Microchip Wristband Becomes a Theme Park Essential

In a nondescript manufacturing plant on a quiet San Fernando cul-de-sac, a khaki-green machine the size of a buffet table sucks in bright pink ribbon and spits out one of the hottest features in theme parks.
Here, Precision Dynamics Corp., a company that began making plastic hospital wristbands out of a Burbank garage more than 50 years ago, has become the nation’s top producer of a new microchip-enhanced wristband for amusement parks, concerts, resorts and gyms.

Smart Bands with RFID by Precision Dynamics Corp.

The wristbands use the same technology as electronic tollbooths, security key cards and the newest U.S. passports. But at Precision Dynamics, this sophisticated electronic know-how has found its niche at theme parks, where the high-tech wristbands act as high-security admission passes, cashless debit cards, hotel room keys and a form of identification to reunite lost children with parents.

In the last year alone, Precision Dynamics’ wristbands came on line at Great Wolf Resorts’ newest water park in Concord, N.C.; at the Schlitterbahn Water Park in Galveston, Texas; and at Water World, one of the nation’s largest water parks, near Denver, Colo. In total, more than 50 theme parks across the country strap the wristbands on visitors.

Company leaders envision a future when they can expand the technology for use in border security and hospital identification, among other purposes.

“All sorts of things can be done with this technology,” said Walter Mosher Jr., a founder of the privately held company and a member of the board of directors.

Precision Dynamics began in 1956 when a friend who worked in hospital supplies suggested that Mosher, a UCLA engineering student, design a better wristband to identify patients at hospitals. At the time, hospitals made wristbands from plastic tubes, using separate tools to cut and fasten the bands on patients. For infants, hospital workers strung together lettered beads that spelled the babies’ names.

At the machine shop at Burbank High School, Mosher and two partners devised a one-piece plastic wristband that required no tools to fasten. The business that began with only $2,000 in start-up money has since expanded to 680 employees, a handful of trademark patents and offices in Belgium, Japan, Italy, Mexico and Brazil.

In 2006, Mosher sued Precision Dynamics in a dispute over the election of board members. But the dispute was settled out of court last year with a deal that keeps Mosher as a shareholder and a member of the board.

The idea of using radio frequency identification, or RFID, technology in wristbands came to Mosher about 10 years ago when he learned that microchips were being implanted in dogs and cats to identify them in shelters and veterinary clinics. A short time later, company Vice President Robin Barber moved ahead with the idea after meeting with managers from Great Wolf Resorts, who wanted to let guests buy food and drinks at the water parks without carrying a wallet or cash.

The result was a patented wristband containing a tiny antenna and a microchip only slightly bigger than a postage stamp.

Unique Custom Designed Wristbands with RFID chips

Each microchip is programmed with a unique 16-character code. A separate device known as a reader emits a low-power radio wave that activates the chip to collect the information and upload it into a computer. The reader must come within a few inches of the wristband to connect to the chip. Thus the wristband acts as a key to access a computerized debit account or unlock an electronic hotel room or a clothes locker.

The microchip wristbands now account for about $3 million in annual sales for Precision Dynamics, representing only a fraction of the company’s more than $100 million in annual sales, according to company executives. The bulk of the company’s business comes from the sales of wristbands that employ simpler bar-code technology to identify hospital patients, among other uses, and plain plastic wristbands with colors that tell security officers at theme parks and concerts who has paid for admission.

At theme parks, parents can use a kiosk to upload amounts that their children can spend, using the wristbands to buy food or play video games at the park. The microchips are coded so that the wristbands can be used only on a specific day. Once a hotel guest or theme park visitor departs, the wristbands becomes obsolete.

Because cashless spending is more convenient, industry reports suggest that visitors who use the wristbands spend as much as 25% more at resorts and parks.

“Our guests appreciate the convenience of it all,” said Jennifer Beranek, a spokeswoman for Great Wolf Resorts. Precision Dynamics wristbands are used at seven of its 12 water parks nationwide.
But price remains a barrier for the technology. Simple wristbands that use bar-code technology, for example, sell for as little as 14 cents each; the RFID wristbands sell for about $1 each. An RFID reader sells for about $450, roughly twice the cost of a bar-code reader.

RFID Wristbands are Getting Popular to Major Events

R.F.I.D.and near-field communication (N.F.C.) technology at events are getting popular.  These devices are the way to engage attendees. Used across various industries since the 1980s, radio-frequency identification is a wireless non-contact system that uses radio-frequency electromagnetic fields to transfer data from a tag containing electronically stored information that can be read from up to several yards away. N.F.C. is a more specific subset of R.F.I.D., allowing for two-way communication at a very close distance. These tags store small amounts of data (like URLs, text, or numbers) that can be transferred to other devices wireless. Here’s a look at how three recent events used R.F.I.D. technology to integrate social media, provide additional content to guests, and help sponsors extend their reach.

Lobster Roll Rumble
On June 7, food and drink Web site Tasting Table held its third annual Lobster Roll Rumble at Manhattan’s Metropolitan Pavilion. The sold-out event saw 20 lobster-roll purveyors vying for the title of “fan favorite,” plus offerings from sponsors like Häagen-Dazs, Don Julio, San Pellegrino, and Stella Artois. This year, event organizers partnered with Tagstand to supply N.F.C.-enabled bracelets that allowed the roughly 1,000 guests to vote for their favorite sandwich with a tap of their wrists.

At the 2010 Rumble, voting was done via text message, but a loophole let non-ticket holders vote, too. “We used Poll Everywhere, which allowed voters to text a unique code for each station, but there was no way to limit the voting to people on-site because anyone could text the code in,” says Tasting Table’s director of communications, Kai Mathey, who serves as the Lobster Roll Rumble’s event director. So in 2011, Tasting Table reverted to old-fashioned paper votes and ballot boxes, a method that was fair, but required staffers to manually count votes.

At this year’s Rumble, guests were handed N.F.C. bracelets at the entrance, where staffers explained how to link them to their Facebook and Twitter accounts. To vote for their favorite lobster roll, guests just had to tap their wrist against a box placed on each station. The vote readers were programmed so that the first tap was the only vote that counted. “We gave Tasting Table a variety of options—for the first vote to be the one that counts, for the last vote to be the one that counts, or for every vote to count,” says Tagstand co-founder Omar Seyal. “They wanted the first vote to count, but we delivered all of the various results to Tasting Table so they could look at it from other ways, too.” Ninety percent of ticket holders cast a vote, and roughly 20 percent connected their bracelets to social media accounts. Voting results were displayed in real time on a large video screen, which was turned off an hour before the event ended in order to keep the final results a surprise. (The winner, Clam Shack, was revealed in an email announcement the following day.)

In addition to the voting boxes, eight social media stations were placed throughout the venue. Attendees could tap their bracelets against signage to check in on Facebook or to tweet preset phrases at the various sponsored booths like “Cooling off with some Häagen-Dazs ice cream at the 2012 Tasting Table Lobster Roll Rumble.” Sponsor Don Julio, which created four specialty cocktails for the event, had a voting wall next to its bar that let guests tap to pick their favorite drink. Thirty percent of guests voted for a cocktail, with 56 people pushing their selection to a social platform. (The live results for the Don Julio mini competition also appeared on the video wall.) Overall, there were 350 social taps, and organizers estimate that roughly 33,000 people were reached via social media.

While the N.F.C. bracelet setup cost significantly more than the previous year’s paper ballot method, Tasting Table plans on using the technology again next year. “In the feedback survey, the response from guests in terms of the technology was overwhelmingly positive,” says Mathey. “And the restaurants loved the buzz created by the live-streaming results.” Given the short time frame to integrate the bracelets into the event (just three weeks), Mathey admits that organizers didn’t have the chance to optimize the functionality of the N.F.C. readers. “Social numbers weren’t as high as they could have been if we’d had time to integrate the bracelets into the event more,” says Mathey, who says she wants to incorporate even more innovative N.F.C. options for sponsors next year. “We also learned that more lead-up communication with ticket holders is needed—it’s important for them to be able to pick up and register the bracelets before the event, since on-site, people were just anxious to get inside.”

Manhattan Cocktail Classic
Heralded as the first N.F.C.-powered digital tasting event, the fourth Manhattan Cocktail Classic’s opening-night gala was held May 11 at the New York Public Library. With more than 60 brands pouring nearly 40,000 cocktails throughout the night, Lesley Townsend Duval, the founder and director of the Manhattan Cocktail Classic, had struggled over the years to find a way to help guests keep track of everything they’d tasted, experimenting with handing out printed recipe cards and selling $20 leather-bound, self-published books filled with recipes and photos.

In September 2011, Townsend Duval hired digital marketing agency ClearHart Digital to find a solution and up the festival’s innovation angle. “At an early meeting, we were talking about collateral materials and the problem that comes up with any tasting event: that there is no elegant way of keeping track of what you’re eating and drinking,” she says. ClearHart suggested hiring Tagstand, a company that provides custom Wi-Fi-enabled devices, bracelets, and services for events, to create silicone wristbands embedded with N.F.C. microchips that guests could tap at about 80 readers placed on the bars set up across the library’s four levels. The scanners in the cardboard boxes on the bars were each linked to a unique ID that tracked the specific cocktail recipes.

“We did this on a shoestring budget this year, because we didn’t want to attach a sponsor to it,” says Townsend Duval. “I wasn’t sure we would have the money to invest in it, but I finally gave the green light to ClearHart and Tagstand on April 10.” The Manhattan Cocktail Classic partnered with food and drink Web site and newsletter Tasting Table, which processed all of the data gathered from the readers over the weekend. Tasting Table sent each registrant a personalized email the following Monday with the cocktail recipes they had tracked. “The really cool part was that guests could then click to buy the products directly from the Web site of our retail partner, Astor Wines & Spirits,” says Townsend. “When I spoke with them back in February, Astor was in the process of building pre-populated shipping carts, so by next year people could be able to add all of the ingredients for a certain cocktail into their shopping cart with one click.”

Beyond just keeping track of cocktails, the wristbands opened up the gala’s social connectivity. Guests had the option to also link the bracelets to their Facebook and Twitter accounts, in addition to their emails. Of the sold-out event’s 3,000 guests, 973 registered their bracelets online. Linking the bracelets to social media allowed guests to instantly upload photos from the gala’s photo booth and check in on Facebook. A wall at the gala was covered in signage printed with booze-inspired quotes by famous authors and equipped with specially marked readers. Guests could tap their wristband on the quotes, which would then auto-tweet the quote to their followers. There were 743 social media taps at the event and 7,006 recipe taps, with an average of eight taps per user. Organizers also worked with men’s fashion brand Bonobos, which dressed selected “tastemakers” in custom outfits and N.F.C.-enabled buttons. Guests could tap their wristbands on the buttons to “like” the outfit on Facebook, which also entered them to win an outfit. Overall, the opening-night gala created more than 133,740 social impressions.

In the week leading up to the event, the Manhattan Cocktail Classic held bracelet pick-up events at bars around the city, sponsored by Heineken. “We knew it would be difficult to get people to register their bracelets in the context of the gala,” says Townsend Duval. “So we came up with the idea of informal happy hours where people could pick up their bracelet and ClearHart Digital staffers would help register them on iPads.” (The process takes roughly two minutes.) Every guest who attended was entered to win tickets to Bowmore Whisky’s special sponsored performance of the immersive theatrical production Sleep No More. Guests were also offered an incentive to link their wristband to their Facebook and Twitter profiles: doing so automatically entered them for a chance to win a pair of round-trip tickets to London on Virgin Atlantic Airways. Around 500 accounts were set up during the four happy hour events, and Townsend Duval says that virtually all of those people linked them to their social media accounts. N.F.C. bracelets were also handed out at the gala for those who didn’t attend the happy hours.

Despite the limited budget, Townsend Duval declares the N.F.C.-enabled cocktail-tracking experiment a success. “Our fear was that a new technology might create crankiness, but the feedback was encouraging,” she says. She plans to use what she learned this year to develop a strategy for using the N.F.C. bracelets in 2013. “In a feedback survey, guests pointed out that it wasn’t always clear that the bracelets had properly tracked the cocktails, but in terms of the overall experience, everyone said it was so cool,” says Townsend Duval. “And with more dollars and time to invest next year, we could take it to another level.” Tagstand says that while they are working on a turnkey solution for having N.F.C. technology at events that will hopefully launch this fall and push the cost per bracelet down, prices are currently determined on a client-to-client basis and can range anywhere from $2 to $8 per person depending on if the project involves travel outside of the Bay Area and other factors.

Bonnaroo
As the 80,000 attendees at this year’s Bonnaroo Music & Arts Festival celebrated on a Tennessee farm June 7 to 10, news of their daily activities was posting to Facebook, creating nearly 1.5 million social impressions. But the attendees weren’t pulling out their smartphones; instead they were swiping wristbands with R.F.I.D. technology at one of 20 check-in portals around the 700-acre venue.

“It was funny watching people walk up to these portals [and] swipe their wristband,” said Chad Issaq, executive vice president of partnerships for festival organizer Superfly Presents. “It would beep green twice and they would just jump up and down like a six-year-old. It was a social experiment. This was the convergence of social in the live and digital space and watching how it fused together. It was really interesting.”

Of the 80,000 people who purchased wristbands (which served as the only form of ticket to the festival), 74,000 registered them online and about half of those people connected the wristbands to their Facebook accounts. Those people swiped their wristbands more than 200,000 times, generating check-ins on Facebook that allowed their online friends to see what they were doing at Bonnaroo. Issaq said on average each of those 200,000 check-ins received about seven “likes” or comments, leading to the calculation of 1.5 million social impressions.

Bonnaroo also used R.F.I.D. wristbands from Intellitix in 2011, but this was the first year of the Facebook integration. In the weeks leading up to the festival, organizers encouraged guests to register their wristband online, offering incentives such as V.I.P. upgrades and festival merchandise and the chance to win a Ford Escape from Ford Motor Company, which sponsored the social check-ins.

“We also drove home the message of registration as a way to personalize your wristband,” Issaq said. “We didn’t want to focus on ‘register’; it was ‘personalize.’” The registration allowed Superfly to stem counterfeits and also provided security for guests. “We pointed out that if you lose your wristband, we have proof it was associated to you.”

About 55,000 individuals opted in for a chance to win the car and another 10,000 agreed to receive future communications from Ford. In addition to that data, the auto company benefited from having its name associated with each Facebook check-in: the online posts included a graphic saying “Checked in by Ford Escape.”

“No other festival had really tapped into the technology of R.F.I.D. in such a broad social reach,” said Ginger Kasanic, Ford’s experiential marketing manager. “This intersection of cool technology and social conversation is the heart of the Escape persona and the perfect platform to connect the Escape to the Bonnaroo audience.”

The focus of Bonnaroo is music, with five stages hosting performances from acts including the Beach Boys, Radiohead, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Organizers placed two R.F.I.D. portals near each stage. Guests who swiped their wristbands got a check-in on their Facebook page indicating the name of the stage and the act that was performing. At the end of the day, the system made a second post to that guest’s Facebook: a recap of all of the acts the person had seen that day with a link to Spotify that provided the act’s Bonnaroo set list and a playlist of studio tracks of those songs.

“I think that was the most valuable piece—the content on the back end,” Issaq said. “That’s what people were most excited about.” Organizers plan to take what they learned this year to develop strategy for 2013. “I would want to communicate earlier,” he added. “We pulled this together in about four or five weeks. I would also want more incentives, more special offers, and at the physical event, more strategically placed portals.”

Social Media Success Story: How Bonnaroo Used Wristbands to Foster Massive Engagement

As the 80,000 attendees at this year’s Bonnaroo Music & Arts Festival celebrated on a Tennessee farm June 7-10, news of their daily activities was posting to Facebook, creating nearly 1.5 million social impressions. But the attendees weren’t pulling out their smartphones to connect to Facebook; instead they were swiping wristbands with radio frequency identification (R.F.I.D.) technology at one of 20 check-in portals around the 700-acre venue.

Of the 80,000 people who purchased wristbands (which served as the only form of ticket to the festival), 74,000 registered them online and about half of those people connected the wristbands to their Facebook accounts. Those people swiped their wristbands more than 200,000 times, generating check-ins on Facebook that allowed their online friends to see what they were doing at Bonnaroo. Issaq said on average each of those 200,000 check-ins received about seven “likes” or comments, leading to the calculation of 1.5 million social impressions.

Bonnaroo also used R.F.I.D. wristbands from Intellitix in 2011, but this was the first year of the Facebook integration. In the weeks leading up to the festival, organizers encouraged guests to register their wristband online, offering incentives such as V.I.P. upgrades and festival merchandise and the chance to win a Ford Escape from Ford Motor Company, which sponsored the social check-ins.

“We also drove home the message of registration as a way to personalize your wristband,” Issaq said. “We didn’t want to focus on ‘register’; it was ‘personalize.'” The registration allowed Superfly to stem counterfeits and also provided security for guests. “We pointed out that if you lose your wristband, we have proof it was associated to you,” he said.

About 55,000 individuals opted in for a chance to win the car and another 10,000 agreed to receive future communications from Ford. In addition to that data, the auto company benefited from having its name associated with each Facebook check-in: the online posts included a graphic saying “Checked in by Ford Escape.”

“No other festival had really tapped into the technology of R.F.I.D. in such a broad social reach,” said Ginger Kasanic, Ford’s experiential marketing manager. “This intersection of cool technology and social conversation is the heart of the Escape persona and the perfect platform to connect the Escape to the Bonnaroo audience.”

The focus of Bonnaroo is music, with five stages hosting performances from acts including the Beach Boys to Radiohead to the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Organizers placed two R.F.I.D. portals near each stage. Guests who swiped their wristbands got a check-in on their Facebook page indicating the name of the stage and the act that was performing. At the end of the day, the system made a second post to that guest’s Facebook: a recap of all of the acts the person had seen that day with a link to Spotify that provided the act’s Bonnaroo set list and a playlist of studio tracks of those songs.

“I think that was the most valuable piece—the content on the back end,” Issaq said. “That’s what people were most excited about.” Organizers plan to take what they learned this year to develop strategy for 2013. “I would want to communicate earlier,” he added. “We pulled this together in about four or five weeks. I would also want more incentives, more special offers, and at the physical event, more strategically placed portals.”

Article was quoted from BizBash.com

RFID Wristbands – A Ticketing Device for Advance Concert Venues

Think back to the last time you got a ticket to go into a festival? Seems like awhile ago right? You might have just received a wrist band that you flashed to security. Those days are long gone as Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) are the latest (and honestly greatest) in festival technology.

To put it in the easiest terms, RFID is an actual chip (no not your average bag of Ruffles) that sends out a signal. RFID technology has made its way into music festival wristbands. You may have noticed at the last festival you attended (Bonnaroo 2011, Bamboozle 2012, Coachella 2012) that to enter the grounds you had to walk through what looked like a fun metal detector. These “fun metal detectors” had an outline of a hand that security kindly asked to place your hand by. Placing your hand in the outline like a missing puzzle piece, your wristband was validated within a millisecond, letting festival organizers know that “you, (place name here), have made it to the festival!”

RFID access control wristbands are the reason why queues have been cut and ticket fraud is almost extinct.  RFID wristband is some of “the next-generation festival technology.” Maybe you don’t care all that much about shorter entrance lines or the extinction of ticket fraud, but RFID wristbands can actually expand your festival experience. These RFID wristbands can connect festival goers with bands and other fans through social media, and can even be used to pay for items.

Rather than carry a wallet or worry about losing credit cards, in advance or at the event you can load funds onto your wristband to spend around the site.  Transactions occur generally between one and three seconds.

By loading funds onto wristbands, it actually becomes a lot easier for the festival organizers as well. Gone are the long queues due to waiting for credit card transactions to go through, and organizers don’t need to worry about the cash. “It’s much more efficient, much more convenient.  Within the coming year we’re going to see more festival attendees registering their wristband online and link it to their Facebook profiles. At this year’s Coachella, around 30,000 fans did just that.

Besides music festival goers, bands can actually prosper from the new technology as well. A person might discover a band at a festival that they really like. The wristband could help connect a person with the band, letting that person download tracks, along with growing that bands fan base.

Those afraid of damaging the wristband and being denied entrance into a festival need not fear. RFID wristbands are “pretty much indestructible.” Don’t worry about getting them wet either. The wristbands can survive being submerged in up to 18 inches of water. So please continue washing your grubby hands at festivals.

Tips on Using Event Wristbands to Promote Your Business or Event

If you are looking for a new and unique way to promote your company or an upcoming event, wristbands are a highly effective and economical strategy to use for spreading the word. There are numerous ways to creatively champion your business or an upcoming event with event wristbands. Here are a handful of winning ideas.

RFID enabled Social Networking Wristbands with Imprint Logos

Imprint logos. Custom event wristbands are a walking mini billboard. Let’s say your company sponsors or hosts an event. Custom wristbands can serve double duties: branding and security/crowd control. When guests have a great experience at your event, they will likely keep wearing the wristband for days or weeks to come. It can become a conversation starter wherever your guests may roam—the water cooler, hairdresser, grocery store, and the like. To more effectively spread the word, you could imprint your company’s website address on the wristband. In this day of social media, it’s highly possible that some of your guests may get on Twitter or Facebook and tweet or post your website address, and then comment about the fabulous time they had at your event.

Imprint custom coupons. When you distribute wristbands at an event hosted or sponsored by your company, custom messages can be printed. You can turn the event wristband into a coupon by printing something like, “get 10% off product X with this wristband” or “show us your wristband and get $20 off when you spend $100.” In addition to promoting your company from their wrist, an imprinted coupon serves as incentive for guests to take action and purchase your company’s products or services.

Imprint quick response (QR) codes. Have you noticed those little two-dimensional barcodes popping up in surprising places? You may have seen them on business cards, in magazines, on flyers and coupons, even on badges and articles of clothing. For those with smart phones, these codes contain information, offers, and freebies that can be accessed on the go and sometimes exclusively. QR codes imprinted on event wristbandscan be used to offer almost anything from discounted tickets for upcoming events to buy-one-get-one-free lunches. They can link to anything from a continuously updated playlist at a DJ night to an updated schedule of seminars at a tradeshow or all-day conference.

Have a team-building car wash. Promote your organization by hosting a car wash, while simultaneously building teamwork and communication. With the logo or slogan imprinted on the event wristbands, you can hand them out to further promote your business. At the end of the day, multiple people will be walking around town advertising your company by wearing it on their wrist.

Organize a pub crawl for a charity. Why not have a little fun while raising funds for an important cause that your company supports? Wristbands can enhance the experience for participants because they become easily identifiable to bouncers, bartenders and wait staff at each tavern stop. All participants need to do is flash their wristbands to gain entry into the establishment and fetch drinks from the bar. No worries about digging for a ticket or card in a purse, billfold or pocket. Chances of losing a wristband are practically nil because it is comfortably worn around the wrist.

Harry Potter VIP Access Wristbands

Designate VIP Access. If you are hosting a corporate or fundraising event at a public site, like a large hotel, event wristbands are a strategic way to provide access control and promote your organization. You could line up guest speakers or celebrities to draw in crowds of people to attend your event. Different color event wristbands can designate different groups of people. Perhaps red indicates the guest is authorized to attend the speaking engagement, while green lets security know the guest is allowed back stage to meet the speaker when the presentation is over. Different color wristbands can also be used to honor VIP donors or volunteers who maybe have special access.

Hold contests or raffles. You can use serial numbered wristbands for special promotion contests or raffles. If you’re hosting a raffle at your business or event, using serial numbered event wristbands with pull-off tabs are easy to use and fun for the participants. Each person who buys an entry to your raffle gets a wristband to wear and removes the detachable stub, which serves as the ticket stub. The stub is entered into the raffle. When the winning numbers are announced, each person just checks the wristband adorned on their wrist. Good bye lost tickets!

There are seemingly endless possibilities to promote your organization or event with wristbands. Get creative and have fun with this easy, affordable promotional tool!

Source: www.Wristbands.com – Direct Custom Wristbands Manufacturer in USA