Selling tickets on Facebook is a natural step towards providing a service (selling tickets) where the users are already present (Facebook is expected to reach 1 billion users by August 2012, link). Most big online ticketing platforms (Eventbrite, Amiando, Ticketea) already offer the possibility to add a ticket module to Facebook pages and I’ve came across quite a few events using them.

MuseumNext is all about new ways of using technology, and we are now selling tickets directly from our Facebook page on.fb.me/wCw5NN

— MuseumNext (@MuseumNext) January 12, 2012

While it’s too early to say if Facebook is an effective channel to sell tickets, it seems rather obvious that it has a big potential in becoming an important sales channel for events:

• Right now Facebook is used mostly used as a communications channel, helping spread the word about an event (either through people that post to their timelines a mention/link to a particular event or because the organizer posts news to the event’s Facebook page) than a direct sales channel, so don’t expect big sales immediately. Users have to get used to having the possibility of buying tickets directly in the Facebook page
• Trust: would you prefer to buy an expensive ticket (e.g.: 1,000+ USD) on Facebook or would you rather buy it on the event’s page, especially if it’s a corporate event? Cheaper tickets (e.g.: less than 50 USD) probably don’t suffer from this trust issue
• Regarding the previous point, it might be just a matter of time until most people feel comfortable buying inside Facebook
• Facebook is rapidly becoming a sort of parallel Internet, with users spending most of their online experience inside of it. For your event -especially if it targets a young audience- being on Facebook is a must, selling tickets on it will become it too
• Findability 1: selling on Facebook should not be your only ticket sales channel as there’s still many people not on Facebook yet or who use it on a rare basis
• Findability 2: another reason to have an alternative ticket sales channel is that search engines like Google are not always good at indexing specific Facebook pages, so potential attendees might not find the ticket sales page as easy as the one in your own website.

Examples of tickets sales inside Facebook Pages

Online ticketing on a Facebook page using Amiando

Online ticketing on a Facebook page using Eventbrite

Concert tickets on sale on Ticketea's Facebook page

Intro photo taken from: http://gruvi.tv/social-marketing/12-tips-for-marketing-movies-on-facebook/

You have an iPad but are afraid of it slipping from your hands while you’re speaking on-stage? Grabbit has a solution for both iPad 1 and iPad 2 owners, and at a quite affordable price too. With it’s hardshell body and quality leader strap, it appeals to both technologists and business men alike. It has several other features but it’s the strap what makes it useful for event organizers and speakers alike, or as they write “Ideal for presentations & one-hand entries. Great for showrooms, inventory work, hospitals, conference rooms, podiums & stages.”

 
For more details visit the official website and online store.

Back in March I wrote about TEDx in a Box, a smart idea which challenged the assumption that you need a conference room for holding a conference. The concept is simple: pack a box with a portable pico-projector, a source (like a netbook) containing TED Talks and you can host your event wherever you are (a remote village in the middle of the savannah, a tent, your backyard wall), as long as you have a surface to project on. Now a further iteration of the concept has also made the need for an electrical socket (and a wall) non essential by packing a portable battery that can feed both the projector and the computer.

Update: the “official” TEDx blogpost on the TEDx in a box is here

You think that your conference’s videos are not being watched by enough people or even worse by the right people? Maybe the problem is that they don’t know that those wonderful videos exist and you are doing nothing to help them discover them!

One of the biggest challenges created by the amount of information available online is “discoverability”, the chance of finding the right information through any means (search, recommendation, etc). dotSUB comes in to the rescue, at least for video content.

Solving Video Discovery

David Orban (linkedin, twitter) is the CEO of dotSUB, whose technology “powers captions and translations as subtitles in any online video in any language so more people can view and understand them across Internet and mobile screens around the world”.

In the interview posted above, which I made during Frontiers of Interaction ’11 (disclaimer: I was its conference director during 2010), David explains that “the solution for video discovery is to use the speaker’s message”, meaning that by making the text of the transcriptions and translations of videos available for search engines to index, you are creating a rich layer of metadata that goes well beyond the title, tags and name of the video’s author, which is usually the only information available while you’re searching.

Making Your Video Available To A Larger Audience

Apart from findability through search engines, the next most important barrier to tap into a larger audience is probably language. Say your content is available not in English (the esperanto of the web) but in French or Italian. The amount of people that will be able to understand that content is quite limited. By enabling translations (be it by crowd-sourcing it to amateur translators or professional ones), you increase the amount of people that can find value in watching your video. As an example, David mentions that TED’s Open Translation project (based on dotSUB technology) has made TED Talks available in 90 (!!) languages thanks to 6,000 volunteers spread all over the world. Another benefit is that written text makes the content of the video available to people with hearing impairments.

dotSUB’s next generation platform will soon extend their services to offer new solutions for DISCOVERY, DISTRIBUTION and MONETIZATION, the three key challenges for online content.

You can find more details about dotSUB’s services here.

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I often speak about the need to challenge the basic assumptions of a conference in order to improve the event’s experience, and one of these assumptions is that you need a big screen so that the speaker can show his slides, etc.

A common deterrent to change the way an event develops is the lack of tools that conference organizers have access to, specially in events with small budgets. Now the “App Economy” is providing many of those tools at a very low price and Idea Flight (website, iTunes, twitter) is an example of his.

Idea Flight is an iPad App developed by magazine incumbent Conde Nast that enables a presenter to run his presentation from his iPad and have up to 14 other iPads following it through the same wifi network (or 3 in total via Bluetooth). While it’s not yet ready for being used in large conferences, it might become very useful in your next corporate meeting and maybe sometime soon enough it will scale up to allow more simultaneous users.

Idea Flight lets one person (the Pilot) use their iPad to control a presentation to an audience (their Passengers) to other iPads via Wi-Fi or Bluetooth. This does not require additional cameras, equipment, dongles, connectors or wires. The transfer happens so the Pilot has complete control over whether or not the Passengers have access to a hard copy. As a Pilot, one swipes through their presentation at their speed and can lock and unlock the content for Passenger to browse at their will. Files can be accessed via Dropbox, iTunes file sharing, email, or Keynote.

Document Format

It currently only accepts documents in PDF format, which can conveniently be obtained by exporting a document from both Apple’s Keynote and Microsoft’s PowerPoint (and several other programs). Hopefully other formats will follow soon.

LinkedIn Integration

A nifty feature from Idea Flight is the integration with Linkedin profiles. Attendees can make their profile visible to the other attendees so that they can exchange their professional details without needing paper business cards.

Cost

The App is free for “passengers”, e.i. people that follow the presentation. To enable the “pilot” function you need to make an in-App purchase that costs 5.99 euro.

Limitations

As I mentioned before, for the time being the App is limited to only one format (PDF), one device (iPad) and the amount of people that can be included in a presentation (15 wifi, 3 bluetooth).

Fixes to increase the usefulness

Hopefully, Idea Flight will soon be available for other mobile devices (tablets) but also laptops. I often carry my 11″ macbook air to meetings, instead of the iPad.

Prezi (web, twitter) has been out for a few years now and while it’s been constantly improving, it’s major challenge according to co-founder and head of design Adam Somlai-Fischer (profile, twitter), is to keep on making the interface more and more intuitive, especially for newcomers.

The real innovation that Prezi introduced to the digital presentation software scenario, dominated by the PowerPoint/Keynote paradigm, is that of providing a broad canvas where you can arrange your ideas as if they were on paper. The hierarchy of these ideas can be managed by zoom-ins and zoom-outs, giving your presentation a multi-level dimension over a virtual 3rd axis (it’s all easier than it sounds). The content can be easily moved around and grouped without the constraint of having to stay inside a “slide”, a concept alien to Prezi. Once all your content is in, you can create a “path” to guide your storytelling.

In the following video, Adam describes how Prezi has changed the way of making presentations and the biggest challenge that lays ahead of them.

I’ve been using Prezi for a couple of years now and it’s just that elimination of the single slide container what makes me come back to it for most of my presentations. I’m no longer troubled by formatting, aligning or distributing content within each slide, a process that usually takes forever in PowerPoint. The auto-center and frame features of Prezi allow me to concentrate on the content and the flow I want it to have during the presentation.

Below is the Prezi that Adam Somlai-Fischer used for his talk at Frontiers of Interaction 2011, where we met for this interview.

Today Storify has opened to the public it’s service for creating stories by aggregating content published on social media like Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Flickr and others. It could prove a perfect tool for the daunting task of summarizing of curating the best tweets, photos, videos and articles produced by the audience (and organizers) of your conference.

Some time ago Google Wave offered a similar (though way more technical and unstable) way to do this by crowdsourcing the process (but Wave is now dead). The difference with Storify is that the curator is one (e.g. the conference organizer) but can pull resources from several different users and also from other Storify feeds.

Storify is very straightforward: you sign in with your Twitter account, you search for the desired content through keywords, users, etc and then just drag-and-drop the content into your story’s timeline.

At the end of the aggregation process you can embed your story, for example in the event’s website.

Storify is a way to tell stories using social media such as Tweets, photos and videos. You search multiple social networks from one place, and then drag individual elements into your story. You can re-order the elements and also add text to give context to your readers. From Storift’s FAQ

To test the service, I created a [very] short story with content from the Lift Conference that took place last February in Geneva.

A new model for online ticketing.

The standard booking fee for most events is 10 percent of the ticket’s face value, and often there’s a transaction charge on top of that. London-based Ticket Tailor, on the other hand, abolishes mandatory booking fees altogether. Instead, event organizers users pay a monthly fee ranging from GBP 6 for one event per month and unlimited tickets to GBP 75 for unlimited event listings and tickets. A free version even lets users sell up to 10 tickets for a single monthly event. Either way, those monthly fees earn users the ability to keep all the proceeds from their ticket sales, paid via PayPal. Ticket Tailor lets users set and keep their own booking fees, if they want; it also offers graphs and tables summarizing sales data.

[via Springwise]

The team behind the presentation software Prezi published today a free App to view Prezis on the iPad (iTunes link). While the application does not allow you to edit your files (they say it’s coming), you can download the ones stored  in your online account to show them on Apple’s tablet.

I’m a long time user (and fan) of Prezi and I tried it as soon as it was available. Unfortunately in the 2 presentatios I tried, the layout was all scrambled and the movements didn’t center on the frames correctly. Hopefully they’ll fix that soon.

Screen capture from the Prezi iPad App

From the official announcement on Prezi’s blog:

We’ll regularly update the Prezi for the iPad app. When using the current version please consider the following:

1. Prezi for the iPad app allows you to show prezis that were previously created on your computer. The app does not have editor features.
2. YouTube videos, PDF and SWF files does not work in the current version of Prezi for the iPad.
3. When you open a prezi for the first time on your iPad, it can take a while to load depending on the size of your prezi. Even big prezis load super quick for the second run.

From TechCrunch’s post:

Right off the bat: we all know the iPad doesn’t support Flash, so not all existing presentations can be viewed in full if they contain Flash material such as videos. Apart from that, all presentations that were made in the past should be flawlessly viewable on the iPad.

When you open a prezi for the first time on your iPad, it can take a while to load depending on the size of your prezi. Even big prezis load super quick for the second run.

YouTube videos, PDF and SWF files does not work in the current version of Prezi for the iPad.

In a previous article I wrote that the 2010 edition of Le Web had about 3,000 attendees which could be both a networking blessing or a nightmare.  For me it was the former as I managed to have those 8 or 10 meaningful meetings that justified my stay in Paris. I was able to do so thanks to Presdo Match, an online tool for messaging and scheduling meetings during conferences which makes it easy for the attendees and exhibitors to find each other based on matching interests, enabling them to securely communicate and schedule one-on-one meetings at an event

Eric Ly (linkedin, twitter), previously a co-founder of Linkedin, is the founder of Presdo which launched the scheduling tool Presdo Match in September 2010.  In the video below he describes the features and future goals for Presdo Match.

I’m not surprised that Eric had received meeting requests from several of the other conference organizers attending Le Web, as facilitating networking between attendees is one of the main goals we have when organizing an event. There are not many good off-the-shelf tools out there that can be easily implemented and building your own is often not a road we want to follow (costs, maintenance, constant tech updates, etc). As he said at the end of the interview, “It seems we touched a pain point here”.

I’m looking forward to a product demo to understand Presdo Match’s full potential and maybe use it in one of my upcoming conferences.

Pros

• Seamless integration with Linkedin: you see rich profiles and who from your network is attending the same event
• You can view the other delegates attending
• Attendees can easily send messages, meeting requests and schedule them
• The system automatically offers which are your free times and a list of pre-established meeting points to choose from
• Mobile version compatible with any smartphone (based on html and not a proprietary OS app)
• The People Genius provides personalized recommendations on who to meet, and they can find out who they know from their social network is attending the event
• Offers several ways to search for interesting attendees (name, company, keywords)

The People Genius suggest people with similar interests

Cons

• If you have one, it duplicates your attendee network (Le Web didn’t have one)
• The design is rather basic and dull – it’s not clear how much control the event organizer has to personalize the page to its event look & feel (when will we see a tumblr-design like tool?)
• The “like” feature generated a lot of undesired emails during the days previous to the event. You could decide not to receive any emails at all or a single one for each activity regarding your profile (people that liked you, requested a meeting or sent a message). I would have preferred to receive a daily summary
• Photos were too small (especially on the mobile site) and it was often difficult to identify a person you’ve never met before (especially with 3,000 attendees filling up the networking areas at Le Web)

Screen captures from Presdo Match on my iPhone

Revenue model

While Eric didn’t say it directly, I believe they are open to do barter agreements in order to generate a critical mass (in 4:38 he does mention the interest in doing “a successful pilot first” and then establishing a long-term working relationship ).

On their website they present a revenue model consisting of either an individual fee of 3,99 USD for each attendee or  a lump-sum for the event starting at 999 USD.

Why didn’t Linkedin do it?

That’s one of the first questions I asked myself. As with digital business card exchange, I wonder why does Linkedin ignore these two extremely valuable features. While Linkedin is the number one professional profile database/social-network, it offers a poorly designed “In Person” function in their iPhone app and nothing at all for event scheduling . It would improve the attendees experience (by not having to set up a new professional profile on a different platform) and would surely generate new revenues.

Currently Presdo Match creates a separate attendee profile for each event but Eric mentions that they “want to eventually enable kind of a database of profiles that people can have in the Presdo Match system so that they can reuse their profiles depending on what kind of event they’re going to”. In that case I see a potential overlap with Linkedin.

It’s not a perfect world, especially if you already have a network of delegates

Le Web didn’t have their own network of attendees so Presdo Match was satisfied both the need of finding out who was attending (actually Le Web did provide a “flat” list of names, companies and urls of the attendees) and messaging or scheduling meetings with each other. I wonder how would Presdo Match tie in with a conference that already has a user database (aka community) with profiles, photos, messaging, etc but no scheduling tool (I’m thinking of events like Lift and TED). As a conference organizer (and as an attendee), I wouldn’t like to ask the delegates to duplicate their profile just for the scheduling, as they already spent time filling in my proprietary database. Also, what happens with the user profiles after the license agreement with Presdo has ended? (My guess: you lose everything and in the future you’ll have to ask attendees to go through the whole process again).

In conclusion, the conference market needs tools like Presdo Match and if they make the right moves and associate with some of the popular ticketing platforms (Amiando, Eventbrite, etc) they might pick up a sizable share. If they ever create a unified profile that can be used for several events, it would make sense to have a freemium formula like the ticketing platforms (free for free events, payed for events with a ticket price).