Case Studies
RFID Journal LIVE 2010 - Orange County Convention Center, Orlando, FL
Dragon Boat Race - Chicago, IL
Lygase RFID, a Chicago based start-up, showcased its SmartEvents solution at the city’s 2009 Dragon Boat Race last month. Lygase, which utilizes InSync’s application framework, developed SmartEvents to help event venues, organizers, exhibitors, and attendees maximize value at conferences, trade shows, seminars, and other public and private events.
Nearly half of the 10,000 attendees at the picturesque Ping Tom Memorial Park received a UHF tag on a lanyard.
Through readers placed throughout the park, Lygase SmartEvents captured information on visitors’ movements at various checkpoints in the park such as registration table, playground, waterfront, and so on. Data can be viewed in real-time or after the fact, to produce profiles of attendee behavior according to time, place, location, and other criteria.
Visitors at the Boat Race who provided Lygase with their contact information also participated in a $50 lottery, held every half hour to encourage sign-ups.
One of the attendees at the event was Ernest Wong, President and Design Principal at Site Design Group, Ltd.
A landscape architect who specializes in public spaces, Mr. Wong designed the Ping Tom Memorial Park. “I was fascinated by the SmartEvents technology,” he said.
“Understanding how people move within public spaces, where they go and why is very important to a landscape architect such as myself.”
These data prove the effectiveness of park designs and can be used to design more efficiently.
“The City of Chicago puts on many events each summer. A product like SmartEvents can help many public agencies organize and manage special events.”
Lygase, an MBE/DBE company headquartered in Wheeling, Illinois, specializes in business intelligence applications, which gather and analyze large amounts of data, helping users such as business leaders understand factors that affect their enterprise’s performance. Such systems are based on user-defined rules which shape the data analysis. Data is typically viewed via software dashboards and other visualization tools. “We are experts in gathering and analyzing huge volumes of data,” says Ketrus Collins, founder and CEO of Lygase RFID. Lygase’s business has focused on business intelligence applications for leading U.S. companies in
the retail, finance, and telecom industries, including giants such as Walgreens, Kroger, Citigroup, Fannie Mae, and US Cellular. “We developed SmartEvents to extend our expertise to the events arena, which has typically relied on barcode scanning, registration data, and personal observation to understand show metrics.”
Through the addition of RFID tags and readers, an extremely rich data set can be collected and mined.
For example, when individual booths are RFID enabled, visitor information may be captured whenever visitors enter the booth, eliminating the need to manually scan badges.
At a time when companies are clamping down on trade show costs, Lygase’s SmartEvents adds value by maximizing lead generation.
Event organizers benefit from knowing which times of the day were the busiest, which areas of the venue attracted the most attention, which attendees and attendee types visited seminars and exhibitor booths, and when they did so. SmartEvents can also be used to control show access for attendees, exhibitors, and venue personnel, lowering costs for security personnel. Joyce Jeng, CEO of Chicago-based Asian Social Network, whose boat team raced at the event, sees great value in the data Lygase collected. “Show organizers want to understand which areas of their event generate the most traffic,” she says.
Lygase distributed RFID enabled lanyards to about 4000 attendees at the Dragon Boat Races.
The data collected can help Dragon Boat organizers plan for next year in terms of the amount of space needed and the optimum layout for the event.
The badges contained no personal information when they were handed out.
But attendees who registered their names and email addresses at Lygase’s desk were entered in cash lotteries for gifts totaling $500 over the course of the day
Trade shows generate big dollars for organizers, venues, and the cities where they are located.
The Las Vegas Convention Center, for example, typically draws close to 6 million show visitors per year.
McCormick Place in Chicago is the largest venue in North America, with nearly 3 million square feet of exhibit space.
There are close to 100 venues in the US alone, including well known locations in Los Angeles, Orlando, New Orleans, New York City, plus dozens of smaller regional locations.
Experts calculate that exhibitors spent an average $225 per booth visitor (2008 data), not counting their spending outside the show venue for hotel, meals, entertainment, and the like.
But trade show attendance declined in 2009, especially in industries hard-hit by the recession.
The worst may have been a reported a 29% decrease in visitors at the National Association of Home Builders’ show early this year according to Tradeshow Week (www.tradeshowweek.com). EXHIBITOR Magazine (www.exhibitoronline.com) reported lower attendance at trade shows in virtually every industry sector, but generally only by a few percentage points. Although many companies have cut back on their trade show expenditures during the recession, the trend is expected to reverse quickly with an improving economy.
Lygase thinks SmartEvents adds value for trade show exhibitors, convention centers themselves, and trade show organizers.
Exhibitors minimize booth personnel costs by automatically capturing lead data, without requiring a person to scan badges.
The system can be set up to generate a lead whenever a person enters a booth, whether or not they spoke with booth personnel.
Convention centers can upsell to exhibitors based on historical information about traffic patterns and attendee profiles.
Show visitors who register their areas of interest can be guided to booths containing products and services they want to see.
Show organizers can add value and provide aftermarket opportunities by offering exhibitors analyses of traffic patterns at their booths and elsewhere at the show.
As a next step, Lygase plans to showcase SmartEvents at an upcoming trade show.
Interested trade show organizers or show venues should contact Ketrus Collins (o: (866) 594-2731; kcollins@lygase.com) to request additional information.
