When talking to Conferize CEO Martin Ferro-Thomsen, you realize how much the conference industry can catch up to reach 2013. Netflix has tackled movies, Spotify does music, by the conference industry has a ways to catch up to what the TED talks have enabled for consuming inspiring talks. It’s a muddled and messy industry, but if some platform can bring some logic to it, they’re looking at a huge market to grow into. The Copenhagen-based startup has just moved from Alpha to Beta, and is showing off some new features and a more simple browsing experience.
Rather than just showing you only videos of talks, Conferize is making it possible to really understand the feeling and buzz that’s happening around the event. On the conference consumption side, they provide platform to show you videos, photos, tweets, and the presentation slides that the conference managers can upload into the platform.
These features are available as embedded objects, called Highlight Players, as shown below of last year’s Arctic15 conference, which make it possible for event organizers and attendees to show off the live feed of everything that’s happening (or what happened) at their conferences, festivals, meetups, and other events. The platform filters tweets and photos to try to show you the most meaningful ones, which is important because event the smallest events can put out a ton of content onto the web.
This isn’t a product to replace conferences for online consumption, but Ferro-Thomsen says that it will help people find the events that make the most sense to the time to attend. The platform gets bigger when going to the Conferize website, which is honestly a lot more valuable than 99% of conference websites. You can see a list of attendees, drill down on speakers, find the event schedule in one place.
The big picture here is to build a solid directory of events, speakers, attendees, and the content that comes out of them. If you really like one speaker on a topic, you would likely want to see more content from them, which is difficult to find in a google search.
“What really excites me is that now we have a way to really follow a conference online. But we also have a good metadata graph,” says Ferro-Thomsen. “The next thing we will be looking to address is how to take the good stuff from that and feed add it into our daily life.”
The platform has already gathered over 20,000 speakers from about 5,500 events. There’s about 1.5 million conferences out there in the world, giving them plenty of room to grow, and a huge amount of data to gather.
