When the organizers of Intuit’s QuickBooks Connect conference initially decided to use near-field communication (N.F.C.) technology on attendee badges for this year’s event, which was held October 22 to 26 at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center in California, they had several goals in mind.First, they wanted to automate the process of tracking continuing education credits for the attendees; second, they wanted to make it easy for vendors to track leads at their booths; and third, they wanted a way for attendees to gather information from vendors and sessions electronically, rather than in paper form.

And then they came up with an additional function: Due to the event’s growth, Intuit had to spread the 112 exhibitors across two halls for the first time this year. N.F.C. created a fun way to ensure the more than 5,000 small business owners, accountants, and developers in attendance would spend time in both halls.

By using the N.F.C. technology in this game-like way, O’Brien said it helped attendees become comfortable with the new technology. “We wanted to teach that the value was beyond the exhibit hall,” she said. “We wanted there to be ‘delight’ reasons to scan, so there was the kiosk or to get pictures.” The N.F.C. was integrated into the event app, which O’Brien said had a 91 percent adoption rate this year, much higher than at the 2015 event.

While it is still certainly possible to potentially clone a MagicBand (and thereby gain access to protected resources by impersonating the original band holder), the fact that the band operates on the 2.4 GHZ frequency inherently presents some challenges to any would-be malicious users. Admission to the parks is fairly expensive (Fig. 5) and the cost of the hardware required to conduct such a cloning attack far exceeds the cost of a legitimate day pass. For the attack to even be considered economical, the malicious user must clone many passes over time.

Part of the MagicBand system allows guests to make purchases with the band at specific registers provided they have tied a credit/debit card to their account via an external process. This can be seen as a very big convenience to guests who do not wish to continually use their cards to make purchases while in the parks, or for those who find themselves wishing to buy merchandise when they had not initially anticipated in doing so and do not have their wallet/purse/money clip in their possession. Yet in order to make purchases, a user must first swipe their band against a specially designed reader (Fig. 6) and subsequently enter a matching PIN number. Even if our malicious user had an RFID token that was a working clone of a legitimate one, it is somewhat unlikely he would be able to successfully guess the matching PIN number within a reasonable number of tries in one sitting before the cashier would begin to get suspicious.

While multifactor authentication certainly adds to the security of the system in a significant way, biometric  hardware is not flawlessly reliable. Florida is a rather humid place [5] which inevitably affects the performance of sensitive electronic hardware like fingerprint readers. To address this issue and counteract the likelihood of the system presenting users with false negatives, it would be fair to assume that the fingerprint readers themselves are configured to fail open (ie, when in doubt, allow entry). This gives malicious users the potential benefit of knowing that they merely need to intentionally cause the reader to malfunction to be granted access. Social engineering could also potentially play a factor in the exploitation of the MagicBand system by using Disney’s own customer-service policy against itself. Suppose our malicious user is successfully stopped dead in his tracks at the gate. He has been beaten to the entry gate by his victims and has lost the calibration race; there is no hope the machine will accept his cloned band. Yet he scans it anyway, and is denied access immediately. He knows he will not gain entry, but he continues to scan it. The employees at the gate attempt to help him, scanning his band for him, fiddling with the machine, etc, all to no avail. Yet a large line is beginning to form behind him.

Aptech Computer Systems, Inc., one of the leading hospitality accounting and business intelligence technology companies, announced a strategic partnership with Inova Payroll, a national payroll and human resources service provider.

Aptech Computer Systems, Inc., one of the leading hospitality accounting and business intelligence technology companies, announced a strategic partnership with Inova Payroll, a national payroll and human resources service provider.

ptech customers who select Inova's payroll and HCM technology will be able to view payroll expenses in Aptech's accounting systems, PVNG and Profitvue, and see labor information in Aptech's hospitality business intelligence application, Execuvue®.

Your Disney World vacation booking starts at CRO and is in the CRO system or comes in as a Disney Vacation Package. The key point is that the actual Disney World Resort, like the Grand Floridian, has no record of your reservation until it is transferred to the Disney resort itself. That happens either 3 or 4 days out. Sorry I forget the exact number of days out the specific Disney Resort gets the reservation in their hotel Lilo Reservation System.

Other Disney resorts have thousands of rooms with turns that can be very little or 50% of the hotel could turn over in just one day.

Sabre Corporation (NASDAQ: SABR) and Alaska Airlines have successfully migrated Virgin America to Alaska's passenger services system (PSS), hosted by Sabre. The recently completed migration will allow Alaska and Virgin America to move forward using Sabre systems as one unified airline while offering a seamless, end-to-end guest experience.

"Since initiating the merger with Virgin America, Alaska's primary focus has been on the 44 million guests that collectively choose our airlines each year – and expanding our technology platform to best serve every one of them," said Shane Tackett, Alaska Airlines' senior vice president of revenue management and e-commerce. 

Now that the integration is complete, Alaska will expand its use of Sabre's customer management technology across the enterprise to fulfill its brand promise, enhance retailing capabilities and offer guests the best options in an ultra-competitive environment.

Most venues today can provide you with an event experience that has a smaller environmental impact and give you a better story to tell stakeholders

To reduce the amount of waste that ends up in the landfill, ask the following questions:

To reduce your energy and water impacts, ask the following questions:

Keeping track of all of the elements involved in planning an event can be challenging, even for the most organized of hostesses. You end up with books full of notes and to do lists, Excel spreadsheets with guest lists and budgets and do-it-now reminders in the way of sticky notes posted all over your desk and computer monitor

There are also other types of Web-based software like Eventbrite.com that are specifically targeted toward managing a live event with paying attendees. They offer an event registration page online and also provide tools to help you promote your event, like e-mail marketing and social media integration.

Event planning software takes important aspects of an event and keeps them all in one place for easy access.