How often have you found yourself at the social reception for a conference, plastic glass of Charles Shaw in your hand, looking around nervously for someone to strike up conversation with, you peer down at the name tag of the guy to your left, read it and stammer out “So…Mike…what’s…Acme Widgets do?”

Great opener, buddy, lively conversation sure to follow.

Last year, Mike Davidson wrote a great post entitled “Building a Better Conference Badge“, in which he harangues the makers of conference badges for their poor design. He talks about space wasted on non-unique information like the conference name (why would I need to read your badge to figure out what conference I’m at?) and attendee status (does distinguishing attendees from speakers really deserve more space than, say, someone’s name?), and he’s right.

There’s something else missing from conference badges, though, that I think is even more important: Who are you?

I don’t mean “what’s your name”, “what company do you work” for or even “what’s your title”. I mean who are you, what makes you special and, most importantly why should I talk to you and what should we talk about?

What you really want when you’re clutching that glass of wine, trying to stammer something out in that second after eye contact, before it gets awkward, is some information about what the person is interested in.

Well, we took a swing at creating what we hope will be the Ultimate Conference Badge. It responds not only to Mike’s complaints, giving more weight to name and less to conference details, but also includes two very unique properties:

• Tags: A list of things the person has said they are interested in. Go ahead and talk about it!
• Matches: A list of people our matching algorithms think you might want to meet. Find them!

We’re pretty proud of our work, so I sent it over to Mike for his opinion.

He hated it.

not visually attractive…No attention is paid to gutters or spacing

OK, he’s right. We’re not done. It could use some style, some pizazz, some gutters. But consider the gauntlet thrown. Pathable will deliver the Ultimate Conference Badge. Mark my words.