(Note: This is the first part of an article submitted to Supplychainer by Creative Reporter Service. The article is written by Tom McNichol. Tom McNichol is a contributing editor for Wired magazine. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Salon, GQ, The Washington Post, and the Guardian (U.K.). His radio commentaries have aired on NPR's All Things Considered, Morning Edition and Marketplace.)

It wasn't that long ago that the only way to identify people at a big meeting was the cheesy, "Hello my name is-" badge, stuck jauntily on the lapel. "Hello, my name is Jack. Don't be put off by the childish scrawl on my badge; I'm really an okay guy. If anyone's looking for Jack, send them my way. Say, did I mention that my name was Jack?"

In the information age, the "Hello my name is-" badge is starting to look distinctly low-tech: "Hello, my name is dinosaur."

Badges first sprouted electronic bar codes and then magnetic strips, which could hold much more information about an attendee other than the fact that his name is Jack. But even these technologies don't know Jack.

Now comes the latest and most technologically sophisticated badge of all, embedded with a radio frequency identification, or RFID, chip. The tiny chips, a quarter-inch in diameter, enable badges to respond to radio frequency signals from a nearby antenna.

RFID badges contain far more information than could ever be crammed onto one of the old "Hello my name is-" stickers: specific details about where the attendee went during an event, how long he or she stayed in a particular seminar, and whether he or she attended the banquet.

Like most new technologies, RFID offers both opportunity and peril for the meetings industry. RFID badges can cut long lines at registration and give meeting planners detailed information about what attendees liked and didn't like to help plan future events. But there's peril for anyone who rushes into RFID without thinking it through simply because it's a flashy new technology.

"I think RFID has a huge potential, but it's still pretty early in the game," says meetings industry tech consultant Corbin Ball, of Bellingham, Wash.-based Corbin Ball Associates. "On a 10-step process of adoption, I'd say we're barely at step two with RFID. The meetings industry is all about bringing people together, and there are certainly ways RFID can help you do that better. But there are still a lot of things to work through, especially the cost and privacy issues."

A Common Technology

The basic technology behind RFID isn't new. Radio frequency transponders were used back in World War II to identify incoming planes as "friend" or "foe." RF technology was largely ignored in the decades following the war, but over the past several years, radio frequency technology has been rediscovered in a big way.

The E-Z Pass tags used by millions of drivers to pay highway tolls employ RF technology to communicate with the tollbooth. Wal-Mart and the Department of Defense now require their top suppliers to apply RFID labels to all shipments, rather than bar codes, so that inventory can be tracked in a more detailed fashion. Within the next few years, U.S. passports are likely to feature an RFID chip, providing travelers with another layer of security-and another privacy concern.

RFID chips have even been embedded in the human body. Recently, 160 people in Mexico's attorney general's office had rice-grain-size RFID chips surgically placed in their forearms, just beneath the surface of the skin. The RFID-enabled officers can now approach a security door, hold their arm up to a reader, and gain access to a restricted area.

One Mexican microchip distributor even went on record to say that key military officers, police and even the office of President Vicente Fox could join the chip party.

It's been over the past two years in particular that RFID has gained a foothold in the meetings industry in the form of the electronic badge.

"Last year, I did maybe 20 shows that used RFID, and this year it'll be more like 50 shows," says Vaughn Dietze, CEO of Dietze Enterprises, a Chicago-based company that supplies RFID equipment. "I hate to say it, but some of it is because of the 'wow' factor-people are impressed by the technology. But there's no doubt that RFID for meetings and trade shows is really starting to take off. I'm hiring more people."

An RFID system for a meeting is not inexpensive. RF badges range from about 20 cents to more than $3 each, although the prices are dropping as more large companies adopt RF technology. Then there's the rental cost of the printers that produce the badges, and the RF antennas that read them, which run about $400 to $600 each. A growing number of organizations think RFID is worth the expense, however.

"Meetings folks are all over RFID technology, and so are marketing and education folks," says Tony Melis, vice president of Business Development for Washington, D.C.-based Laser Registration. "RFID can really help associates build a 360-degree view of their members in a way that other technologies can't."

In spite of RFID's sudden buzz-or perhaps because of it-there's widespread confusion over what the technology can and cannot do, and how to address the legitimate privacy concerns of people spooked at the notion of somehow being "tracked."

"There's a lot of misunderstanding about RFID," concedes Bob Lucke, an executive vice president at Conferon Global Services, whose subsidiary, ExpoExchange, supplies RFID technology. "We get exhibitors who think you can use it like a global positioning system to track exactly where people are at any given time, when there's no way that the technology can do that. You can tell from some of the questions we get about RFID that the technology isn't very well understood."

To further complicate matters, RFID badges adhere to several different technical standards. Some badges are short-range, needing to pass within three or four inches of a reader in order to transmit ID information. Longer-range RFID systems can communicate with a badge at a range of up to 15 feet.

"A lot of people are interested in RFID, but they don't know quite what to do with it," says Arnie Roberts, president and CEO of Smart-reg International Inc., an RFID supplier. "There's a big learning curve."