Online Resource for Conference and Trade Show Attendees and Organizers Launches

WebKnowHow
Monday, November 13, 2006; 05:09 AM

Confabb.com today announced the availability of the Web's largest resource for conferences and trade shows. Visitors to www.confabb.com will be able to search for, promote and track conferences and trade shows anywhere around the world. Attendees, speakers and administrators will find a host of live Web tools on Confabb.com designed to maximize the time they spend attending conferences and trade shows. Confabb offers hosted discussions, views of photos and blog mentions, downloadable event calendars, and an industry-first peer review system for conferences, speakers and sessions to ensure these events deliver the highest return on the time and money invested in them.

"Confabb's staff are all veterans of the tech conference circuit. Between us we've been to hundreds of events over the years and always felt there should be a way to get more out of the time and money invested in attending, speaking at or marketing these events," said Salim Ismail, chairman and co-founder of Confabb. "The general saturation of blogs and other easy to use live Web applications provided the tools we needed to take the positive face-to-face networking, lead generation and professional development experiences of live shows well beyond just the two or three days and physical location the conferences are restricted to now. Confabb represents an entirely new way to discover, think about and participate in conferences for your industry or interests."

Its creators said Confabb.com contains the largest database of conferences anywhere on the Web, numbering more than 16,550 active events worldwide and growing. The features available within Confabb represent all of the possible resources that conference attendees, speakers, organizers and sponsors need for a conference. Although anyone can search the database for conferences of interest to them, a free registration grants full access to all of the site's features. Registered users find and track conferences, see who else is attending and speaking at shows, allow others to find them, and discover what people are saying through conference-specific blogs and news. Confabb has built on top of the conference search function the best in tracking, community participation, networking and conference promotional tools to extend and enhance the conference experience.

Users can research past conferences of interest in order to make plans to attend future events, track current conferences already underway and plan for upcoming conferences.

Confabb's database and features are designed to grow with community participation. As new conferences are developed organizers can add and promote events directly through the site. Confabb's functionality offers conference organizers control over session content, speaker selection and peripheral events geared to specific audiences.

"The first thing I did using Confabb during the Web 2.0 Summit was to organize future conferences I do and don't want to attend," said Mary Hodder, CEO & Founder of Dabble, a video search company located in Berkeley, CA. "Confabb let me do everything I needed in just a few minutes. And I can add information to the things I care about and see what others are doing as well. It's the perfect tool for managing events that are typically far away, last several days, and require more commitment than just going around the corner to hear a concert at the Greek Theater in Berkeley."

Confabb is hosted by the Ruby on Rails professionals at Engine Yard, of Sacramento, California.