What do long lines and slow check-ins have in common? Angry clients! Never fear; help is here. No more standing at the door, flipping through ten pages of names. New iPad and iPhone apps offer efficiency and professionalism for guest check-in. We’ve taken a good look at the latest options and reviewed them for you. From basic spreadsheet uploads to full-on social media integration, these apps are at the front of the line. Each of these applications caters to slightly different needs and they vary in cost, but they all look like they’re worth a try!

  1. My Guest List is the world’s first app allowing event managers to sync guestlists and function enquires from your website, Facebook, or spreadsheets to an ipad ready for hosts or door staff to use at the beginning of your event. This clever app is great for guest management- tap guests off as they arrive and track arrival times, VIPs, and walk-ins. All of the night’s data is translated to reporting and statistics- logging the total number of people who attended your event and the performance of your promoter. Finally, the most important feature, social media integration- allowing your database to have both Facebook and the iPad working in sync. This enables complete guest profiling, including how often they frequent a venue, what they like to drink and how much social influence they have.  The service starts at $25 dollars a month.

2. CheckInEasy is a great iPad/iPhone app which was recently used for the Google holiday party to check in over 2500 guests! This app is great because guests can either be looked up by name or using boarding pass style barcodes.  Also, if you want to be notified when a special guest arrives, you can choose to receive a text message or email. CheckInEasy has really emphasized their attention to data security so that customers can feel confident about protecting their guests’ information. The app is only $1.99 and the starter package, up to 500 check-ins, is $99.00.

3. Eventbrite is a leading ticketing service that has created an app called Entry Manager. This app allows you to log into your Eventbrite account and pull up guestlists from all of the events that you are planning. Attendees can be checked in by name, or by scanning invitation barcodes that guests can print out or pull up right on their iPhones.  The list automatically syncs with other devices being used to check people in.   All of your attendance data will be stored on the server and accessible in your Eventbrite account for further analysis. An Eventbrite account is necessary, and the app is free!

 4. Event Farm has a mobile guest check-in app for the iPad and iPhone. It is sleek, stylish and full of features. It allows you to customize the background of the app to promote your brand and to keep up with the real time analytics for the event.  Also, guests can leave tickets behind for the rest of their party if they happen to arrive separately.  Use it in conjunction with the fully-featured web-based Event Farm Ticketing System, or create your own list by downloading their Excel guest list template.  The cost starts at $0.50 per guest that you upload, with no extra fee for the app.

5. Venue Driver Mobile Check-In is a web based venue management system. This software is ideal for nightclubs and bars that hold events regularly which require guest check-in, VIP table reservations, or ticket distribution. The software can be used on an iPad/iPhone, and the data can be viewed online. It is a great solution for both the venue and the guests, since guests can sign up for events on their mobile devices, and managers can easily keep track of the consumer database, making it easier to plan for future events. The management system requires a subscription, but the app comes at no extra cost.

6. MyBanquet is a great iPad app for events that require seating assignments.  It was created for weddings, awards banquets, and gala dinners.  Guests can be uploaded from facebook, a text document, or manually.  Then, you can design the layout of your event, organize table assignments, and easily email reports to important people every step of the way. You can add notes to people’s table assignments if special arrangements need to be made for their dinner or accessibility.  RSVP’s can be handled manually or by connecting to facebook.   It is only $3.99 in the App Store and doesn’t require a subscription.

 7. Guest List Manager is an app developed by Hilton Worldwide, ensuring event managers have the ability to coordinate guest lists with room bookings. This app is great for managing the small details of your event through key features like viewing the current guest list and reservation status regardless of how the guest’s reservation was booked, viewing the group’s room count, and searching for attendee cancellations. This application is extremely effective and makes booking the Hilton as your next event venue so worthwhile! Guest List Manager is convienently available on iPad, iPhone and iPod touch.     

We recently saw the launch of a new lifestyle brand, HelloBrit.com which aims to find helpful, yet creative new ways for busy people to live more simply, beautifully and imaginatively. Brit Morin (wife to Dave Morin, the founder of Path) has been working in the tech world for several years now and was a former Apple and Google employee. She is already being touted as the Martha Stewart of Silicon Valley and has recently been featured in The LA Times, Huffington Post, and TechCrunch. Brit gives new ideas and tips to live a more simple and creative life whether it be through technology, food, style, health that she either created or curated from scouring the web, something that is becoming very popular! Brit says “The ideas should come to you, and they should come through a channel whose expertise and taste you trust.”

Her site is looking like a cross between Real Simple and Wired Magazines with videos showing you how to make Christmas tree cheese appetizers, how to use electrical tape to make candy cane cups, DIY Holiday welcome mats, wearable dinner party napkins, and more. She recently featured a great gift guide for the holidays and showcases 20 of her favorite products and apps. Thanks Brit!

The brand’s first offering is a wedding app called Weduary, which was inspired by the process that Morin and her husband used in planning their own ”Pixel Cowboy”- themed wedding this summer. This will be a new service for brides and grooms, and will hopefully make for a more interesting experience for guests online and off. Make sure to sign up on the website to be notified when the new site arrives! There will be some other apps launched in the future which will likely be centered around ways to be creative around the home and novel ways to perform everyday activities like cooking, decorating and shopping.

We hope you enjoy and use Hello Brit for a little inspiration into your own creativity! We know that at ABCey, we will be keeping up Brit’s innovative ideas and using them for inspiration of our own, especially this holiday season.

Do you ever spend hours in a store or shopping online, trying to find the perfect gift for someone, but just can’t quite figure out what to get them? Well, now your days have become much easier, and just in time for the holidays!  Givvy is an “open community that let’s you participate in shaping the next gift-giving trend”. Whether it’s for a birthday, holiday present, housewarming party or a little something for yourself, our community of curators makes it easy to discover trendy new gifts that will inspire you and delight your friends and family.  You can also keep track of your most important occasions and social events with a personalized calendar and gift reminder service.

Givvy is uniquely designed for use inside Facebook—so you can discover gifts and share occasions while staying connected to the friends you love most. Givvy is an open community that let’s you participate in shaping the next gift-giving trend. Simply share your favorite gift ideas with friends and earn points as your influence gains in popularity. The members with the most influence earn exclusive rewards and join our community of Curators.

Your Holiday season of gift giving has now become much easier.  Make sure to check out Givvy’s Facebook page for great ideas for the perfect gift.

ABCey Events would like to thank Larry Rubin, one of Givvy’s founder’s for making our gift-giving days much easier!

Salesforce.com‘s annual convention, Dreamforce, is in full swing this week at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. The event, which began Dec. 6th and continues until tomorrow, Dec. 9th, has been promoting the release of 5 new applications for their cloud computing enterprise. CEO Mark Benioff stated in his address that this new stage, ‘Cloud 2′, “is built around a social and mobile web that includes Facebook, feeds, push notifications, touch, smartphones, location, HTML5 and mobile operating systems.” According to Mashable.com ‘s list of the new platforms are as follows:

Appforce: A platform for companies to build collaborative departmental apps that scale.

Siteforce: A website creation solution designed with both developers and business users in mind.

VMforce: A private beta service for Java developers to run their applications natively on Force.com

Heroku: The just acquired popular cloud platform for Ruby applications.

ISVforce: A platform service that enables ISVs to build and deliver multi-tenant cloud apps.

As far as events go, Dreamforce’s schedule is packed with over 700 speeches, parties, and musical guests, such as Neil Young and Stevie Wonder.  Last night various speeches and keynotes, from speakers such as Marc Sofia of Baker Hughes and Herman Boyd of DuPont, were delivered to give convention-goers a bit more information about the new applications.  Many attendees were from other companies in the software industry and the technological industry at large.

Tonight’s big event is being held at SF MOMA and will commence at 6:30pm.  The purpose of this event is for the marketing and sales divisions of the company, and will be sponsored by PR Newswire.  Salesforce has a great event management department, and ABCey thinks these events look really cool!  As event planners, how would you plan such a large event or convention, and where would you host these events?

The full Mashable article can be viewed here!

There’s a cool new web app in town for those looking for an alternate take on calendars. It’s a little more like a to-do list than a calendar, and is pretty good at arranging the items you’ve entered around a date. If you are a super heavy calendar user, this might not be the best option for you. But, if you are looking for something new to test out, this might be something fun. They seem to still be adding functionality and working out the kinks on some of the discrepancy’s, but it’s free to use and nicely designed. Of course it requires a google account to log in. Go figure!

Eventually it appears that you will be able to use #hashtags for organizing, @mentions for sharing events (most likely via Twitter), and many alert options to make sure you get the reminder (right now it sends an email and Google Talk notification to the Google account you signed up with).

As we attempt to keep on the up and up in the event industry, our latest research brought us to these 4 new event portals that could prove to be invaluable for your next event. Which ones will you be testing out?

1. Intelligent CO NNE CT MOBILE by Alliance Tech is the latest solution for providing attendees with full access to event content through mobile devices such as the Iphone, Google phone Palm Pre and Blackberry. This app features access to the agenda, session information, news, business card exchange, messages, Twitter polling and more.
2. Yasmo Live enables targeted networking at an event, whether it’s a conference, social gathering, or meeting. It allows attendees to locate the people they wish to network with by seeing their picture-based business profiles on their mobile phones. Then they can connect, take notes, and more!
3. Mobile Community Platform by Zerista is an app which will help and allow you to create your own app. It combines community-building components, social networking, mobile social discovery, event ticketing, and management. Users can check in from wherever they are.
4. Wellknown is an IPhone platform that allows you to search events based on your location or area of interest, keep up on the news, find and connect to other professionals and keep in touch with people after the event.

Keep in mind- these are all great, but you don’t need a ton of apps and digital gadgets to make an event interactive. Just be creative and it will be succesful!

When planning an event, last-minute purchases come up all the time. Well, Paypal and iPhone have teamed up the create a bump app that allows users to make purchases quickly and easily.  Over the past few years Paypal has made financial transactions via the internet a simple process. The recent bump iPhone app is just another way the company is creating a worry free shopping environment. The new bump app lets users literally bump their phones together and send money to each other.

Another cool feature of this app is that you can donate money to great causes and charitable organizations. Currently, PayPal has partnered with various organizations, including Save the Children and Autism Speaks, to make donating to charities an  easy process. The iPhone app will also allow users to deposit checks straight from their phone. Instead of going to an ATM or bank, just take a picture of both sides of the check and PayPal will deposit the money into your online account.

How do you think you will use this app? Can you see any potential problems with the technology?

Rumor has it that Apple has hired an expert to develop credit card payment technology as an app for the iPhone. This app would use near-field comms (NFC) implementations, like used in subway/bus ticket systems to process data transmitted from transportation cards. The simple technology recognizes the amount you’ve paid according to each journey you’ve taken, but the process for a  smartphone is far more complicated and has endless possibilities! This technology could add a whole new dimension to online shopping. All you have to do is set your iPhone onto a small pad and it will process your request the same way a machine in a grocery store works- simply confirm your PIN number or provide a signature.

Some might be skeptical of the new application, wondering if it’s necessary when one could simply shop online the old fashioned way, but the new iPhone app would allow users to input information faster, give access to stores where one can shop and receive free apps, discounts, loyalty card points, or games. For event planning, this is great news because you could buy all of your supplies quickly and easily from home, or on the go.

Do you think more people will prefer this method to regular in-store shopping? How do you think it will change the shopping experience in general?

On June 24 CNET reporter Daniel Terdiman began his journey up and down the East Coast in search for new and interesting technology, research and development. Throughout the tour Terdiman will stop at NASA, the Naval Academy, Washington D.C., and Philadelphia. His latest stop was the Media Lab at MIT where he took a look at some groundbreaking technological advances, a few of are definitely worth mentioning:

-NETRA, or near-eye tool for refractive assessment, is a smartphone application and device combo that would provide large numbers of people around the world with quick and easy eye tests, similar to what is available in a doctor’s office. An application of this kind could easily serve the 2 billion people with refractive issues, especially those in rural areas.

-Electrodermal sensors fitted to autistic children will help occupational therapists during sessions better understand the child’s emotional moods and work constructively. These sensors are the combination of biosensors, artificial intelligence and assistive technologies.

-The CityCar, better referred to as the folding vehicle, can fit into the tiniest parking spaces and could radically change urban environments. The battery-electric car is expected to average at least 150 miles per gallon, can rotate on its own axis- 360°- park sideways, and because there is no central engine it can be folded into a smaller vehicle.

What could the CityCar mean for the energy crisis? Do you think applications like NETRA will help developing countries become more competitive?

For all you iPhone users in the event industry, here is a list of handy apps you should add to your event planning tool belt:

• AccuWeather- AccuWeather offers a GPS application to provide worldwide forecasting to “weatherproof” your event.

• Evernote- Create an electronic ideas scrapbook containing notes, photos and voice memos using Evernote, accessible at any time from your iPhone, computer, or the web.

• Foursquare- Keep tabs on your clients’ locations using the geolocation social networking site, and explore your city in new ways with the Foursquare application.

• Skype- The Skype download connects you to contacts anywhere in the world, which is perfect for destination events or long distance clients.

• LinkedIn – LinkedIn for iPhone allows users to access and share their professional profile with clients at the touch of a button, and connect with over 70 million professionals worldwide.

• Twitterific- Twitterific lets you update clients about the event planning process, and allows easy access to your business and social networks.

• Facebook- To keep track of and check in with clients and staff, Facebook quickly connects you to all of your networks.

• Alarm Clock- Though it seems simple, every event planner knows the importance of being on time, so ensure your punctuality with the Alarm Clock application.

How have these apps contributed to your event planning? Are there any other downloads every event planner should use?