2-D Bar Codes Used to carry
Registrant Information
at Asian Trade Shows
American Exposition Technologies (AET) handles the registration
service details for trade shows. The company handled 35 trade shows
in 1997, and are exploring the challenges of Asian shows such as
Comdex Beijing - an event five times the size of the Las Vegas original.
Technology Eases Registration Process
AET's role is to provide registration services, making badges
that include registrant data in a complete profile printed on the
badge in the two-dimensional (2-D) bar code PDF-417. Show management
then uses badges for entry verification at the door, as well as
to audit how many registrants appear, report traffic level, and
track attendance patterns. Armed with this information, show managers
can demonstrate real traffic to exhibitors, rather than floor estimates.
But shows such as Comdex Beijing pose special challenges.
The Electronic Lead Retrieval System
At the heart of the system - now used by half of AET's shows'
exhibitors - is the Compsee Apex II handheld terminal. Exhibitors
request scanning kits with their show purchase. During setup, a
Welch Allyn scanner, Apex 11 handheld terminal and printer are delivered
to the booth. Or exhibitors may pick up the equipment from AET's
service booth and get a full demonstration from AET.
The Apex 11 unit is the size of a cellular phone, with a scanner
Port to accommodate the Welch Allyn 3400PDF device used in the AET
application. Run by an Intel processor, the Apex II includes a four-line
display, alphanumeric keyboard, 128K of static RAM, a real-time
clock and a printer port.
2-D Bar Codes Store More Data
Before the advent of 2-D codes like PDF-417, only the attendee
number was stored. Exhibitors would have to be careful about collecting
attendee information, usually from business cards.
But at AET events, exhibitors scan the badge, and then scan the
linear bar code symbol that is printed on a piece of paper - corresponding
to the type of follow-up action that is required. At the end of
the day, or at the end of the event, exhibitors then take the Apex
11 to the service desk, where the information is off-loaded to a
diskette.
Because attendees had filled out a profile - name, address, company
title, etc - to obtain their badges, the information included into
the PDF-417 code becomes part of the lead, and that information
is already married to the specific product interests or sales information
requests of each lead.
Putting Lead Information To Work
The file AET provided on disk can be imported into any contact
database management package the exhibitor may be using. This allows
the exhibitor to generate customized letters to send with product
literature and automatically forward leads to the correct salespeople.
The printer port on the Apex II terminal is also useful for exhibitors
who want immediate hard copy of lead information at the booth, or
for an end-of-day summary. Hard copy serves as a source for quick
information a salesperson can grab to follow up a lead during the
show.
Unique Challenges In China
One of the problems with shows in China was within the registration
process itself, starting with the need to convert Chinese symbols
into Roman characters. According to research by Mei Yuan of Duke
University, "The most user-friendly way of typing Chinese on a personal
computer is through entering it phonetically, as one would speak,
by typing in a standard Roman transcription such as Pinyin and letting
the computer do the work of looking up the Pinyin words in an internal
dictionary which contains correspondences between pinyin and Chinese
Hanzi characters, then converting them instantly into the correct
characters."
Converting Chinese Symbols
Phonetic conversion is used extensively, but Yuan notes, "there
is an inconvenience to the Pinyin-based typing of Chinese because
there are many homophones, words which sound alike, even when tones
are taken into account. In such case, the computer can only present
the typist with a selection list and ask him to choose the desired
word."
AET's owner Mike Nolan points out that this process can delay
registration significantly. "Once they turn the symbolic graphic
character set into Pinyin, then the issue is how long does it take?"
Advance registration in China accounts for only 15% of attendance.
Nolan identifies registration success based on the time it takes
all attendees to be registered. That hinges on knowing "how long
one typist takes to complete one registration," he explains. "Plus
it is 800,000 people." Even the basics become an issue, such as
finding enough typists to enter the Pinyin.
The registration backlog that is sure to occur may in part be
ameliorated by cultural expectations. While people may accept no
more than a 30-minute wait in line in Western culture, the Asian
show organizers feel daylong waits may not be excessive.
Handling The Data Representation
But all of that is just one part of the problem. At the "back
end" of registration technology is the data representation. There
may be a variety of information and data structures, but at all
trade shows in the West, characters are encoded in single bytes
of information - each byte represents one letter, number or symbol,
for a maximum of 256 ASCII characters.
Non-alphabet Asian languages, however, cannot fit the ASCII mold.
The Chinese language includes upward of 40,000 words. Since two
bytes can represent 65,536 configurations, a two-byte system was
developed for digital representation of Chinese text.
Though the - two-byte system is effective and on its face a simple
solution, it sets high hurdles for the speed and efficiency demanded
of data manipulation on the trade show floor. Not only does the
data space itself need to be doubled to accommodate the two-byte
representation, but the ordinary keyboard input needs rethinking:
Looking For More Improvements To Registration Process
Some questions with future applications will need to be resolved:
Will vendors be able to input lead information in Hanzi, or must
they depend on knowledge of phonetic Pinyin? How will the resulting
data files be configured? "We'll learn from this application - and
know better for next year." Nolan adds, "It is inevitable this technology
will find its way there. It is a matter of time."
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