Meeting News - June 16, 2008 - (Page 31)

Edited by William Ng william.ng@nielsen.com Technology Meetings Technology Expo Adds Fourth Show Chicago—The Meetings Technology Expo, first launched in 2005, has grown this year to four conferences spread around the country. Just concluded last month was the expo’s debut at Chicago’s Navy Pier, following a March date in San Francisco. Upcoming events are planned for Washington, DC, (September) and New York City (October). “It’s grown nicely, and it’s still really the only standalone meetings technology conference,” said Paul Paone, conference director. “At most meetings [industry] conferences, the tech companies always get stuck in the back of the hall.” Because Meetings Tech Expo’s educational sessions are conducted by vendor personnel, Paone rigorously polices their presentations to assure they’re objective. Session leaders can’t, for example, mention specific tools. Given this, vendors are ideal session leaders because they are Shadowing Amex, Visa Debuts Meetings Card, Partners with Arcaneo San Francisco—Visa has launched a purchasing card especially for meetings, following the path blazed by American Express. The new card is available initially to meeting planners in the U.S. and Canada, with launches planned for the European Union in the third quarter and AsiaPacific in 2009. “The solution provides not only the back-end reconciliation reporting capabilities, but also allows for meeting planners to plan at a detailed level up front,” said Louis Goodson, senior business leader for Visa Commercial Solutions. He said the meetings card would combine features from Visa’s existing corporate and purchasing cards. To give its purchasing card the required meetings management tools, Visa is partnering with meetings tech company Arcaneo, whose Metron product allows users to view actual spend against a particular meeting’s budget. In teaming up with a meetings tech company, Visa was beaten to the punch last fall by American Express, which partnered with StarCite to create a Web-based service integrating StarCite’s e-sourcing and planning tools with Amex’s payment, reconciliation, and analysis reporting. The partnerships between corporate card companies and meetings tech providers allow planners to further streamline the meetings process, said meetings tech consultant Corbin Ball. “It makes it easy to post expenses to different budget centers, and to reconcile them, as well,” Ball said. “It’s [about] controlling spend, but it’s another step toward digitizing the business process.” www.meetingnews.com Meetings Tech Expo is industry tech suppliers’ front-and-center chance to showcase their software and equipment solutions. more knowledgeable than consultants or meeting planners about specific tools, he said. “Their job is to say,‘If you’re not using a registration tool, for example, you should and here’s why,’” Paone said.“They can talk tech and nontech.” For specific tool information, attendees can view demonstrations at vendor booths in the expo halls. After four years, the shows are modestly profitable, Paone said, and the addition of new shows is helping. He plans to launch an informational website, which he is branding Meetings Technology Institute, as a onestop source for meetings technology information. Site Inspections Get Tech Boost Brielle, NJ—The process of matching up hotels with meeting planners for site inspections has been traditionally hit and miss, with little control over the suitability of the match or inadequate pre-inspection information for the planner. Now, a New Jersey company is hoping its tech solution will streamline the process and make for more satisfactory site visits for both participants and hotels. EMCVenues, an independent planning company, has launched eVite for Sites, which uses extensive databases to analyze hotels’ and planners’ meeting histories. “We already do attendee management for planners, in getting attendees to register for events,” said Jody Wallace, president and CEO of EMCVenues.“What we’ve done is taken [existing] technology one step further, to have planners register for site visits.” EMCVenues analyzes meetings and hotels similar to those held by planners, directing them to invitations from facilities with which they might not be familiar. Meetings histories of hotels are analyzed to overlay particular types of events with EMCVenues’ planner database. “We’ve done 35 sites already, and have another 15 in the pipeline,”Wallace said.“We haven’t done one that hasn’t drawn 50 planners.” Underlying the analyses, she said, was clean and accurate databases of planners; meeting planner preferences and experience drive the matches, she said. “We want the planner to be in the driver’s seat, to tell us if they have an interest [in visiting a site].” StarCite Adds Attendee Tools Philadelphia—Meetings management tech firm StarCite has augmented its Small Meetings Solution booking portal with an online event registration capability. The upgrade allows planners to e-mail invitations, create a registration site, and manage a database of attendees. The solution is tailored to small meetings organized by part-timers. For example, users can pick from e-mail and registration-site templates, and reports are exportable to spreadsheet programs. More elaborate reports include rooming lists, but meeting organizers can pick and choose which ones to use. r —Section written by Christopher Hosford June 16, 2008 MeetingNews 31 http://www.meetingnews.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Meeting News - June 16, 2008

Meeting News - June 16, 2008
Contents
What’s Up @ MeetingNews.com
Inside the Meetings Industry
Social Scene
People Making News
Technology
MN Webcast Report
Advertisers Index
Live from the Forum

Meeting News - June 16, 2008