At last week’s ICCC conference in Orlando, Corbin Ball gave a presentation on mobile technology for meetings.  He concluded his talk with a section on Near Field Communication as the next big thing.  (Here is a link to the wikipedia page on NFC.)

And NPR just did a story on QR codes that essentially came to the same conclusion:

The issue I have with QR codes is that marketing is a little bit like telling a joke, and the longer the joke, the better the punch line has to be — and [using] QR code is a really long joke,” Floyd says.

Instead people are looking to NFC because it is simpler and can do more:

Unlike QR codes, this technology can be used to pay for things. So instead of using a credit card to pay for your salad, you’d just tap your phone to a plate by the register, and the transaction will file with your bank and the business.

“With near field communication, you’re dealing with transactions that people can profit from,” Williams says. “The banks have got an interest because every transaction that occurs, they take a percentage.”

We will be exploring the possibilities of NFC for mobile meeting apps.  If you have suggestions about how these new technologies could be used for your meetings, please post them or send them to us by email and we will explore them.

Sue Hatch at MeetingsNet has published a useful set of articles on meeting apps, including a directory of vendors, an overview of the various approaches, a list of available features and functionality to help you get started, and a nice list of questions that event and meeting planners can use to devising their own mobile strategies.

And thanks, MeetingsNet, for including SwiftMobile.

Brady Forrest at O’Reilly Radar reports a very interesting analysis of Twitter data at the WordCamp event in San Francisco.  Pathable, an event social networking company, did the analysis.

This chart shows the life cycle of activity over the course of an event.  During the event itself, the bulk of activity is around “here’s what I am doing/feeling” in red, direct messages to people in green, and comments or quotes about speakers in aqua.

Event tweets provide a rich source of data for taking the pulse of the event community.  Brady Forrest has an interesting starting list of suggestions:

• Community Pulse – What’s the mood of the attendees? Negative or positive? What’s the tag cloud look like?
• Community Connectedness – How many retweets are there? How many people are following each other? Is that number growing over the course of the event?
• Engagement – What percentage of tweets being sent out by the community are using the tag?
• Growth – Are more people using the tag? How many new users are we gaining/losing per hour?
• Influencers – Who are the most connected tweeters in the group?
• Locations – Where do people claim they are? Or more likely, are from?

There are rich possibilities in mining twitter for a portrait of an event community.  If you have any suggestions about data you’d like to see in the dashboard of our next release, please comment or email us with your ideas.