InXpo - Top Ten FAQ Profile

1. What is the integration capability of your platform?
2. What is the advantage of your webcasting tool?
3. How can I use a virtual event to maximize my investment?
4. How will physical and virtual events complement each other?
5. What are some of the technological challenges involved in producing an event?
6. What are some of the other challenges in producing these events?
7. How do you utilize video in your platform?
8. What role will video and 3D play in the future of virtual events?
9. How will social networking affect the way events are utilized?

10. How did you make the transition to the virtual event industry?

What is the integration capability of your platform?

We will integrate with other registration systems. It’s another key difference between our platform and everybody else’s. It comes from our history. We have always built industrial strength enterprise based applications for finance. So, when you do that, you have to make sure that the systems you build can integrate with pretty much any other kind of system. If you build a time and billing system, it has to integrate to an expense system, and to the general ledger. It also has to integrate to accounts receivable systems. So, we have 25 years of experience in building systems that integrate into other enterprise applications. My belief is that most other people vendors have approached virtual events from a marketing application point of view. They build very nice, Flash based applications that are not a data driven model. And because of that, it gets a little tricky integrating to other products and sometimes in their scenario when you integrate to other products, you end up creating multiple instances of code for each one of your customers. We only have a single instance for all our customers.

What is the advantage of your webcasting tool?

In current webcasting tools where you just sit and watch a presentation for an hour and then wait for the Q&A at the end, it’s a killer. So, we said, “How can we get our people, the audience to interact with the actual presentation?” To do that, we needed to build out some technologies ourselves, which we are doing. Once again I want to reiterate that we never go to anybody and say, “You have to use our webcasting tool.” If somebody wants to use Webex, that’s fine. If anybody wants to use other standard webcasting platforms, that’s fine with us as well. We never force them to change. If, however, they want to do something unique like do a presentation and in the middle of the presentation take the audience to the presenters booth or drop them in a chat room for a minute and then bring them all back to the presentation, we can do that.

How can I use a virtual event to maximize my investment?

If a client was spending a million dollars on an event for 1,000 people, that means they’re spending 1,000 dollars a person, right? So let’s see what we could do for say $600,000. First, let’s spend more money on the physical event per person. Let’s spend $2,000 per person on the core 20% or 200 people. There’s a $400,000 physical event right there. Then, let’s take another $200,000 and spend it on a virtual event. Keep in mind that a lot of the content that is created for the physical event can be reused for the virtual event or the other way around. So, now you spend $600 thousand dollars and you gave your key 20% of your audience a better experience, but you ended up getting 10,000 people or more coming to your total event. So, at the end of the day, the customer wins because they got 10,000 or more people for just over half the price or for a reduced price.

How will physical and virtual events complement each other?

You’ll end up with a physical/Virtual combination where the virtual event will be a component of the overall strategy, whether it will be a standalone event or a pre-physical event or a post-physical event or a same time physical event, will depend on the overall event strategy or what the purpose of the event was. I believe right now in a strange way the economic recession is the impetus for making people try virtual events, and when we come out of the recession, there’ll be a different kind of a playing field. But, the virtual event will definitely be a part of it.

What are some of the technological challenges involved in producing an event?

The challenges for the user who wants to get to the next level then are committing the right resources. First there is really planning it out correctly, making sure that you’re got enough time, making sure that there are certain things that you just can’t skip. There’s a certain amount of testing we make people do. There is specific communication required with exhibitors that you have to make sure happens. The exhibitors have to test their stuff. It’s not like a physical booth where you build it and you look at it and you say, “looks good we are done” You have to test technology, make sure things work the way they are supposed to, test your firewalls, security. It’s just the little things that if you don’t know that they’re there, they’re going to bite you for sure.

What are some of the other challenges in producing these events?

I think one of the more challenging things today, by the way, is getting exhibitors. That’s just the same as it would be for a physical event. So, it’s making sure that your event is priced correctly, making sure that you explain to the exhibitor what they’re getting, because it’s new to them, too. For new exhibitors it’s still not clear to them what a virtual booth really entails, but that’s more for a new client. Next is what happens when you get to the next level with somebody who’s experienced at this, now it becomes more sophisticated. Questions arise like do they want single sign on or do they want pre-registration? Do they want to be able to integrate back into certain environments? Do they want to hold one event a month? How do they structure the organization when they’re rebuilding these things all the time? What happens if you build one and you want to reuse it a month later? Can you just switch it on again? It raises a whole series of new questions…you’re now talking strategy versus execution.

How do you utilize video in your platform?

We don’t integrate it; we have video chat built into the platform. We recommend hosts start by having their exhibitors on video and not trying to push all the attendees to be on video. Not everybody’s got video cameras. And video bandwidth is always a challenge. It’s new, but the experience is great. I believe over time it will become the standard, but it’s going to take a little bit of time, as people get used to it. More and more computers ship with cameras today. People use it in selective cases right now but soon everybody will be using a video camera.

What role will video and 3D play in the future of virtual events?

I think we’re going to have to be a little careful about the use of avatars, because you just don’t want a thousand avatars running around on one screen as the events get bigger and bigger, which I believe they will…in other words, I think there’s going to be a trade-off. There’s going to be a trade-off between usability and immersive technologies. I believe video will be a massive play, whether it’s HD video capability inside the video chat with 3 or 4 people all talking to each other at the same time. We have some of that now. It’s just the bandwidth that limits us as it is not as consistent as it needs to be, and that’s a challenge when you’re going to have 10,000 people all coming from different places, homes or offices. But even with that being said, bandwidth will grow and become more consistent and video will dominate the experience.

How will social networking affect the way events are utilized?

Down the line, there will also be a strong move towards virtual event platforms that are always available for social networking rather than individual virtual events, A corporation will eventually have its own virtual business platform with multiple communities being invited to that platform to either come to events or for just general material. Even further down the line, a virtual business environment will have pages, like a Facebook page for each person who comes in. But, in addition you’ll have business spaces like booths or offices that represent the business entities. So, there are personal spaces that are like a Facebook page and business spaces that are like an office or a booth. These business spaces also need to be multi level so that organizations can be represented. InXpo will bring all of that together in a single environment.

How did you make the transition to the virtual event industry?

Adam Mankoff showed Drew [VanVooren] a copy of a virtual tradeshow he was running for his vending and coffee supply business. It was still, in those days, an html flat screen website, but it had the concept of being able to click on a person and do chat with them inside that screen. So we looked at that, we said that’s pretty interesting. We figured we could take it to market. He [Mankoff] didn’t know what to do with it. So, we took out our technology tools that we had, and we hired back certain key people, our development manager Rich [Hawkinson] as vice president of development. He was with us already. Jeff Pryhuber is our CTO, and so we started building up the platform and that was in 2004. We started off focused on distributors, because that was Adam’s background. But, we quickly realized that it wasn’t a massive enough market, and they also required a huge amount of custom work to make it work with their order entry systems because they were promotional selling events. We soon moved into media type of tradeshows or lead generation tradeshows.