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does anyone know any good services that can help to plan and manage conferences and other type of events? Especially twitter/facebook oriented.

I had to organize a small con recently, and couldn't find any service that can help with tools for it, i.e. I had to create a schedule for every room(used google calendar and it's API for this task), collect and moderate questions in twitter and show them on big screen(wrote a small GAE app for it), set up a page with info and directions how to get to conference(I've set up a small wiki for it).

I am thinking about putting everything together as a service, but maybe I am missing some well-known awesome startups, which can do all this and other nice things?

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So are you looking for tools for the conference itself (i.e. the twitter feed type stuff) or tools for managing the registration aspect of the conference? – Michael Pryor Mar 18 '11 at 14:45
Handling registration could be a nice addition, but I am more interested in tools/services that can help with "social" part. – Riz Mar 18 '11 at 16:59

3 Answers

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Here's a trick to find multiple web apps that do X. Find one and then go to http://crunchbase.com and type in the name of that company and then look down on the left for the "Competitors" section.

Registration event services:

  • Eventbrite
  • RegOnline
  • amiando
  • TicketLeap
  • Acteva
  • Ticket Text
  • Guestlist
  • Eventat
  • CharityHappenings.org/ticketing
  • Eventarc
  • ticketea
  • Eventbee

A new up and comer that would be perfect for you is called lanyrd.com and it has a lot of tools to manage hashtags, put up media, allow attendees to see each other, etc. It is highly integrated with twitter.

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Excellent idea. If you see 10 potential competitors on CrunchBase alone, you probably don't want to waste your time starting up number 11. – Mike Walsh Mar 18 '11 at 15:24
Thank you for this list, I can clearly see that it will be impossible to compete on the field of ticket selling/registration, but what about services that can help with managing community behind the conference? – Riz Mar 18 '11 at 17:22
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I had same Idea recently, even started coding but then refused, because of there are tons of similar services, free and with payment, most of them are online conferencing tools, and still only early beginners in this business get profit, such as gotomeeting, webex, dimdim, to my mind to start now from scratch you will need million of dollars for promotion to make people use your tool.

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Thank you for your answer, but it seems that gotomeeting & co are online meeting services and I am interested in offline ones. Sorry, if it wasn't clear from the question. – Riz Mar 18 '11 at 17:10
up vote 0 down vote

Try sched.org for session management and eventbrite.com for registration.

I've managed conferences from 200 attendees to 3,000.

I've never found any all in one software that handles all the functions perfectly so there always seems to be some custom work for each type of conference.

There have been some conference software startups over the last 10 five years but most died. They all were trying to make their money on the registration business and Eventbrite now dominates that aspect of the biz.

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sched.com seems to be non-working. – Riz Mar 18 '11 at 17:01
Whoops. The actual website is sched.org . – Mike Walsh Mar 18 '11 at 18:08

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