Derek Gallo

The Future of Web Apps in Miami has past. I found the event a great opportunity to learn from some of the industry tops as well as socialize and network with industry peers. I attend many conferences but usually I am working at them, providing kiosk technology for their attendees. They are usually not conferences for my profession, so to go to this one as an actual attendee was great.

Besides just the main Future of Web Apps conference, the Miami community hosted BarcampMiami. Barcamp is a community driven un-conference where anyone can choose to give a presentation or talk on whatever they feel and contribute to the overall knowledge of the community. BarcampMiami was held on the day before the main conference day and was a free alternative to the FOWA workshops.

Don’t miss our own second BarcampOrlando in April! Registration is already open.

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We have returned from the ACTE conference in Miami. Overall the conference was a success, both for ACTE and for NFi Studios. ACTE reached every goal they aimed for despite a few setbacks due to inclement weather. The nQuest Event Browser supported decent usage and great feedback from attendees, particularly on the newly released features.

The Green Movement is catching wind among many associations and events. Due to this they are not releasing conference collateral or presentations via printed hard copies any more. nQuest was equipped with a new Paperless Portal allowing attendees to insert their USB flash drive to easily select and download some or all of the conference presentations. The process is almost completely automated. Overall we received tremendous feedback from users on how quick and simple the process was to grab the presentations.

Usage of the Event Browser was consistent with previous events although usage of the Messaging component was down. This was most likely due to the conference location being in the United States with a large amount of U.S. attendees that all had working mobile email devices. We tend to see higher messaging usage at overseas conferences that still have a large U.S. attendee base. Usage of the new Paperless Portal was very good despite attendees gaining knowledge of it not until later in the conference. We now look forward to future events in Singapore, Munich and Washington D.C.

Tomorrow Tom, Sterling and I head down to The Doral in Miami for another ACTE Educational Conference. Chris will be meeting us down there on Sunday. We will be heading down there to help support website updates and technology during the conference. We will also be providing our Meetings Connect solution including the nQuest Browser.

This conference will have the largest attendee count in ACTE’s history. We will be hosting 10 kiosks. It should be good times as usual at the events. We will be launching a couple new features and the skin for this conference is by far my favorite so far. I can’t wait to get some feedback on the new look.