How the Technoport event upped the game in the Norwegian startup community #technoport15
On the 18th and 19th of March, Technoport welcomed a variety of challengers, creators and capital providers to Trondheim, Norway. Their aim? To maximize innovation and to awaken the entrepreneurial spirit in the Norwegian startup community.
Here are a few key learnings to be inspired by:
Pioneering change
As the host of the second-ever live crowdfunding experiment in the Nordic region, Technoport provided Scandinavian startups with the opportunity to gain maximum exposure, speaking directly to businesses and people who may fund them. Overall, the Technoport crowd invested €67,000 (USD 72,000) into four Norwegian startups
Featuring talks like ‘Blood, SWOT & Tears’, and ‘The Kick Inside’, from renowned entrepreneurs and public speakers, such as Nolan Bushnell and Leo Johnson, Technoport provided a program packed full of the latest innovations in startup culture.
Entrepreneurs were provided with the opportunity to pitch before each of the judges, as part of Technoport’s pitch competition. The top 8 then presented on the main stage at Technoport, with the winners receiving awards up to NOK 100,000 (USD 12,000).
Facilitating innovation with Conferize
By using Conferize, Technoport brought their event to life online and engaged with their event community in new ways.
By livestreaming the whole event, Technoport were not only able to WOW their attendees, but broadcasted their event, from start to finish, for their online followers around the world.
With automatic content aggregation on Conferize and from the hashtag #technoport15, Technoport’s event page came to life with all the excitement from social media and provided their attendees, speakers and online followers to network and share information before and during the event.
The best bit? Their community is still growing and will continue to do, so and with all the action at Technoport it’s no surprise that the event community is still buzzing with ideas and feedback. What’s more, their event community will be ready to get involved for their next event to keep building on their success, and Conferize is proud to be there to capture the action.
It’s not too late, check out the action from #Technoport15 here.
Here are the highlights from the event, shown with the Conferize Highligt Player.
Free social event websites for conferences and meetups: Introducing Conferize Organizer
We’re very excited to present a major new addition to the Conferize Organizer product suite: Truly social event websites!
It means that everything you’ve come to expect from Conferize–a dynamic event community with social networking and content sharing–now can operate under your very own website domain, e.g. 'www.myevent.com'. It can effectively save you the time, headaches, and costs of building your own website, while offering your attendees, followers, speakers, sponsors a much more engaging event experience.
The website features has already been included at no extra cost in all plans, also our free Basic plan and for existing events. If you’re running meetups that are free to attend, we’ll support you with a free forever website. Read on below.
We’ve also added a bunch of new features to be able to provide you with the most engaging social and user-friendly event website in the world!
Read all about it on our new Organizer product website or check out the embedded video here. There’s also a FAQ below.
Are you ready to retire your old non-social and static website?
So, tell me everything about the website features?
The full list of website-related features is below. It only takes a minute to add your event on Conferize, so why not get started now?
Custom URL, e.g. www.myevent.com (NEW).
Custom welcome message/media area on your front page (NEW).
Custom pages: Add up to five custom subpages (NEW).
New editor with support for rich text, images and rich media editor for all pages (NEW).
Support for any registration service.
Content sharing and aggregation, including video livestream.
Social networking and matchmaking for attendees, speakers and followers.
Custom graphics and logo to match your brand.
Your event is seamlessly connected to our platform with a community of millions of event lovers.
Choose from over 50,000+ readymade speaker profiles.
Easily invite your speakers, sponsors, attendees to help grow your community.
Create a series of events where the community grows from event to event.
Reliable website hosting with market leading performance included.
Fully responsive website to adjust for smaller devices.
Show me an example
One of our first customers are www.ndc15.com, check it out. You’ll notice that the Conferize branding has been minimized to its bare minimum, yet keeping all the lovely community and content features. The event website is all about you!
What does it cost?
It’s free! Meaning that we’ve added the website features at no extra cost for all existing plans, also the free Basic plan (free up to 100 people). It makes it by far the most cost effective event website, not to mention the only truly social event website, available anywhere today.
View plans
Is it really completely free for meetups, workshops, and seminars?
Yes! We love anyone who works to gather cool people in a room without charging for it. So you can use Conferize free of charge, even if your community grows over 100 people.
Add your meetup now
How and when can I use it?
The website feature is already live for all existing and upcoming events. It means that you can Manage or add an event and tell it to operate under your own domain, e.g. www . myevent . com instead of www.conferize.com/conferences/myevent.
Go to My events to select an event to use with your own domain. Then go to Event info / Custom domain and follow instructions. Simple!
That’s cool, but what makes it really cool?
We’ve long been puzzled with the status quo in the events industry where 99 % of event websites are static and non-social, adding no real value to attendees, regardless of how gorgeous they may look. It's an incredibly overlooked opportunity to create real value for delegates and build a community to help promote the event. A key feature of a Conferize website is that visitors can Follow the event free of charge. It gives event organizers the chance to convert a “maybe” visitor to a “definitely” attendee. Without this feature, most visitors will leave the website and may never come back.
We’ve seen that event communities often grow 5-10 times bigger than the physical attendance. We’ve also seen a host of cases where followers were converted to attendees through our platform. Without Conferize all that potential value is not captured and utilized. Making it an integral part of the event website is a huge benefit, leaving the organizer with only one platform to work with. And that platform is currently the only open social platform for events.
We've also seen how event organizer struggle to turn generic website platforms into something that works for events. It's often a painful and/or expensive process, ending up with a result that may be useful, informative and elegant, but in no way captures or reflects the essence of the event itself. An event is a social and dynamic context that produces engaging content, strong social ties and unparalleled excitement from speakers, sponsors and attendees–when it works well, of course.
The most obvious reason that a suitable solution hasn't been brought forward before, is that from a technology and design perspective it's virtually impossible for most event organizers to engineer a true online experience that reflect the nature of the events–without spending a ridiculous amount of money and yet being unsure if it'll work. It's also a challenge that many technology companies in the past have taken on and failed it.
Conferize has for the past three years specialized in creating a true event experience online. It's been used by thousands of events and millions of people. It's now available for any event organizer to make it their own–with a simple, user friendly interface that was made specifically for events people, and nothing else. And yet pricing starts at free. That's what makes us so excited.
The open platform for events: Announcing the Conferize registration API with Eventora
At Conferize we've always believed in keeping our platform as open as possible. Today we're announcing a new registration API to underpin just how serious we are about our open position and the endeavor of reducing fragmentation in the global events industry.
Why is this important?
We estimate that roughly 5,000 registration services exist today, powering the world's 2+ million annual professional events. It's a jungle with virtually no overview possible. With the new API it's much easier for event organizers and registration providers to list their events on Conferize, the leading open platform for professional events worldwide. It also makes it easier for attendees to benefit from Conferize's social networking and content sharing features.
What is it?
A while back we announced our partnership with Eventbrite, one of the largest and fastest growing registration platforms in the world. From this we learned a lot about how to structure an integration and we eventually developed our own API for any registration service to integrate.
For event organizers using registration services that's integrated with Conferize, it's now much easier to ...
import events to be listed on Conferize for millions to discover.
buy a ticket for an event on Conferize.
invite existing and new attendees to network and share content.
reap the benefits of the Conferize platform.
Announcing the first integration with pioneering partner Eventora
We're launching the new API together with the great team at Eventora, who–just like Conferize–are official TEDx partners.
Nick Tsamis, CEO of Eventora, comments:
"We are thrilled to announce our partnership with Conferize. Eventora's easy event registration and smart event management is now combined with Conferize's powerful community building. For attendees, this means a better, seamless registration experience. For organizers, it means more registrations and engagement."
"Both our companies are TEDx partners, and Eventora serves TEDx events in 25 countries. For TEDx communities worldwide, there are many benefits coming from our partnership. Joining forces with Conferize helps us in our mission to make smart events simple."
Jon Schäffer, Co-Founder & CCO of Conferize says:
"Eventora is a great and cost effective registration solution. Partnering with Eventora means that event organizers can now easily plug in registration, build a living event community and sell more tickets on Conferize. This is a perfect match for both companies and for our customers."
How the Eventora integration works in practice:
With this integration event organizers can publish their event on Conferize with just a click on the Eventora control panel. Event attendees can now register seamlessly via the Conferize event page. Whenever someone buys a ticket, also outside of Conferize, they can easily be invited to join the community with social networking and content sharing.
API specs and key
For registration providers and developers, please refer to the API documentation and get in touch regarding integration.
TOP 50 Tech Events of 2014: Here's to the brave, the bold, and the social ones
2014 is almost over. What a year it’s been! We saw a dramatic increase in the number of tech events added to Conferize. From local meetups to huge conferences and global exhibitions, they’re all here. Now comes the time to recap and select the best of the best! Our jury of distinguished experts have selected 50 events from all over the world that we believe are the best of 2014! (Last updated: December 18th, 2014)
“With the Top 50 Tech list we want to reward event organizers who are proactive about community building and digital strategy. We believe big is not always better. In fact, we want to reward the most social and innovative events on their efforts to share, engage and involve with their communities online – regardless of their size.” Martin Ferro-Thomsen, CEO & Founder of Conferize.
Each day, from Dec 1st, we will release a couple of events, so stay tuned until the 18th of December, where we will announce the final list!
Don't forget to share with others too! #Top50events!
We thank you for all of your support during this campaign. We wish you all a very happy holiday with your family and friends!
As some of you may have noticed we've just introduced a brand new way to manage your events on Conferize. We call it (drum roll) Manage Event!
You can access this page either from My Events (click Manage) or from your event page (there's a direct link in the black top menu).
Here's a closeup:
As you see above, a prominent feature is that Conferize will constantly monitor your progress and guide you to a more successful event by suggesting things to do. Simply click the Next step and fill in the missing information to keep growing your event score to 100 %
You can quickly get a sense of how well you events is doing in terms of community size, activity, latest members of your community etc.
There is also a quick way to Engage community by posting updates, media and any other important information to your community. What you post here will of course go into your Activity page on Conferize. Any media links you share (Youtube, Slideshare, Flickr etc.) will be included in the Media section. There is usually a short delay, and remember the default sorting of media is by popularity so new media is added to the bottom of the list).
The rest is pretty straightforward, you can access anything via the left-hand menu and edit anything you like. We hope you like the new Manage Event page!
Tip: The Sponsor section is a premium add-on feature, you'll need to get in touch to enable it (learn more about it here).
Conferize honored as a top Event Innovator 2014 by Bizbash
“Conferize was willing to take risks and find opportunities to create authentic engagement and value, which is why we decided to highlight them and their work,” says BizBash editor in chief Anna Sekula.
BizBash has announced its 2014 list of the most innovative people and brands in events and has named Conferize among the top innovators right now. Here' why:
Conferize has stood out as an event innovator and groundbreaker—joining an elite group that proves the value of face-to-face events, empowers peers to consider the unconventional, and reveals a redefined image of what the industry is today.
CEO Martin Ferro-Thomsen and CCO Jon Schäffer. The two remaining co-founders, Martin Wullfeld and Jesper Vestergaard, we're too busy to leave their laptops at the time of the photo.
Professional events has a new face online. Today Conferize is introducing the brand new event pages across all events on our platform.
The new event pages is designed to be easy on the eye and more user friendly, putting everything events related in its proper place: Speakers, media, the community, and realtime activity to constantly capture the beating heart of your event.
It's also much more visual and customizable, giving event organizers more options to present their events with logo and a large photo showing the atmosphere at their event.
Gorgeous media feeds to wow your audience
Conferize has probably the world's smartest and most innovative approach to event media. We call it 'collective media' and it's everything that you, your speakers and the community care to share. We track all conversations on your event page and Twitter, and from that we identify the most popular rich media content items.
It's a lot of heavy data processing behind the scenes, but the result is as beautiful as it is captivating: Your own tailored media feed, powered and curated by the web and your community. Any content type (video, photos, presentations, papers) from any platform (Twitter, Instagram, Youtube, Slideshare etc.) available in one user friendly place. We of course also support video livestreaming from any platform. It just works!
Burning Questions captures the knowledge of your crowd
A prominent new innovation of the event page is a component we call 'Burning questions'. It's designed to engage your audience and capture the knowledge of your crowd. With this component you are at the forefront of the event revolution, where your capable speakers and delegates get a chance to shine and create a body of knowledge specific to your conference theme. You can of course customize your Burning Questions for each event (Go to My Events).
World's best event networking
Conferize has one of the best networking and matchmaking features. Forbes believes it's even better than LinkedIn and Twitter. It's the perfect way to get the most out of your event attendance, and to keep up with though leaders of any industry. We offer these networking features with every event and for Conferize in general.
One community to rule them all
It's important to remember that all the activity and media being shared at individual event pages are streamed into the Conferize network itself, potentially reaching millions of events professionals. The larger you build your community and the more active they are, the more it will resonate throughout Conferize's network, the social web and frequent automated newsletters. On Conferize you can also create a 'Series' of events, gradually building your audience from event to event, instead of starting from scratch. It's one community to rule them all.
We hope you enjoy the new event page. Any feedback or questions are welcome!
How to get started using the new features
How do I add or edit a Burning question for my event?
How do I upload a photo to my event page?
How do I get media on to my event page?
