Q: To get us warmed up could you tell us a little bit about your background and the aspect of your career of which you are most proud?
My background is in software development and consulting, which has proven beneficial to start and run a successful tech start-up in Vienna.
The aspect of my career I am most proud of is Waytation – as I built the company with a small team from scratch, and now 3 years later, we are working with Deutsche Messe, the European Associations of the Study of the Liver, and many other big players in the industry.
Q: How and in which direction will the Meeting industry change in the future?
The need of digital innovation in the Meeting industry has inspired hundreds of people around the globe to create new products and services to feel this need. This tendency will continue to soar, as the industry embraces new technologies throughput the event lifecycle.
I think that event planners have to be a lot more accountable now in the era of data analytics, since their visitors and shareholders need concrete numbers rather than gut feelings. This is will be a big topic in the next 5 years, and organizers already need a strategy to serve it.
Q: Which innovations in your opinion will most influence the organisation of events?
The automatization of our modern day life will influence how events are planned and executed, so both event planners and visitors can save time and money. Gamification is already influencing the meeting industry and pushing planners to get creative with the on-site experiences of their visitors. For example, the new format CEBIT in Hannover is introducing a festival area to its exhibition.
Q: What personally inspires you?
“Measure what is measurable, and make measurable what is not so”
― Galileo Galilei
My personal motto is a reminder of what inspires me the most – to find new ways to disrupt old processes and make them measurable.
About Waytation
Q: Please explain to our readers what are the main features of Waytation?
Waytation offers event planners the first seamless solution to capture and analyse the full journey of every single visitor at any conference and exhibition using the WayTag. With set-up, easily hours before the event, and visualization in a final report on the ‘Infinity’ web platform, it is used for performance and ROI evaluation of booths, speakers, session topics and room allocations.
Main features of our all in-one solution:
- Smart badges: with the WayTags – small Bluetooth 4.0 chips that are attached to the visitors’ badges, we log where event visitors went by the minute.
- The “Infinity” Web Platform: our user-friendly dashboard, where our clients get their final report and can evaluate the ROI of the overall event.
- CMEasy – Seamless session counting and CME/CDP granting (based only on delegates’ presence in a session room)
Q:Who was the Waytation designed for?
Waytation’s solutions are designed for event planners who organize up 500 visitors’ conferences and exhibitions anywhere in the world.
Q: What are the statistics behind the success of Waytation?
In its first 3 years Waytation captured the on-site journeys of over 90,000 delegates across 2 continents; Analyzed 25,000 lectures at a range of Associations conferences: And it is about to equip thousands of visitors with its smart badges at the new format CEBIT in Hannover.
Q: What are the biggest challenges for you on the position at Waytation?
The biggest challenge for me at Waytation is to bring digital innovation forward in the industry internationally with a compact team from Vienna.
