Proprietary wristbands are shaping up to becoming the next big thing. For those of you who aren’t aware of them yet, they’re interactive wristbands that you wear at a public event, like a State Fair, an amusement park, a convention center, or a trade show. Much like the “admission wristbands” of yesteryear (the kind you used to get at Disneyland once you’d paid for admission; the kind that let you onto roller-coaster rides when you showed it to the ticket attendant), you wear them on your wrist, and they get you access into public events. But that’s about where the similarities stop and the high-tech future begins.
Proprietary wristbands are a new technology that let their wearers not only pay electronically at machines for admission to public events, thereby saving on money and time (think of those giant lines you used to have to wait in to get into your local amusement park; the ones where everyone had to wait patiently while the lady in front fumbled in her purse for a 20% discount coupon that had expired ten months ago). But that’s really just the beginning of what they’re capable of. Interactive wristbands have been developed that allow their users to simply “point” their wristbands towards a particular ride at an amusement park, or a particular company booth at a trade-show, and “like” it via Facebook. Or if you take a digital photograph of the lunch you just purchased electronically (again, via your wristband), that photograph can get automatically posted to a host of possible social media websites.
The future applications for this technology seem pretty much limitless. People can “re-charge” their wristbands by adding a certain sum of money onto them, thus eliminating the need (and the risk) of bringing wallets into a high-density public event where a lot of people are necessarily rubbing shoulders. It’s even been touted as a technology that can be applied for emergency evacuation purposes.
We at Metalcraft have begun delving seriously into this new technology and researching its business and governmental applications. Doubtless we’ll be talking more about this topic soon in the course of our own research and hands-on work.