Virtual Office Featured Article

LiveCube Reengages Industry Event Participation

October 05, 2015
By Mae Kowalke, TMCnet Contributor

The events space is in flux, due partially to the fact that every business professional now hangs by their phone.

This reliance on one's phone, and the ever-present need to check in with social networks, can be a challenge for a live event where the point is face-to-face networking and idea sharing. Smartphones isolate.

“You’d see people at conferences, distracted by their phones and not quite sure how to interact with the other people around them … who were strangers really,” notes Gabe Zichermann, co-founder of LiveCube.

LiveCube is one example of how event organizers are getting around this problem, as a recent Phone.com blog post highlighted.


If you can’t beat em, join me—that’s not the slogan of LiveCube, but it could be. The service helps events get ahead of the smartphone issue by engaging event participants through their phone and pulling them back to the event in the process.

Livecube brings together event scheduling, photo and Twitter (News - Alert) feeds, event polling and gamification in a single interface, enabling participants to engage with the event on new levels and connect with others while still hanging close to their smartphone.

It works by having attendees sign into the app when they arrive, and enabling them to get schedule updates, post tweets and photos and interact with other participants through the app. Gamification can also be incorporated to spur involvement—nothing like giving out a gift card for those who are most active at the event, for instance.

LiveCube also serves as a repository of information for after the event, something all of us can use after the blur of activity that is the typical industry event. It can show interactions, session info, etc. And for the organizers, it also can be used for event feedback and surveys.

This is the sort of innovation sorely needed at most industry events, a way to at once acknowledge the smartphone issue and surmount it through thoughtful application of virtual office technology.

Not only is this an innovation for the events space, but also it points the way forward for other businesses when it comes to applying smartphones to their existing business models.




Edited by Maurice Nagle

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