How Meetings Benefit From Today's Technology: Meetings & Conventions - 1 views
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Mobile Apps Mobile technology is one of the hottest areas of development in any industry. Mobile applications will continue to change the way we meet and travel, and their influence will continue to grow. Global smartphone wholesale revenues were expected to hit $97.3 billion in 2010, according to New York City-based ABI Research -- a year-over-year jump of nearly 57 percent. ABI expects revenues to climb to more than $175 billion by 2015. As a fast-growing majority of planners and attendees have smartphones in hand, the opportunities for mobile meetings management and mobile event engagement will skyrocket.
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How they are being used. App development is occurring at breakneck speed, and potentially thousands could be of use to planners. MeetingApps.com is making efforts to list them all; as of press time, the site had catalogued nearly 1,000 different meeting apps, across 26 different categories, for the iOS alone. Also listed are a steadily growing number of meeting apps for the BlackBerry, and the site has plans to catalog Android apps as well.
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Meetings management apps. These often are free and provide planners the ability to tap into web-based meeting platforms from their mobile devices while on-site or in transit. In many cases, the apps provide mobile access to a platform for which users already pay. In theory, a dedicated app might not be necessary for that, as long as planners have access to the Internet; but an app that provides a phone-friendly interface and optimizes the display for mobile-device viewing can make the difference between incredibly useful and utterly useless access while away from one's desk.
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Meeting apps for attendees. Think of these as "electronic event programs plus." These event-specific apps may be downloaded by attendees, nearly always for free, and can include all of the speaker, scheduling, seminar, keynote and attendee information, along with exhibit floor maps, that might be found in a printed program. Additional features could include everything from social-media platform links to attendee messaging or local restaurant listings.
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Toronto-based 5Touch Solutions, which makes the EventMobi app, has seen 70 percent of attendees download the app at some tech shows, according to president and founder Bob Vaez, and an average 40 to 60 percent download rate overall. Those numbers have grown quickly, says Vaez; as they continue to grow, so too will opportunities to generate revenue from the apps through sponsorships and advertising.
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There are kinds of meeting technologies in nowadays. This article mainly introduced how Mobile Apps affect this industry. It gave a description of two categories of mobile apps which are particularly relevant to meetings. They are meeting management apps and meeting apps for attendees. App use is gaining traction among attendees, particularly when event producers market it well.