Alcatel-Lucent (News - Alert) recently announced a series of new business applications to its touchatag solution. touchatag is an online Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) service that enables developers and Web-savvy consumers to create innovative one-touch applications, which connect everyday objects with online applications.

The innovative touchatag technology can prove valuable to event organizers as it can help them enhance their events and provide a high quality of experience to their customers/visitors. In fact, touchatag provides the opportunity for event organizers to extend the reach of physical events to online participants to enhance educational value, connect interested parties, and create affinity-driven customer data.

touchatag enables these event organizers to link and represent real world visitor actions to the online world, thus extending the reach and impact of an event into the online world.

For example, touchatag can be deployed by trade show organizers who can enable attendee badges to receive more information, register their interest, update their presence online and link up with other like-minded attendees. In this application, trade show attendees can request information from the various exhibitors and retrieve that information from a single Web site, or reach out to people they’ve met with specific questions or business proposals.

When a visitor registers for an event, an RFID tag (News - Alert) is created that can be used as badge or applied to another badge. During the event, the visitor can use his RFID tag for various applications such as to receive information from the organizer (welcome message, reminder to silence mobile phones, etc…); to mark and collect points of interest (for later retrieval, perhaps via a single URL for collected information); update their online presence to share their experience with their social community; to connect with other visitors, and more.

touchatag can also be used to facilitate mobile payments, by linking to a customer’s account, allowing the visitor to use the RFID enabled badge to pay at the event registers enabled with an RFID reader.

touchatag enables advertisers to make their campaigns interactive. Using RFID or NFC (near field communications) technology with touchatag’s innovative 2D barcode capabilities, advertisers can present their potential customers with ever more information in unique ways. For example, a user can approach a smart poster with RFID or NFC tags and, with a wave of their NFC-capable phone, can get access to a wealth of information via the browser on their handset. Or, they can scan a 2D barcode in a magazine or on a billboard with a camera phone to get more information sent to their phone.

touchatag stores all campaign information in the network at the application server and not in the RFID tag or 2D barcode tag, which affords several key advantages:

·         Context and user dependent action initiation (e.g. together with Alcatel-Lucent’s Advertising Selection Service ADSS)

·         Update campaign on-the-fly via Web interface

·         Full campaign reporting

Event organizers stand to reap other benefits from deploying touchatag to enhance their users’ experience. For example, the solution is easy to use. touchatag requires only a simple touch to initiate or register actions, and to request information. The solution is also cost effective. touchatag is provided as a service, which means it can be introduced without major upfront investments in hardware or software and can grow depending on the actual needs.

touchatag provides an easy to use and cost effective event experience service for companies interested in linking real world activities to online presence and information. Furthermore, by building a database of user actions and preferences, and coupling that with a simple, secure mobile payment solution event organizers and advertisers can work together to provide their users a high-value experience.