Finn Digital
229 E. Wisconsin Ave., Suite 400, Milwaukee
Innovation: Barcode scanning software as a service
Bill Finn, founder and president of Milwaukee-based Finn Digital piloted BoothTag at the BizTech Conference and Expo last year. BoothTag is a barcode tagging system used to create micro communities and enhance consumer interaction at trade shows.
Finn has since expanded the Booth Tag service into Tag up With, a software as a service model that can be expanded beyond the trade show floor and can be used in everyday business to create micro communities among customers.
“After our initial pilot we had a ton of interest from higher education institutions and other trade shows,” Finn said. “But what we realized is that the model really lends itself to be marketed as software as a service. So what we’ve done is stripped it all back and basically started fresh.”
Tag up With, like BoothTag, is a community building tool that uses customized barcodes as its building block, Finn said. A limited free version of the software will be offered to clients interested in creating their own barcode communities, he said.
“Tag up With can and should be expanded beyond the traditional ‘BoothTag’ trade show floor,” Finn said. “We envision it being used in lots of different places, interactive campus tours at educational institutions, wine tastings, art galleries or with businesses in a Business Improvement District.”
Tag up With is intended for business use on a variety of different levels, Finn said.
The main goal is to create micro communities by linking people in a certain arena through barcodes.
The premise is similar to Booth Tag in that individuals can sign up for the service, create a profile and provide information about themselves including, email address, phone number, city of residence, Twitter handle, Facebook and even LinkedIn account information.
“Where the software as a service turns into a business model is when we start generating reports for a company,” Finn said. “The personal identification capabilities on the part of the report are the biggest differentiator for Tag up With.”
According to Finn, the analytics will allow a company or organization to identify who is scanning what, what type of device they scanned from, and even have that individual’s e-mail, Twitter and other contact information if the person provided it during the sign up process.
“That creates real opportunities for networking and community building,” Finn said. “We’re generating that element of community building.”
The reports can also be used to track specific scans, including voting or contests if the barcode community was set up that way, Finn said.
“We can generate pretty much any report on a group of communities under an account,” Finn said. “So if it were something like rating a wine sample at a tasting, or a job candidate at a job fair we have those survey tools built in to provide those kinds of analytics for an organization.”
The barcodes can link consumers directly to a video, a social media link, a Facebook page or even a commerce purchase page, Finn said.
In addition, organizations will have the option of creating a traditional QR Code or a Microsoft Tag within their community, a differentiation that wasn’t possible with Booth Tag’s original model, he added.
Tag up With is in the process of launching its private beta version.
“Effectively we’re leveraging a social kind of points-based badge component but adding real business value to it through connecting and the different ways of reporting,” Finn said. “Not only can you offer an incentive to give people a reason to be engaged in the barcode community you set up, but as an organization you have full access to those micro-communities in a way that hasn’t quite existed until now.”
