High Tech Mapping and Way Finding for the Events Industry

Date of publication: 23/07/2007 – © Corbin Ball Associates – Tech Talk Newsletter

Events commonly involve business travellers coming to unfamiliar cities with common questions: Where is my hotel? The convention centre? A particular restaurant? Or other sites of interest? What is that building in front of me? Which way is Hall A?

Questions now commonly asked of the concierge, the bellman or the person on the street will be answered with new technology tools in much more robust ways with significant applications to meeting planners, meeting venues and convention and visitor bureaus. This article will cover some of these developments.

Updated web-based mapping
There are several new business locator sites using Web 2.0 technology. Although many of the examples used are North American-based, they are example of what is to come globally. One such site is Ask City (http://city.ask.com). Simply type in the desired business (convention center, hotel, pizza, bar, museum, etc.) and a city name. The site will nicely list the desired sites (often with user reviews) and a zoomable map indicating locations. Google Maps (http://maps.google.com/) has a very sophisticated search feature (type in “museums near seattle” and you will get very similar types of results). If you want to get a satellite view, then download Google Earth (http://earth.google.com/) or for even closer view in given locations: Windows Live Local (http://local.live.com/ -- click on the “birds-eye view” for astonishing high resolution aerial photos). This site also has sophisticated business look up capabilities with free telephone/VoIP calling to the locations linked in.

These “browsers for the earth” will provide increasingly high resolution images of everywhere.

Mapping Mashup Sites
There is much happening in the mapping field. Mashup sites combine information from multiple sources. For example, ChicagoCrime.org uses the Google Map application interface to show the locations of crimes reported to the Chicago Police Department. You can zoom in on the intersection near your hotel and see exactly the crime incidents happening near there.

Geotagging
Flickr (www.flickr.com/groups/geotagging), the popular photo-sharing site, is providing “geotagging” capabilities (encoded latitude/longitude information). Eventually, online maps will be able to link multiple photos of everywhere. Mobile phones have some Global Positioning System (GPS) capabilities already so the ability to tag phone-cam photos with GPS data automatically pinning the photo to appropriate spots on a web map will be a very simple next step. Geotagging means the Web is slowly being wedded with real space, enhancing physical places with information that can deepen our experiences – a great boon for convention and event goers. Eventually, every location will have a web page, or an infinite stack of them.

GPS and MARA Systems
GPS pricing is coming down and will eventually be a common option in mobile phones. One possibility, still in the research labs but with huge potential for destinations, is called Mobile Augmented Reality Applications (MARA - http://research.nokia.com/research/projects/mara/index.html). MARA will use mobile phones with an integrated GPS system, compass, and an accelerometer to identify restaurants, hotels, shopping, landmarks and to provide web links and information about the objects on the phone cam screen. What is the building or monument in front of you? Simply point you phone cam at it and the name and links to more information will automatically appear. The system will also be able to identify nearby colleagues who have a similar system.

Supplementary information from the Web will be overlaid onto the real world – hence the name mobile augmented reality. There is already a similar commercially available application in Japan called Geovector (http://www.geovector.com/) allowing an individual to search his or her location and provide directional arrow to a restaurant, hotel, or other place. But MARA will actually annotate the real-time image on the phone screen.

Location-based Sales
One example of location-based sales is Google’s current deployment of a “free” Wi-Fi network in 75 square miles of San Francisco. Their business model is they will be able to identify the location of the Wi-Fi user. If, for example, “restaurant” was the search word, Google will be able to provide a list of the restaurants near the searcher. The restaurant owners should be willing to pay for the clicks from these “hot” buyers in the neighbourhood.

Implications for the Events Industry
As meeting attendees are commonly business travellers, they will be more directly impacted than the average person. Although some of these products are still in the development stages, there is no question that location-based sales and mapping tools will have a major impact on our industry. Some of the ways this could play out are:
- Convention visitor bureaus, tourism offices and cities in general will be able to provide for every city visitor a “free” geo-position-based “pocket-guide” using the phone they are already carrying around to open the community in interactive ways for exploration and commerce.
- Hotels, convention centres and other venues could use related tools for high-tech way finding – what is the way to a specific room or hall?
- Restaurants, museums, shopping areas and other attractions will use GPS-based sales systems to draw customers and book reservations.
- Tradeshow managers could use GPS-like systems to guide and track exhibit visitors through an exhibit hall.
- Exhibitors could offer targeted “electronic specials” to those near their booth.
- Conference or convention attendees could use MARA for networking – to identify others with common interests in a crowd.

These mapping and GPS tools (browsers of the earth) will help to redefine how we access web-based information. The implications and opportunities for the events industry will be significant.