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10 Useful and Free Mac Applications to Run Events

EMBlog — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 11:06:45 +0000

No secret we love Macs and Apple when it comes to getting things done. If you are a member of the Apple tribe, here are few applications that will help in running your event.

We had a blast with iPhone earlier this year. Now the time to show you how your Mac could become an extreme productivity tool and get your events done.

10. Mindnote

Successful events are carefully planned. Mind Mapping initiates the process of planning. It helps in skimming ideas and identifying KPIs. Mindnote is a great tool to draw nice looking and effective mind maps. It comes with a free version which covers all the essentials. Go for it!

9. iGTD

If you are an event planner and never heard of Getting Things Done, now the time to catch up. The famous book started a series of dedicated applications. Most of them are extremely pricey and not worth the money. iGTD is a great Project Management tool and it comes for free, so give it a go.

8. Notebook

You planned your project and rationalized it. Right about time to clear the clutter and start doing things. Notebook is a light application that helps in clearing the clutter on your desktop. Get back your focus.

7. Klok (Adobe Air)

Reality is that an increasing number of event professionals are now freelancing. If this is you, you should track the time you spend at projects and bill for that. Popular Mac or Windows applications that track time charge big monies, but you can get Klok for free. It runs with Adobe Air (which makes it Windows, Mac or Linux compliant). If you don’t have Air installed, Klok will install it for you.

6. Appointments

OK, you are up and running. You are meeting suppliers, clients and stakeholders. Appointments saves all the relevant info about your contacts and alerts you of upcoming meetings. Never be late again!

5. NeoOffice

For those who don’t like or cannot afford Office/Openoffice/iWork, NeoOffice is a specifically Mac designed office suite for your docs, spreadsheets and presentations.

4. Anxiety

We love To Do applications. We think that To Do List are the most effective way of getting things done. Anxiety depicts a feeling that you have experienced if you run events, but also empowers you to get rid of it by delivering instead of procrastinating.

3. Jing

Virtual Events, Webinars, Screencasts and the like are trending topics within the industry. Jing enables screencasting and video recording easily and for free, which is not usually the case in this software niche.

2. Caffeine

One of the most annoying features of the Mac is the Auto-Sleep function. That gets event worst if you set up the Mac for a presentation. Caffeine keeps your Mac on and on and on….

1. Chicken of the VNC

If you work with two computers, it is extremely likely that you may forget files on Machine A when you are using Machine B. VNC technology allows to access Machine A remotely over the Internet. Chicken of VNC (gotta love the name) is one of the few free apps (usually you pay hundreds of $/£/€) to do that. So next time you are at your event location you can easily access your office computer and retrieve vital information. Stress free!

The Difference Between Flavors and the Real Deal

EMBlog — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 19:10:14 +0000

This post investigates the reasons why you should be careful in playing with event concepts.

Photo by Funadium via Flickr

Picture a cheap, insipid detergent brand. Imagine the marketing team struggling to find a new flavor for their boring product.

Our studies say that Marseille Soap is perceived as natural and refreshing. We should flavor our detergent with that.

Some customers will be definitely attracted by it, they will give it a go and buy it.

Later on, with the same easiness of mind they will switch to some more appealing flavor.

Now picture using the real deal. Savon de Marseille. As inexpensive, organic and effective as it is. Picture the fact it has been there for 600 years, not because it was ‘a flavor of something’.

If you attach new forms of events such as Pecha Kucha or Unconference to your boring event, you may win some interest in the short term but it is gonna be a hell of a nightmare to retain that interest.

Build a Marseille Soap factory, sell the real deal!

Event Management Toolkit v.2

EMBlog — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 15:40:56 +0000

One of the most successful projects started from this blog was an Events Toolkit. Here is the new version.

We love to hang out at our Linkedin Event Planning & Management Group. Apart from great discussions and networking, we do create tangible knowledge.

The following is the effort of 15 event professionals willing to share with the World their passion for events.

Click on your present, download it and share it, it’s for free!

Link not Working? No worries

smeepe Introduces Event Suppliers Search

EMBlog — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 12:09:59 +0000

Do we need a service like smeepe? Yes we do, and desperately!

smeepe.net just launched and we are very happy about it.

In the SEO invaded Google and in the tricky jungle of Social Networks finding the right vendor, venue or PR for your event is becoming increasingly tough.

In our 9,000+ members Linkedin Group, we published a special offer featuring free registration for the first 5,000 vendors.

We surely did not want to exclude you from such goodness! So click here and enjoy it!

If you are not sure about what smeepe is have a look at the terrific video they put together!

5 Ways to Visualize Twitter at Events

EMBlog — Fri, 29 May 2009 17:12:29 +0000

A lot of fuzz is being made about if tweets should be displayed at events or not. The answer is simple, Yes! And in a fancy way.

Here goes a collection of what Julius Solaris, your host, thinks are the best tools to display live tweets at events.

5. Twitter Search + Firefox + ReloadEvery

Twitter Search is the visualization tool for the nostalgic twitter user and/or retro tweep. In order to make the page refresh automatically, Install Firefox add on ReloadEvery. If you don’t have Firefox probably you won’t read this because your browser has crashed in the meanwhile

Goods:
- Suits large screens
- Neat and detailed

Bads:
- Hard to read
- A bit dull, not fun.

4. TwitterCamp

We talked about TwitterCamp in the past. It’s a damn cool project and the fact it was implemented for a BarCamp and on an opensource basis makes it even cooler.

Goods:
- Highly Customizable
- Fun Interface

Bads:
- Could be slow in updates from time to time
- Looks like the project is not moving on

3. Twitter Fountain

What about that! Twitter Fountain looks slick and fancy. Very design oriented and definitely relevant to image conscious events.

Goods:
- Good looking Interface
- Clear and neat
- Flickr Integration

Bads:
- Embed only, does not work as a standalone page or software.

2. Twitterfall

Great Control with Twitterfall. You can play around with settings and have fun with customizing the experience.

Goods:
- Able to opt for a good speed of refresh
- Able to display ReTweets

Bads:
- Although highly customizable it still remains a bit dull

1. Visible Tweets

Visible Tweets is simply fantastic! This is what tweets at events should look like.

Goods:
It’s all good just go for it.

Bads:
Don’t see any.

Slideshare Helps Conference Organizers and Speakers

EMBlog — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 14:33:12 +0000

No secret we love Slideshare. From today we love the service even more for a couple of powerful reasons.

View more presentations from Adrian Mcewen.

Slideshare, the popular community for presentation junkies, recently introduced few new initiatives and features which got us hooked up heavily, if you’d allow the euphemism.

Let’s see:

Registration for Conference Organizers

Conference organizers who register on the website, will increase the probability to get their slides featured on Slideshare.net. Slideshare has a section dedicated to events, which is very handy to increase visibility of your event.

Registration for Speakers

Speakers will also get a better the chance to be discovered and hired for speaking gigs, by registering at the above link.

Presentation Camps

Slideshare started a series of unconferences around the world, generated by the Slideshare community.

Mobile Integration

Slideshare is now also mobile. Which makes it even more relevant and portable.

LinkedIn Integration

This is the best integration we’ve seen coming from LinkedIn in a while now. It surely adds value to a rather dull interface and serves the professional social networking purpose very well.

Are You Listening?

EMBlog — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 14:18:06 +0000

Few months ago we were talking about Meetups, user generated events and about getting back networking.

As part of the late venture with amiando, we sparked a series of user generated events across the world, to display the power of our online community.

Obviously clever people were listening, they implemented what we pioneered and are now getting great successes.

Photo by b_heyer via Flickr

We feel good about it, because we creatively shared that.

Good News

Good news is that we are sharing right now as we speak and we are way forward compared to what’s going on right now. It’s a fact.

Leave us alone

We strongly suggest you unsubscribe from this blog if you are perpetrating practices of a distant past.

On the other hand, if you like challenges we have few suggestions for you:

- We think that Pecha Kucha is the way to go.

- We think that technology should be part of the present event industry as it increases streams of revenue while decreasing intangibility of the event in itself.

Start now

If you read this blog you are well aware of new trends and whatever is going on with Event Planning 2.0, but make sure:

- You read most of it, search categories and get out of your comfort zone.

- Interact, commenting on each post.

- Engage in our communities, specially on Linkedin where we are more than 6500 (yeah you remember when we were 400).

- Get in touch directly with Julius, if you want targeted guidance with your project.

10 Applications your Event Needs

EMBlog — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 12:39:58 +0000

As anticipated the webinar for Nielsen & co. was great yesterday.

Here are the slides for my presentation. If you attended and had questions, now the time to comment.

View more presentations from Julius Solaris. (tags: twitter events

Update: Here’s a transcript of the presentation. Click here for the pdf.

85+ tools to manage projects

EMBlog — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 18:22:24 +0000

Events are indeed projects or at least they should be managed as such.

Here is yet another free list that will help you to be more productive.

Remember to save it in your del.icio.us for future reference and to let others know through StumbleUpon.

iMacworld and your next event

EMBlog — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 22:03:26 +0000

Photo by marcopako via Flickr

IDG, who is organizing Macworld 2009, released v1.1 of iMacworld, a dedicated iPhone app for the expo. Do you need to start thinking about mobile apps for your next event?

You should hate technology. If you work with events you should really despise it as the worst of your competitor.

The problem with technology is that it evolves rapidly. With rapid evolution, users’ demands and expectations grow accordingly.

Technology is your fiercest enemy. Or is it?

Not in my opinion. I only see room for better experiences, up-selling opportunities and cross-selling chances. Technology is tangible, your event is not.

Macworld is already a success. Rumours have spread weeks in advance. They set up a community, they are well integrated with major social networking sites.

What really captured my attention was the dedicated free iPhone app that came from organizers, iMacworld (link to iTunes).

I already talked few times about how iPhones are very helpful to be more organized and productive.

IDG did a great job and released an update of the app with interesting features:

As Zdnet explains:

The Exhibitor tab gives you an alphabetical list of exhibitors which you can scroll through or you can jump right to the first letter in the company name via the letters down the right hand side. You can also search by booth number and by hall. One thing that’s missing is an open text search.

The Products tab allows you to scroll through lists by name, exhibitor and by category and the Sessions tab allows you to locate conference sessions by day, track, room and speaker.

The Messaging feature rounds out tabs across the bottom of the UI and provides updates from IDG about the show and the iPhone.

Now this is something I’d like to see at every event I will attend in the future.

I’d like to be informed as a participant, I’d like to get my name out there as an exhibitor.

As time goes by, I would stop appreciating the chance of it and start requiring it. This is what you have to deal with today.

I love technology.