If you want your participants to sit up and pay attention, give them some gum. Yup, it seems that there’s some recent research that suggests chewing gum helps make you more attentive and perform better on tests. Unfortunately, the boost in brain power only lasts 20 minutes, but still, maybe it’s time to replace those little dishes of mints and hard candies with sugarless gum?

Google Maps is bringing its helpful blue dot indoors, so you’ll be able to figure out where you are relative to where you want to go inside as well as out. While it looks like it just has some major airports and shopping areas mapped out as of now, I’m sure it’s just a matter of time before you can use it at New Orleans’ Morial Convention Center, or even better, Gaylord Opryland. Though with more conference organizers including interactive maps in their show apps, maybe this will be not quite so needed by the time Google gets around to major convention sites?

Today I got a press release from a company that was making an “>interesting offer: If a conference organizer uses the company’s services in response to an attendee’s referral, the company is offering to reimburse that attendee up to $500 in registration fees as a “thank-you” bonus.

I have never heard of anyone in the conference space doing something like this, but, while it seems like it could be a bit unwieldy to manage if it really catches on, what a cool idea. Leave it to the social networking folks to come up with an attendee incentive to market their stuff. I just hope that those who take advantage of it really think this is a good service for their conference, and aren’t just in it for the free reg!

I love this notebook! How much do you want to bet that the number of interruptions you’d get would go way, way down if you carry this into your next staff meeting and plop it down on the table in front of you…

If you’re looking for spa food like cucumber gazpacho with shrimp and melon on your next flight to Cincinnati, you’re almost definitely going to be out of luck (unless you’re on your billionaire friend’s private jet). But the enterprising souls at DietDetective.com have done some sleuthing to find out which airlines sky snacks are the least (and most) hazardous to your waistline. Now the results are in.

Of the eight airlines whose snacks DietDetective.com analyzed for healthiness, cost, calories, and exercise equivalents, Virgin America and Air Canada provided the healthiest sky snacks; Spirit’s snacks were the least healthy.

However, the company noted in a press release, your best bet is to bring your own food (low-calorie cereals, apples and oranges, salad, energy bars, beef jerky, fruit rollups, nuts, nonfat yogurt, and sandwiches). They also suggest peel-and-eat tuna and salmon cups, which sounds pretty awful to me.

I know I should care about keeping to nice healthy snacks but really, to be truthful, I don’t. I always figure I’m working off so many calories just holding the plane in the sky with my mind that anything I eat is instantly burned off. Calories eaten on the plane, stay on the plane—that’s my story and I’m sticking to it!

If you find yourself designing your meeting’s brochure, signage, or anything else that includes type, you owe it to yourself to check out these 26 free retro fonts (you can download them straight from the linked site). If you have any sort of nostalgia theme, or just want a throwback look, you must check these out. (There also are links to many more beautiful, free fonts if you’re not in the nostalgia mood).

Fellow font freaks, rejoice!

It’s hard to imagine that the word hasn’t yet gotten out to some meetings professionals that it’s better environmentally, budget-wise, and even logistically, to lose the bottled water habit for meetings. And yet, we still see them on ice at breaks, so I guess the trend toward pitchers and other forms of water dispensers hasn’t quite hit the mainstream (so to speak).

Andy McNeill, principle and CEO, American Meetings, Inc., tackles just this topic in this blog post that covers the topic nicely, including lots of related links to more resources and bottle alternatives AMI has found.

I can’t vouch for its total accuracy, but this is one handy guide to tipping around the world.

I know I like to complain about airline chicanery when it comes to fees, but this one blew my mind: A Comtel flight en route from India to the U.K. stopped in Vienna and refused to compete the trip until passengers pulled out their ATM cards to raise another $31,000 to pay for gas. Seriously??

The results of the Velvet Chainsaw/Tagoras survey on speakers are in: Here are the top 15 things about speakers that drive meeting planners nuts. I can’t think of anything to add to the list, can you? Speakers, if you’re doing any of those 15 things, I beg you on behalf of planners (and conference-goers) everywhere to please stop!