The Dublin Web Summit has partnered with Presdo for the third time this year to deliver an interactive and collaborative conference experience with Presdo Match. Once again Dublin, Ireland will be the location for two days of great industry speakers and networking. Eric Ly, Presdo’s CEO, will also be the featured speaker at the Fireside Interview session with event organizer Paddy Cosgrave.

Ireland’s largest tech event, Dublin Web Summit, has sold out with over 1,500 attendees and 100 speakers scheduled for October 27 and 28 at the Royal Dublin Society (RDS). Founders and top executives from Skype, Twitter, Google, Amazon, Facebook and many more global Internet companies will be sharing their perspectives on the future of the web.

Streams running in parallel will focus on the cloud, social media/marketing and the startup environment. International media partners covering the event include TechCrunch, Mashable, Wired, and Bloomberg among other outlets.

We are thrilled to be a part of the Dublin Web Summit for the third time this year! Previous events in March and June have been outstanding successes with unbelievably positive press from international media. The Dublin Web Summit this week promises to be the most exciting event so far with significant growth in attendance and industry leading speakers.

Attendee use of Presdo Match at previous Dublin Web Summit events has been in the 90% range with very high numbers of face-to-face meetings. The social media integration that Presdo Match enabled through LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and e-mail should deliver even higher levels of interaction among attendees this week in Dublin.

Eric Ly, Presdo’s Founder and CEO, will share his insights into how emerging technologies are driving the evolution of event management at the Trade Show Technology Summit 2011 (TSTS ’11). TSTS showcases innovative technologies that drive differentiation and profits for events and trade shows on July 21 in Richardson, TX.  The keynote presentation by Eric will be a look into how social networks are rapidly changing the event industry!

Event organizers across the globe are looking for ways to differentiate their events and drive revenue growth.  Event attendees are also looking for the best return on their investment of time and money, and organizers are increasingly turning to social media technologies to provide the disruptive experience to drive awareness of events while also increasing interaction between attendees, exhibitors and sponsors.

Presdo Match is leading the next generation of innovation for events with social network integration.  Event organizers are recognizing the benefits of using Presdo Match, including increased attendee and exhibitor value and increased ticket sales.  The ability to enable event attendees to drive awareness of events through their social networks including LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and email is creating a new way to promote events.

Eric brings an entrepreneur’s perspective to the event industry from his experience building companies with emerging technologies.  As a co-founder of LinkedIn, Eric was integral to LinkedIn’s early products and market launch strategy that led to over 100 million users worldwide and its position as the leading social network for professionals.  In addition to leading Presdo, Eric has become a highly sought after speaker for events including the MTO Summit this past March in Chicago.

For the last few months, we’ve had the great experience of talking to many event organizers in the event industry about how to best to deploy social media to improve events in any number of ways. Out of all these conversations, there’s been a common theme from many organizers—”how do we get more people to show up at our events?”

There’s no doubt that building attendance is critical to organizers of conferences and trade shows. Besides the extra revenue to help pay the costs of the event, increased attendance brings valuable benefits to event participants who are the ultimate audience that event organizers serve.

More attendance at conferences means attendees have access to more people for “networking”, making events more rewarding and beneficial. At trade shows, exhibitors and sponsors generate more business when more prospects show up for face-to-face discussions. Even event organizers benefit from greater attendance as they are often part of associations interested in building larger memberships for their organizations, so events are often “membership drives”. Do you identify with this?

It’s no surprise that social media is very effective in building attendance to events. Just a few years ago before social media, people found out about events through “word of mouth”. If you were a networker and attended events, you would find out which events to go to through colleagues or friends who told you about events they would go to.

Social media is the modern-day version of “word of mouth”, except like a sports car compared to the horse-drawn buggy. Success stories are starting to roll in. Ticketing companies like Eventbrite blogged about their recent success with Twitter experiments.

How Presdo Match Builds Attendance For Your Event

Presdo Match brings you more people to your events through a powerful feature called Social Invites. Built into Presdo Match, Social Invites are simple, powerful and very effective. For every 100 Social Invites sent, an average of 2.6 people will register for your event. Compare this rate to conversions generated from email campaigns, and this becomes a highly effective way to bring new people to your events.

Any attendee—whether an attendee, exhibitor or sponsor—participating in your event is automatically presented with a list of their LinkedIn contacts.

By simply clicking on names, attendees can invite their LinkedIn connections to your event. As the event organizer, you can personalize Social Invites with a link directly to your event registration page along with a promotion code if you wish. Social Invites are delivered to the invitees’ LinkedIn Inbox and they get an email notification.

Think of the exhibitors and sponsors now being able to easily invite their clients and prospects to your events, or conference attendees who bring key contacts to your event so they can catch up with them.

Thanks to Social Invites, Presdo Match actually pays for itself. The additional tickets sold through Social Invites pays for the cost of Presdo Match several times over, making the use of Presdo Match for your event a no-brainer.

There’s nothing like experiencing the very products we work on because the experiences offer valuable lessons about how they are actually useful. Despite the best predictions we make about the benefits of tools that we build, utility sometimes come from very unexpected places.

One such experience came for me recently with our own Presdo Match.

We were delighted to provide the event networking product to TiECON Dallas this past October. TiE itself is the world’s largest network of entrepreneurs consisting of 13,000 members across the globe with 56 local chapters. I was honored to be the keynote speaker at the conference, and it was also one of the first events I attended which also used Presdo Match.

As I began preparing my speech, I assumed that I knew who my audience would be, being familiar with similar organizations in Silicon Valley.

It was fortunate that our product provided ways to browse event attendees and their profiles before the event, as I was able to use it to learn about my audience.

After glancing through many profiles, I began to realize that my initial assumption about the audience was in fact not on target. Instead of an audience of technology entrepreneurs, I found that many attendees had sales and marketing backgrounds. Many were indeed small businesses owners, but many others were from established companies. My keynote had to be designed to appeal to the audience I had.

It was this valuable insight which inspired me to focus the speech on anecdotes around marketing themes over entrepreneurial ones. I focused on recounting how we at LinkedIn acquired users in the early days, and how we took early learnings from user behaviors and incorporated them in virally growing the professional network that is LinkedIn today. Overall, I felt that I had given a better keynote because of this realization than without.

All it took was the simple ability to browse through all attendees and the ability to learn a little about each that made all the difference in how I approached the keynote.

It was an insight I never expected, but it completely improved what I did. Social media tools like ours, when brought to life at events, have the potential to offer attendees many interesting insights, making events that much more rewarding for the people who go to them.

Eric Ly
CEO, Presdo Inc.

Certain Software, the leading provider of event management technology solutions is hosting a new series of thought-leadership Sunrise Summit breakfast for corporate meeting and event professionals.

Our founder and CEO, Eric Ly, will join an elite panel of industry experts in discussing issues and topics focusing on the latest advancements in technology for meeting and event professionals in Palo Alto on November 17th.

The Certain Software Sunrise Summit series hosts a group of experts from partner companies that are devising new technologies for meeting and event planning and management.  Other panellists include experts from Stanford University, Dow Jones, ClimatePath and more.

Register at: http://www.certain.com/sunrisesummit

When there are ideas worth spreading, we hope they spread by people who connect through Presdo Match!

Presdo is proud to provide Presdo Match to the second annual TEDxToronto conference, happening on Wednesday, September 30.

Hosting hundreds of attendees who will be at the sold-out main event and several satellite events, TEDxToronto is the official TEDx conference for Toronto, Canada. In the spirit of ideas worth spreading, it brings together the city’s foremost thought leaders, change makers and everyday people from each discipline and challenges them to deliver powerful, unforgettable and unique TEDxTalks.

Presdo Match will enable TEDxToronto attendees to find other people of interest and enable them meet them one-on-one during the day and at the event’s afterparty, creating the opportunity for more meaningful conversations for everyone.

This year’s featured speakers include Neil Hetherington, CEO of Habitat for Humanity Toronto, George Kourounis, Furious Earth, Drew Dudley, Founder of Nuance Leadership and Amanda Sussman, Senior Advisor of Plan International, Canada.

If you will be at TEDxToronto this week, find out more about how you can meet interesting people face-to-face with Presdo Match.

Today, we are very excited to talk about a new product that we’ve been incubating for several months with a select set of customers and partners.

The product is Presdo Match, and it helps enable face-to-face meetings at conferences, trade shows and other types of events.  It solves a problem that we all have experienced when we’ve gone to conferences and trade shows: who should we meet?

How many times have you shown up with not a clue about who you should meet or who you should be talking to?  Surely, networking has been cited widely as the most important reason to attend events, whether to develop important relationships or to close business.  Presdo Match is our answer.

We work with event organizers to set up Presdo Match for their events.  Once set up, attendees use Presdo Match to discover others they want to meet.  Attendees can search for other attendees based on interests and background, and perhaps more interesting, they can now find out who in their LinkedIn social network will also be there.  (In fact, Presdo Match makes great use of LinkedIn in several ways!)

Presdo Match also enables attendees to set up face-to-face meetings during the event.  It does so through the best scheduling user experience in the industry… something we know a little about!

For event organizers, Presdo Match increases attendance and helps get people to register for their events sooner.

There’s much more to say about Presdo Match.  We have a new section on our site that talks about Presdo Match.

If you are an event organizer or you will be attending an event, and you would like to see Presdo Match at your event, let us know.  We would be happy to tell you more about how to make it happen.

We are so excited to tell you about a new feature of Presdo called Presdo Link.  It makes scheduling meetings easier and faster than ever before.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could somehow meld your email and calendar together when it comes to scheduling? We thought so too, and Presdo Link is based on our own scheduling challenges and our insights on how to radically improve it.

How does Presdo Link work? First, get your own Presdo Link. Your link will be of the form “http://presdo.com/johnsmith”, where “johnsmith” is whatever you choose. Think of it as a “vanity license plate” for your scheduling activities.

Once you have your link, share it with friends and business contacts who want to schedule with you. When they click the link, they see a calendar displaying your availability in gray (busy) and white (free) areas.

They can use Presdo Link to pick a time (or multiple times). If their single selection is free on your schedule, the time is automatically confirmed on both sides so you don’t have to respond (if they propose multiple times, you can choose the most convenient). Either way, both parties get notified with the details.

You might be wondering how Presdo knows about your schedule. That’s where our Google Calendar sync comes in. Sync Presdo with your Google Calendar and meetings scheduled with Presdo Link automatically pop onto your calendar.

So get your link now before someone else grabs the one you wanted, and make your scheduling easier and fastest than ever before!

Over the last couple years that Presdo has been around, we’ve had the opportunity to talk to many users about their experience with our product. And while we’ve strived to design a product with simplicity that is the first in the world to accept and recognize time information through text phrases, users kept telling us that incorporating a calendar user interface into Presdo would make it more familiar to them.

Today, we’re finally delivering on your desire. We’d love to tell you about the center of our new scheduling user interface.

Upon creating your event, you see our new calendar UI for selecting times.

It does all the things you’d expect for selecting times, like clicking to add times and dragging time blocks to change a proposed time. You can change the duration of your event by resizing the time block. You can propose up to 3 times, since as before, guests are allowed to pick from 3 times to indicate their availability from the times you choose.

The gray areas are the times you have already booked, so you can now see what times should not be proposed (unless you want to). Combine this with the ability to sync with Google Calendar and now you have an up-to-date view of your availability when scheduling.

Oh, there’s a nifty thing that Presdo does. If you don’t want to poke through the calendar to look for free times, let Presdo do it for you. On the home page, you can still type in a phrase for a time window, like “Friday”. Presdo uses its Time Suggestion Engine to suggest 3 suitable times for you based on your availability, spreading out times to give guests some good choices to pick from. Of course, you can fine tune those times before sending the event to guests.

All these things go toward making scheduling even easier.

We’ve gather a lot of detailed feedback over the years, and out of all this feedback, we are re-thinking and streamlining the process to make scheduling faster and easier than ever. This release is the first of many enhancements around the calendar to come in our quest to make Presdo more usable and useful to more people. More to come!