Event Tech News Roundup – January 2024

As we start the second month of 2024, we look back at the latest news in the event technology selector. It was a busy month for many companies, with new brands, products, partnerships, features, and even top-level leadership changes announced.

Here’s a closer look at the biggest event technology news of the previous month.

Rebranding

Allseated has rebranded to Prismm. The event technology platform specializing in floorplan diagram management is taking a page from Apple’s book and referring to its product as “spatial design technology.”

The company is betting on digital twins being an important part of event planning at all levels. Its platform is uniquely suited for virtual touring, selling and helping with event designing and management. The dynamic digital twins it hosts can be configured to showcase multiple layouts for multiple experiences. It is also capable of real-time collaboration integrating with several cloud-based services and provides engagement data such as the number of views and clicks.

“Our modern technology effectively transforms space and event management’s disparate sales, marketing, and operational components into a captivating, comprehensive client experience,” said Yaron Lipshitz, CEO of Prismm.

Allseated was launched in 2014 with a focus on planning and seating charts. It has received a total funding of $40 million and helped over 5,000 organizations plan 500,000 events.

Leadership Changes

Stova announced a leadership change at the highest level with the appointment of Kirk Ziehm as CEO. Ziehm joined Stova’s board in 2023 and will continue to be a board member in his new capacity as CEO. He comes from a role as a board member of Movista, a retail execution SaaS company. Previous CEO Eric Lochner led the merger of MeetingPlay, Aventri and Eventcore and launched the Stova brand. Lochner is leaving to pursue new opportunities outside event technology but remains an investor in the company.

Splash CEO Eric Holmen announced his departure in a LinkedIn post. Holmen joined the company in February 2020 as chief revenue officer. He later transitioned to the CEO role in June 2021, later taking over from founder Ben Hindman. The company has yet to make an official statement regarding the change. 

New Event Tech Products

AI Event Tech platform Spark has launched Spark Takeaways, providing AI-generated summaries of sessions in real time. The product was successfully showcased at PCMA Convening Leaders 2024 in a high-stakes keynote session featuring President Bill Clinton and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. The tool can output data in two useful formats: Key Takeaways, which lists ideas in short summaries, and Idea Cloud, which provides a novel way of visualizing session content. The outputs can be shared with attendees and externally online. The same session content can be repurposed for various uses, including blogs, social media and more.

Industry veteran David T. Stevens has co-founded Conference Pro, billed as the “Yelp” of conferences and trade shows. The platform brings together exhibitors and conference organizers and uses reviews to connect the dots. It aims to build a community of verified exhibitors sharing transparent reviews and actionable feedback. It also provides conference organizers with a way to source exhibitors. Additionally, Conference Pro offers professional services to help plan or exhibit at conferences.

New Event Tech Features

Splash launched Attendance Insights, an AI-powered tool to predict attendance and make marketing recommendations. The predictive machine learning algorithm has been trained on hundreds of thousands of events hosted on Splash over the past five years. It uses both past performance of a customer’s events and the performance of comparable events from other customers. Data points such as event type and format, page views, email engagement, guest list size, and number of days away from the event all contribute to the results. Splash plans to launch more AI tools to its customers going forward.

Eventbrite has introduced two new payment-related features. Instant Payouts enables organizers to withdraw funds from ticket sales before the event, with deposits arriving within minutes via Stripe for a small fee. The fee is 3% of the payout amount, with a minimum of $2.99 and a maximum of $40. Tap to Pay allows event organizers to effortlessly accept cashless payments, both at the door and beyond, without any additional costs via the Eventbrite Organizer app. The feature is currently only available on certain Android devices for organizers in the U.S.

PheedLoop has released several new features in January. A clever AI integration helps users craft session descriptions. It has revamped it Call for Proposals feature and improved its Sponsor Application Portal.

New Event Tech Research

ExpoPlatform released the Event Tech Forecast 2024 report, the third edition in the series. Once again, the company surveyed its audience and shared some noteworthy findings.

• The top challenge for exhibitors is obtaining a good return on investment. 76% of respondents chose this challenge, up from 64% in July and 55% in January 2023.
• The top three opportunities for event tech are personalizing experiences (64%), proving exhibitor ROI (60%), and providing better event analytics (56%).
• 72% of respondents predict digital revenue from events will increase in the next year (up from 64% in July). No one reported they expected it to reduce.

New Event Tech Partnerships

Group booking platform Hubli announced a partnership with BeCause, an AI-powered sustainability data management platform. The partnership enables Hubli to make more eco-certified hotel content available to planners, including an ever-growing list of over 25,000 eco-labeled hotels. Through Because’s API, Hubli will be able to collect sustainability data from over sixty certifications and automatically map it to hotels in its platform in real time, providing valuable data such as energy and water consumption. This enables Hubli users to identify which properties are sustainable according to internationally recognized standards.

Event technology platform Swapcard and interactive floor plans provider ExpoFP announced a strategic partnership to seamlessly integrate the two platforms, complemented by blue dot navigation from Crowd Connected. Exhibitor information automatically synchronizes across the latest version of a floor plan and vice versa. The integration also enables several additional revenue opportunities for organizers.

Previous Event Tech News You May Have Missed

WebinarTV launched Webinars Unlimited, a completely free webinar service. There are no monthly or annual fees, even for an unlimited number of attendees. Recording and archiving are also free. The company does plan to add additional revenue-generating services that will be entirely optional. It promises to keep all current features free forever. Current functionality includes multiple presenters, screen sharing, chat, QA, polls, video effects (custom background, blur), and analytics. It offers custom registration pages and user tracking. The company is the brainchild of Michael Robertson, who previously founded and sold MP3.com, Gizmo5 and the Linspire operating system. Robertson has stated the company’s goal is to garner a 40% market share within two years. At the start of the year, it had hosted over 328,000 webinars for more than 128,000 users.

GiantiTab released iTab Portable, a not-so-giant version of its large smartphone-like device. The new device makes it possible to use the hardware at trade shows and for sales missions without the need for shipping. The device can be transporter as hang luggage and weighs under 22lb.

Sessionboard introduced Speaker CRM, a cross-event speaker database. The tool offers a centralized and collaborative depository of speakers from users’ past, current and future events.

Captag introduced two new features to its Badgee smart badge. Live Voting and Moodboard are designed to boost real-time engagement and connection during events.