FEATURES

High-tech solutions for conferences

19 March

Smaller meetings that may not necessitate a large-scale vote or text response can still benefit from information-sharing systems. The recently released MeetingPod, from Synanto, is a user-friendly desktop device that solves a range of common communication problems – and has the potential to become an indispensable tool for the meetings industry.

The wireless system shares all the meeting’s relevant information between attendees, cutting out unnecessary paperwork and endless photocopies, and reducing the meeting’s general level of waste – paper and time. When logging off, delegates can save all the information on a USB memory stick or have it emailed to them. And when they get back to the office, everything is there – from a full record of the event and everyone’s electronic business cards to the agenda, minutes, personal notes, the results of any votes taken, and an Outlook-compatible calendar record.

The MeetingPod is designed to be an attractive addition to any meeting room as well as a functional workhorse. Its battery life – a full 10-16 hours – means that wires don’t have to intrude on the meeting table, and its ergonomic design incorporates highly useful electronic nameplates – inspired by the fact that delegates are more effective at meetings if they know the names of the other people at the table.

These new innovations in conferencing technology provide a direct benefit to speakers and delegates, but what new technology provides help for the conference organisers themselves? The answer lies in new software packages, unavailable a decade ago, which have been specifically designed to make the conference organiser’s job easier and minimise the margin for error when planning an event.

There are various packages on the market at the moment, most of which, because they have been tailored for a specific purpose, offer a fairly comprehensive solution to event planners. One of the oldest established providers is Velvet Software, set up in 1998, who have used a decade of experience to craft a selection of online solutions for event organisers.

Velvet Software’s online accommodation booking system, ConferenceBOOKINGS, is a simple-to-use piece of software that creates a customised, dedicated website for each event. This allows accommodation providers to access the system directly and provide initial allocations and pricing, while delegates can make and amend reservations using a link from the event website. The complementary, linked delegate registration package, reg.istrations.com, is a hosted web application providing a powerful and user-friendly system designed to accommodate a broad range of meeting styles and sizes, coping with variables such as multiple delegate types and multiple packages as well as online payment.

Great advances in technology have shaped the conference industry significantly over the past 10 years, and there’s little doubt they will continue to do so into the future. In the next feature on high-tech conferencing, we will look at the development of live, online video conferencing, and the potential effects the latest link-up technology will have on an industry that’s constantly evolving.