Mobile ticketing systems have been around for some years but yet were too complicated for attendees and often required a big investment by the event organizer. Both constraints kept them doing things the good ol’ way but as advanced mobile devices (smartphones, tablets, etc) become ubiquitous, the possibility of eliminating paper tickets move closer to reality. We have become so dependent on our mobile phones that most people might forget their wallet, their [paper] ticket or the keys but not so their phone.

Mobile ticketing may offer myriad benefits for both event managers and consumers, but most options still require specialized scanning hardware to read the ticket from the user’s device. Not so Twicketer, a new service that delivers event tickets that can be verified and validated right on the smartphone.

Now in beta, Wisconsin-based Twicketer is powered by technology from its Danish parent company, ScreenTicket, that uses a patent-pending system called On Device Verification. How it works: Event managers can send out links with a shortened URL to their events through social media including Twitter, Facebook and MySpace. From there, attendees can buy their mobile tickets online by simply following the included link. Once it’s time for the event, the mobile ticket can be scanned and verified onsite without any scanning hardware. Twicketer charges a service fee of USD 0.99 for every ticket sold; it can also be used to distribute mobile coupons and vouchers. [Via Springwise]

Renato Valdez Olmos holding the E-connector

You might think that My Name is E, a Dutch startup, is just an service related to the exchange of social business cards like the that of competitors Poken and Mingle360. While this is true, it is only half of the story. Today it is basically an online platform that allows people to share business cards, though in their development roadmap they have much higher objectives.

The philosophy of the team behind My Name is E (where E is a flexible name that stands for “electronic”, “emotional”, “everyone” or whatever other meaning the user will give it) is that of empowering the “choice of the user” through the concept of touch. Touching objects or people through a physical device that can be your mobile phone, the E-connector or in the future other gadgets, will create a digital exchange through a physical action (they call it “online information in the physical world”).

I have recently visited Renato at E’s headquarters in Amsterdam. Listen to him explaining present and future features of My Name is E:

My Name is E has a huge potential in conferences and events: think of those conferences from which you come back packed in business cards and brochures that rapidly end in your trash bin. Apart from the ecological point of view (tons of paper copies produced but very few of them are effectively transmitting the message they were created for), we are overwhelmed by information and classifying it or being able to search through it is becoming a real challenge. Imagine RFID tags and QR codes applied in conference booths, posters, cards, etc and that you are able to choose with which of them you want to interact by just passing your “reader” over it. The reader can be the E connector, or your mobile. The connector, an extra piece of hardware that you will reluctantly carry in your pocket, is a transitional technology until our mobiles will be online by default (in most Western countries only a minority of mobile phones are constantly connected to the internet as it is still rather expensive for most users) and/or will have NFC RFID technology incorporated (it should happen in the next 5 years, in Japan is already a reality for many devices).

It is all about the experience rather than what object people use to exchange information. According to Renato Valdez Olmos, Chief Technology and Product Officer of My Name is E, this year is about connecting people (e.i. exchanging business cards) and the next one will be about connecting people with the environment (e.i. connecting people with objects) and the interactions derived from those experiences.

Attendees blogging during an event

There are plenty of online tools to make the live coverage of your conference over the internet. In this article I have summarized the most useful, powerful and easier to use ones.

The global availability of broadband and a bunch of web 2.0 services have made the live transmission of an event a low cost (if not free) and rather easy activity. In particular the power balance has changed: in the past, only the organizer could broadcast what was going on during the conference but nowadays almost anyone with a mobile phone or laptop+internet connection can do so.

The best way to proceed is for the organizer to produce its own flux of information plus encouraging the attendees to do the same on their own, providing them with free wi-fi internet access. The only risk is that if you produce a poor event, the world will know it immediately from the activity produced by your attendees… anyway you cannot hide, so the best thing is to give free access and try to do your best to organize a remarkable event.

Define your tag

Independently of which tools you or your audience will be using, it is very important that you define the official tag (also known as hashtag) of the event and that you communicate it to everyone, prior, during and after the conference. This will allow you to easily track the conversations that talk about you.

A tag is a short keyword that should represent the name of your conference. I also advice you to include in the tag the year the event is taking place in. Try to keep the tag as short  as possible (but still representative) to save characters in services like Twitter, that only allows a limited number of characters (140) for each message.

Example: if your event is called “Green Business 2009” your tag could be something like “greenbiz09”, often represented as #greenbiz09, or “gbiz09”. The “#” tells programs like Twitter that this is your tag and makes it easier to track the conversation through a search engine.

Micro-blogging

Micro-blogging services are amongst the most popular ones today. The content consists of several short messages that describe what is going on at the conference, usually in real time.

Cover it Live (www.coveritlive.com)

Cover-it-live is a very powerful online application which is being used by big and small companies to transmit live events like conferences, sports matches, political announcements, etc.

Advantages

• Cover-it-live works as a widget you can embed in your website or blog and does not require to download an application.
• It allows multiple users to input information which can consist of text, images, videos and files to download.
• The information is displayed as a chronological feed that updates itself without needing to refresh the browser.
• The system allows comments by followers, which can be moderated by the owners of the feed.
• Once the live coverage is finished, Cover-it-live saves all the content and allows you to display it so that users can still watch it as a documentation of what happened.

Cost: free for now . In the future it will offer a premium version will allow some interface personalization, etc.

Scribble Live (www.scribblelive.com)

Similar in function to Cover it Live, it offers some advantages. I haven’t personally tried it yet but have seen it in use by big players like TechCrunch and others.

Advantages (apart from the ones shared with Cover it live)

• Website integration which means that  you can cross-post to your Wordpress Blog, or embed an iFrame into any web page, create a customized html at the end of your event and paste it into your site. Their system is optimized so that  the content lives on your website and it can be indexed by all search engines, which means more traffic for you.
• Direct integration to several services like Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, etc
• Translation tool to automatically translate your content into many other languages.

Cost: it is free but also offers an Enterprise solution.

Twitter (www.twitter.com)

Probably one of the most talked about services, Twitter allows you to produce short messages of 140 characters, or “Twits”.

Advantages

Twitter logo

• Inputs can be written through Twitter’s web interface or through dozens of third party applications from your computer (like Twhirl or Seesmic Desktop) or internet enabled mobile phone.
• Your followers on Twitter automatically get updates from your messages and can reply or send direct messages to you.
• Twitter is rather ubiquitous right now and you will find that during events the most of the content published through this service comes from the audience, so it is very useful to see in real time what they are saying and take that as feedback to improve or change things on the go.
• Connecting your Twitter account to your Facebook or FriendFeed accounts (or others too) is very easy and it allows you to reach your followers on those services too.
• Links to images can also be published on Twitter through third party services like Twitpic and many others.
• Powerful search tool.

Cost: Twitter is free!

FriendFeed (www.friendfeed.com)

FriendFeed produces a real time feed of information directly through its web interface by aggregating your other social networking sources (like Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, del.icio.us, etc).

Advantages

• FriendFeed creates a unique information feed from most of your online sources, acting as an aggregator. It allows you to follow what goes online in many different social networks through a central web interface.
• This service, opposed to Twitter, fosters the creation of conversations by allowing comments under each source of information. It empowers your direct contacts and their contacts to participate, extending the reach of your inputs.
• Groups: you can create a group (previously know as “rooms”) and invite all your contacts and other people (for example by promoting your FriendFeed group on the conference’s website) to concentrate all the talks and inputs related to your event. This allows you and other people to follow a dedicate feed that aggregates the information produced by different sources/people in just one place.

Cost: FriendFeed is free too!

Video Streaming

Video online streaming allows you (but not only) to broadcast what’s going on during your conference with quality that ranges from mediocre to high definition, depending on the service used and your broadband internet quality.

There are many services to broadcast live and I selected three of the most popular and powerful ones.

Livestream (www.livestream.com)

Probably one of the most powerful streaming services, the recently renamed Livestream (previously known as Mogulus) is a very versatile tool that may not only allows live video broadcasting but also offers professional editing and live commenting & interaction instruments.

Advantages

• Livestream is easy to setup and has a huge array of options to personalize your transmission. It’s up to you to decide which features to use.
• You can control more than one source of video, which allows you to use different cameras and other sources to create a single video stream.
• You can create your own TV like channel with a defined url (like “www.livestream.com/my-event-name”) to transmit all your events so that you don’t need to create a different web address each time.
• You can embed a widget with your video streaming in your own website.
• Livestream provides a chat window where watchers can comment and interact with the vide producer and between themselves.
• You can use the Livestream website to promote your videos.
• The quality of the service is related to the quality of your internet connection but you can obtain decent enough quality with a normal internet service.

Cost: the basic service is free but you can also pay to activate professional features and have more options to personalize your channel.

UStream (www.ustream.tv)

Basically it is similar to Livestream but IMHO a bit less powerful. Used to broadcast many different kinds of events.

Cost: the service is free to use.

Qik (www.qik.com)

The main characteristic of Qik is that you can use it through your mobile phone, which means that anyone with an internet enabled phone with a camera can become a video source. Quality varies depending on the internet service used but in general Qik is very easy to use and comes as a default application with many mobiles (like the new Nokia N97) or as a downloadable application (for iPhone and others).

Advantages: simple and easy to set up and use, you can start video broadcasting wherever you are using your mobile phone.

Cost: free.

Do you use any other online tools to cover your conference? Please share them with us!

BuddyPress logo

BuddyPress is a new suite of plugins for WordPress MU (the multi-user version of WordPress) that adds new features that transform your blog/website into a Social Network. These features allow event organizers to support their own community (or build one) with a professional social networking layer, making your conference/s live before, during and after the physical event takes place.

Note: this is not intended to be a technical article but an introduction of how BudyPress can be useful to conference managers that want to create an online community around their events.

Andy Peatling

Last Friday, at the Italian edition of WordCamp 2009 that took place in Milan, I met Andy Peatling, one of the main developers behing the BudyPress project. Andy explained during the main features and advantages of using BuddyPress and after that we discussed how it could be applied to extend the reach of an event by creating a space of interaction way before and after the conference. In general having your own social network costs a lot of money, software platforms are rigid and difficult to modify or way too complicated to manage for the event organizer. BuddyPress presents a different approach to this situation as it was born with the same philosophy behind WordPress, which is one of the most popular (and powerful) blogging platforms available today.

While having your community hosted insiede a third party’s social network is useful (and often recommended) for reaching to new people, a big issue is that you don’t have control on what the third party (like Facebook, LinkedIn, Xing, Ning, etc) might do with the information of your users, the interface, old & new features, etc. For example Facebook has changed its services several times without asking and if tomorrow they decide to close (not likely but possible), all the information of your users, the connections, etc will be lost… independently of the fact that this might affect your business or the members of your community.

The main advantages of using BudyPress vs proprietary platforms or creating your community on third party social networks are:

• It allows you to be independent and own your community’s information. This is summarized in BYOTOS (“be your own terms of service”)
• BuddyPress is Open Source and being part of WordPress it means tens of thousands of developers are creating new add-ons and testing it around the World
• The high number of developers and users involved means that it is stable. Bugs are quickly identified and solved
• It is specially appealing for companies that BudyPress (and WordPress) is FREE! (you might need to pay a techie and graphic designer to implement it with the looks you want)
• It is easy and fast to deploy. You do not neet a big team of IT staff to manage it
• BudyPress/Wordpress is fully customizable through CSS and templates so that it can seamlessly integrate with your present brand image

Having the BudyPress social network layer in WordPress MU allows you to add social features to create your online community. It will allow the organizer and the members interact and (more important!) interaction between community members. The following features are already available on BudyPress and more will be rolling out soon from the developer’s community:

• extended user profiles/personal pages
• private messaging
• groups
• forums
• albums
• status updates

Follow the slides used by Andy Peatling during his BuddyPress presentation during WordCamp, explaining the main reasons to adopt it.

Use the following links for more information on BuddyPress and WordPress MU. There is also a demo of BudyPress available to see how it works. Check this one out if you don’t know what WordPress is.