Thursday, September 25, 2008

Name Badges

Name badges and name tags have been a fascinating thing for me, especially over the last 5 years.

You may be aware that I wore a "Hello My Name Is" name tag every single day of my four years of college. (Starting about a month into my Freshman year). And working at Target has given me the opportunity to continue that tradition of wearing a name tag.

I was reading this post by Robert Scoble about the nTAG badges given out at the MIT Emerging Technology. Read about them, they sound pretty interesting.

I haven't been to a lot of conferences, in fact, I can probably count them all on one hand. However, one conference I did attend was the International Health, Racquet & Sportsclub Association conference (IHRSA) held at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. I was on one of the committees for the planning of the Student Recreation Center that recently opened up at Fresno State. One of our assignments was to plan out some of the fitness and exercise equipment, so a natural thing to do was head to the IHRSA convention and check out some of the vendors and their products. One of the most interesting things was the name badges. They were nowhere near the sophistication of the nTAG badges, but every name badge had a barcode on it. If you were interested in receiving more information from a vendor or enter to win a drawing/prize, you could just have them scan your name badge and they would have your contact information directly uploaded into their database. This saved a lot of time and carpal tunnel pain.

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