Opportunistic Communication Technologies for the Event Industry

By Iacopo Carreras (CREATE-NET)

Trade fairs are "exhibitions organized so that companies in a specific industry can showcase and demonstrate their latest products, service, study activities of rivals and examine recent trends and opportunities". As such, trade shows represent a forum for people to create and develop their own businesses, and always played an important role in the society as "facilitators" for developing new commercial opportunities.

Starting from the mid-90’s, the way the event industry is operating is drastically changing, with an increased competitiveness both for organizers and exhibitors. This is due, on the one hand, to the increasing number of trade shows and, on the other, to the globalization of the market, which makes market places much more open and accessible than before. This has an impact, especially on SMEs, which can only afford the participation to those trade shows that can potentially lead to concrete business opportunities over a short time period. As a consequence, it is becoming an extremely challenging task to organize and run successful trade shows, and when this happens, this is the result of an extremely careful preparation,
which involves three distinct phases:

• before the event: during this initial phase organizer collect all the necessary information in order to maximally exploit the limited time available during the trade show. This includes, e.g., accurate profiling of both exhibitors and attendees, planning of dedicated events for facilitating the "matching" between exhibitors and participants, distribution of this information to specific target groups;

• during the event: whatever can not be planned in advance, needs to be supported during the event itself. This includes providing all the necessary facilities for exhibitors to advertise their businesses, and for attendees to find potentially interesting products or services; efficiently managing sudden changes in the schedule, or reorganization of parts of the event;

• after the event: in order to maintain competiveness, the post-event is a very delicate phase. More in detail, this is important for organizers, to reason on possible causes of the success or failure of the event, and for attendees, to follow up on the contacts had during the event.

However, especially in major trade shows, where the number of participants can easily exceed thousands of people over the entire duration of the event, each one of the three phases is extremely critical and requires the utilization of appropriate technologies for facilitating the work of organizers, exhibitors and attendees. The importance of technology in the meeting and event business sector is confirmed by the many SMEs operating in this domain, and providing dedicated services or products. Examples include SpotMe [1], a Swiss-based company providing hand-sets to attendees with advanced features such as, e.g., business cards exchange or attendance tracking, Mexage [2], an Italian company supporting through SMS-based technologies the identification of stands in large trade shows, or .nTAG [3], a US-based company providing advanced data management solutions for understanding and measuring the successful organization of events.

Most of these technologies assume a backend system which is used for registering and profiling users and exhibitors (phase 1), and dedicated devices that are provided to attendees for the entire duration of the event (phase 2). Clearly, the latter case can only be afforded for events of limited scale, where the number of attendees and exhibitors is confined to a few hundreds. Differently, when the number of participants is too high, it becomes too expensive to equip every single participant with a dedicated device that needs to be first provided, and then returned back.

In this case, an alternative approach, which could help in overcoming such a scalability issue, is offered by opportunistic communication technologies [4]. Opportunistic networking refers to the possibility of delivering data applying an "epidemic-like" information distribution mechanism, without the need for any dedicated infrastructure. This is obtained by exploiting proximity wireless communication such e.g., as Bluetooth or Wi-Fi, for exchanging data, and the physical mobility of nodes for achieving system-wide communications. Such paradigm received great attention in the last few years as an emerging technology for disseminating data in infrastructure-less environments, where the deployment of a fixed infrastructure was not affordable or not necessary.

An example includes PeopleNets, networks where people themselves, with their personal device, represent nodes of the mobile network. From a purely technological perspective, this is motivated by the large availability among people of mobile devices (e.g., smartphones or PDAs) and by the constant increase of their computing, communication and storage power. Several mobile phones are in fact equipped with Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and Wibree (in the near future), technologies that are directly accessible for programmers through freely available and easy-to-use APIs.

A natural application of opportunistic communication technologies is represented by the support of events, where people (with their mobile device) gather for a limited period of time, thus forming a transient network that can be exploited for circulating data. Such network would rely solely on people’s hardware and software platform for running the service, thus reducing the costs related to the deployment of dedicated devices to the attendees of the event.

U-Hopper [5] is an example of such platform, which runs on any java-enabled smartphone, and utilizing Bluetooth wireless communication technology for exchanging data.

References
[1]    Spot Me, http://www.spotme.com/
[2]    Mexage, http://www.mexage.net/
[3]    nTAG, http://www.ntag.com/
[4]    L. Pelusi, A. Passarella, and M. Conti, “Opportunistic networking: data forwarding in disconnected mobile ad hoc networks, IEEE Comm. Mag., vol. 44, no. 11,Nov. 2006.
[5]    U-Hopper, http://u-hopper.create-net.org/