Corbin Ball, CMP, CSP, DES, Corbin Ball Associates
Corbin Ball is a speaker and independent third-party consultant focusing on meetings technology. With 20 years experience of running international citywide technology meetings, he now helps clients worldwide use technology to save time and improve productivity. Mobile event apps have become the standard for many events, with more than 300 products to choose from. With so many choices, we are seeing an evolution expanding from simple agenda apps to ones that can provide specialized benefits, including audience engagement, advanced networking and much more.
Six best apps 2015 by Corbin Ball
1. InItLive – This volunteer and staff management software system and app is a novel product for a specific challenge of managing onsite staff and volunteers. The product has been tested, the pricing is reasonable and a significant benefit for planners with this kind of need (www.initlive.com).
2. Event Pilot – is a mobile event guide app, specialized for large scientific/medical meetings. It has a number of strong features, including the ability to handle very large sessions, extensive search capabilities, the use of beacon technology, offline abstracts, audience polling, text Q&A, slide distribution with notes, CME tracking and more. There are many mobile event guides, some with similar features, but this is unique in its vertical market focus, wide range of tools and design (ativsoftware.com).
3. Blue Stone – This app takes a novel approach to business contact exchange at events and exhibitions. It is completely smartphone-based and provides extensive capabilities to capture business card information, distribute marketing literature, integration with CRM systems and robust analytics (www.bluestonebd.com).
4. Event Farm – Many events do not require an elaborate registration check-in procedure – a quick check-in to verify attendance is all that is required. This app works to make this process much quicker and more efficient. This app helps planners to move away from bulky and slow printed spreadsheets to a mobile solution that can sync with multiple devices, with arrival alert notification for VIPs, with real-time analytics and much more (www.eventfarm.com).
5. Conferences i/o – There are several good mobile audience polling tools. This one I have personally found to be reliable and easy to use. It integrates with PowerPoint, it has a range of survey capabilities, it has social Q&A (attendees can vote on questions they like with the question with the most votes rising to the top), analytics and more (www.conferences.io).
6. Event Base – This full-featured mobile event app uses beacon technology to assist in event networking. Beacons are small, inexpensive “digital lighthouses” that interact with the mobile event app when it comes into range (from 1-50 metres). Eventbase allows attendees to enter their interest areas into the app and, when an individual of like interest comes within range, the attendee receives a pop-up notification with the person’s picture and interest areas (eventbase.com).
