Video streaming encoders are turn-key. Presentation management software has proliferated.

For example, the “video recording and webcasting studio in a box” pictured below is the Roland Systems Group (www.rolandsystemsgroup.com) VR-5 incorporating a 5-channel video switcher, audio mixer, video playback, recorder, preview monitors and output for web streaming. What previously would have required crates of equipment and $100,000+ has been shrunk into a 9 pound (4.3kg).box for under US$5,000 greatly simplifying the production, recording and streaming of live events.

Using these smaller, cheaper, and faster tools, it is now possible for conference recording companies to record video/audio and slides for dozens of simultaneous presentations and have them available for sale or distribution on the web that evening. Streaming technology for real-time distribution is also easier and simpler than in the past. Some of the companies providing these services are: Content Management Corporation cmcgc.com,  Freeman freemanco.com, OmniPress omnipress.com, PSAV Presentation Services psav.com, Sonic Foundry sonicfoundry.com, Digitell digitellinc.com and Soma Media soma-media.com.

More information and details on the benefits for conference recording can be found at the following article: http://ow.ly/6i8Mh