Rick Borovoy

Executive Vice President of Product Development, CTO, and Co-founder, nTAG Interactive

Sometimes you discover your path in the unlikeliest of places. For Rick Borovoy, that discovery began on a Navajo reservation in New Mexico.

The schools where Borovoy was volunteering during a year off from Harvard needed help managing their information, so Borovoy helped them build databases. The experience, he says, made him "really interested in the way technology could play a meaningful and progressive role in a community."

Back at college, Borovoy began studying how technology could be used in education, and after graduation he spent five years working on collaborative learning projects at Apple Computer, earning five patents.

That experience served him well as a graduate student at MIT's Media Lab. The high points of the program were the twice-yearly gatherings when corporate sponsors came to see the fruits of their investment, yet Borovoy couldn't help noticing a certain level of dissatisfaction: Sponsors complained that people came together but didn't really communicate.

"How do you break past certain social barriers to get people to communicate?" he began to wonder. "How do you make sure it's not just a massive herding exercise, to get people to interact in certain ways?"

Borovoy set about developing technology to facilitate business networking. The result was the nTAG, a small, wearable device that stores information about each wearer and displays details on an LCD screen.

After earning his PhD, Borovoy launched a company to produce the devices, which quickly earned a following in the corporate world. NTAG Interactive now has 30 employees and 40 clients, including industry leaders such as IBM, Procter & Gamble, MasterCard, Bristol-Myers Squibb and GE.

The device itself, operates quite simply: When two people meet at an event their nTAGs exchange data, helping them find common interests to break the ice and allowing them to trade business cards at the click of a button. The devices also provide feedback to event organizers on who is chatting with whom, who is attending which sessions, which sessions have the highest satisfaction rating and which attendees are emerging as the biggest social nexuses.

Beyond simple networking, the devices proved useful in helping a sponsor drive his or her objectives through an event more efficiently. They also helped cure what Borovoy calls "event blindness"—the organizer's lack of knowledge, at any fine level of detail, about how well the event is going and who is interacting with whom.

One thing is clear, nTag is not just a clever piece of technology. "We operate like caterers in that we don't just drop off a bunch of raw ingredients," Borovoy says.

Instead, anTAG Interactive employee remains throughout the event, and as information from individual devices is fed back to the employee, he or she updates the system with real-time data, letting nTAG wearers know of changes in the conference schedule, say, or helping organizers tweak the proceedings to get more people to meet or encourage more people to attend popular sessions.

The result is a much more dynamic gathering, what Borovoy calls " a Connected Event." The old way of running a conference—here's your program, hope you enjoy—"starts to look a little static and out-of-date," he notes.

"We're beginning in some ways to unlock the mysteries of event satisfaction," Borovoy says. "It transforms the role of meeting planner from one that's mainly tactical and logistical to one that's more strategic. There's an event science aspect to this that's really fascinating and allows us to deliver really good events and proven events."

With the event industry in the United States a $10 billion behemoth, nTAG Interactive has plenty of room to grow. But Borovoy sees other untapped markets for nTAGs, such as cruise ships, singles bars or hospitals.

"Events are prototype communities for what can happen in everyday surroundings, such as a company or a city," he says. "Because an event is a bounded patch of space-time where people are willing to do something different for a few days, you can make something happen in a way that's difficult to do right now in the real world.

"This is a great opportunity to get out in front and experiment with those things and see what those ideal interactions look like," Borovoy says. "Then I hope we can get beyond that and do those things in broader space and time."