Spotme Interview with Sam Smith

event 2.0

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Interview #2 from our Event Technologies Series.

We met Sam Smith from Spotme at IMEX, 2008 in Frankfurt. A couple of weeks ago I had the pleasure of interviewing him in order to get more details about Spotme’s technology and company direction. Sam is responsible for Spotme’s worldwide marketing as well as regional sales.

Danielle: What exactly is Spotme?
Sam: Spotme is a wireless communication service for meetings, conferences and events. It creates a new platform for communication.  The centerpiece is a handheld device that helps participants communicate with each other, interact with speakers in sessions, and organizers communicate with participants.

Danielle: Give us the history on Spotme. How did it come about?
Sam: The founders went to conferences themselves and had a hard time meeting with the people they needed to see. Since they had this problem of finding people and knew they had the technical skills to solve it, they moved forward with this idea. Over time, they developed a real passion for the communication and the conference experience.

Danielle: Who’s your target audience and how do they benefit before, during, and after an event from Spotme?
Sam: Our target customers are corporate and association meeting planners. They benefit from Spotme in a number of ways – live voting, feedback forms, speaker q&a, lead retrieval, networking, participant management, etc.  Most of our clients use Spotme to help them achieve 2-3 different objectives. For example, an accounting firm used Spotme to connect 1000 participants across 3 different venues AND provide each person with a personalized schedule (there were more than 300 education sessions) AND reduce the amount of printed conference material AND ask the audience to share their ideas through our Speaker Q&A.  The participants ended up sending about 13,000 messages to each other and exchanging 4000 business cards.   While for a technology company, we tracked attendance, provided feedback forms and prepared reports for over 250 education sessions.  We ended up sending over 16000 feedback forms through Spotme and getting a 60% response rate.  At the end of the event, we knew who had registered for the sessions, who had attended the sessions, which person filled out the feedback forms and what they thought.  This data came together in over 500 detailed reports and a handful of summary reports.

Danielle: Can you give us an idea of how much Spotme costs per event?
Sam: The price will depend upon the size of the event and the Spotme services the customer needs. The customer should be prepared to invest between 20k and 50k Euros.

Danielle: Are there specific industries that you focus on?
Sam: We don’t have an industry focus.  We concentrate on meetings and conferences between 1 and 3 days.

Danielle: What kind of feedback do you hear from your users about Spotme?
Sam: Most participants are really excited about Spotme – because it makes their life easier.  Last week a participant told me that because of Spotme he met 3 people that we wouldn’t have otherwise met and has now (10 months later) secured contracts worth several million dollars.

Danielle: What is the corporate strategy/direction for Spotme? Any upcoming technologies or add-ons that we should know about?
Sam: Where are we trying to go? We are continually adding services that create more value onsite for clients. We recently just added multiple language support, a total of 7 languages. This allows us to be able to deliver content in language of the customer’s and participants’ preference.

Danielle: And last but not least, What do you think the event industry is in need of today?
Sam: Personally, I think that conferences need to engage more of the audience’s brain power.  Often there are a lot of smart people in the audience that have intelligent things to contribute – but the format and technology don’t allow these people to participate.   There are several different technology tools coming on the market that can help with interactivity and participation.  We just need to make sure that meeting planners have a clear understanding of how these tools can create value for their events.

Spotme celebrated its 10 year anniversary on September 25th! Congratulations, Spotme!

danielle @ October 3, 2008