In my (admittedly finite) experience, I’ve never encountered and RFID/QR-code/whatever system that served the logistical interests of people who were looking to get to know some of one another. Having to scribble things on napkins with the one dodgy pen the group has isn’t ideal; but the suits have their business cards and everybody has at least a dumbphone (and if you don’t, or rock it old school, you can bring a small notebook).
This always leads me to the suspicion that such high-tech solutions (especially the ones that cross over so directly with the material culture of the access control systems sector) are, at best, somebody indulging their onanistic technophilia without any user experience improvement. At worse, they fall under very strong suspicion of being in place for the benefit of ‘audience engagement metrics’ rather than the attendees.
And, given the level of punch that some of the larger cons possess as marketing vehicles for their genres, I’m sure more than a few people would love to get some good audience tracking data.
Obviously, as demonstrated by any suitably plucky stalker, even pre-digital crowds offer less anonymity than they appear to; but I always get a trifle nervous when somebody adds a fancy tech feature that is either largely useless and overengineered (eg. “If two people who both have NFC-compatible smartphones and the SomethingCon-2013 app meet they can exchange information just by tapping their badges! It’ll be just like exchanging contact information, only with high system requirements and incompatiblity! Too bad that the SomethingCon-2013 app is for iOS and the only NFC handsets are Android, huh?”) or explicitly about allowing entities who were previously poorly placed to gather data to gather data easily and automatically.
