Poken-Invasion at the Lift Conference
So I was at the Lift Conference about a week ago. Aside from being one of the most amazing conferences in Europe, they had a fancy new feature embedded in their badges:
See the lash on the bottom left? Inside is a Poken, a small gadget that allows you to share your personal data with other people. So if 2 Pokens are held together, they exchange the data that is stored on them.
Actually, it goes like this: first, you enter your personal data on the Poken website, then you bind your Poken devices to this account. Then you are ready to exchange your data with other Pokens. So each Poken only transmits your Poken ID when held together. After pokening around you connect your poken device with a computer via USB and load all the collected user profiles into your Poken account.
While at the conference it was an absolute blast to use the Pokens. In an instant they made business cards superfluous by bringing so much more to the table – just by holding together our conference badges, we were able to exchange not only names, but also images, social media links and so on.
Also at the conference were some people from Poken (the company). I had a chat with Stéphane Doutriaux and Bryan Guido Hassin and I really liked what I heard. They were really enthusiastic about their creation.
Apart from the “conference badge” model there are severeal cute ones for private use. After tweeting about the Pokens, the people from the agency back home were equally intrigued and told me to bring some home with me. So I did – and all 24 were gone in a flash.
I think there is something about those little plastic things. They are real extensions of the virtual social networks, which are based on real interactions. They are easy and most of all: fun! So let’s see where these Pokens lead us and what connections they allow us to bond. Let’s Poken up!