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November 13, 2006

Confabb: Find, Track and Review Conferences

Marshall Kirkpatrick

43 comments »

Confabb is a new service launching today that offers a centralized place to find information about all kinds of conferences. The site offers everything from speaker and event reviews to photos of the events after the fact through integration with Flickr. It’s an impressive full service site that could become the go-to spot for at least tech conference attendees and possibly a wider audience.

Confabb is lead by former PubSub co-founder Salim Ismail, product manager Cameron Barrett (who incidentally built campaign web sites for Wesley Clark and John Kerry) and former AT&T exec and PubSub team member Jon Mandell. Early investors include chronic conference attendee and web innovator Dave Winer.

At launch the site includes details on more than 16,000 conferences and anyone can fill out a form to submit other events for consideration. Confabb calls itself the largest conference database in the world. It’s a very well put together site; there are both standard categories and tags, integration of off-site resources, reputation management, user watch pages to track a number of events, a badge generator to post conference logos on your blog and iCal export of your conference list. Attendees and watchers can list themselves for public display.

Confabb plans on rolling out a number of new features over the next two to three months, including integration with more calendar programs, video and podcast listings, web based chat rooms per conference and per session and both native and integrated RSVP capabilities. It’s an ambitious road map, but most of these features look like tech industry best practices brought together into one place at a time when at least our sector is finally widely familiar with them.

Will Confabb be able to gain traction outside the Web 2.0 world? If attendees of events like the All Asian Food Expo and the Second International Doris Lessing Conference start using Confabb then the events world could really be shaken up. Building use of the system outside the community most prepared for it will take a concerted effort and probably some changes to suit the cultures of other conference communities.

There are a few technical things that Confabb could still use. RSS feeds for events by categories are needed badly. Microformats are being considered, the company says, and would help demonstrate that Confabb is a community participant more than trying to be an exclusive destination site. The integration with off site resources is great, I’d like to see Mary Hodder’s Speakers Wiki, a wiki intended to help diversify conference speaker lists, drawn from as well. Map and attendee tag features as was explored by the service Attendr could be interesting too.

It’s high time someone took the best practices from across the web that conference attendees and support sites have been developing. It’s great that Confabb is bringing many different services together and aggregating them. The project should get a lot of support and I expect that at least the web world, if not the larger conference world, will be using Confabb quite a bit.

  • Sphere It

This entry was posted on Monday, November 13th, 2006 at 10:25 am and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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  1. The good news is rolling in at Hello, My Name Is…

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  2. Scripting News for 11/13/2006 « Scripting News Annex

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  3. Argolon » Salim’s new baby - Confabb, The Conference Community

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  4. Confabb opens to conference attendees, speakers, planners « Scobleizer - Tech Geek Blogger

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  5. Confabb.com Opens Doors « matteh, a dev junky

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  6. Confabb, The Conference Community » Dee’s-Planet! Blog

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  7. Salim launches Confabb at Tom Raftery’s I.T. views

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  8. Confabb « InterMedia Blogging Network

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  9. BenCurtis.com » Blog Archive » Connecting at Conferences

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  10. Confabb - Search, Track, Discuss and Review Conferences « Kiyo’s Blog

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Comments

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  1. Patricia

    November 13th, 2006 at 10:34 am

    This is really good, as this kind of information is really huge for marketing and publicity, especially for high tech companies and normally very tedious to locate. There was a site that offered this (it was called TSNN or something?) at one point but it’s since seemed to fall off by the wayside - much to the cries of hundreds of interns who have to pull together listings of shows and speaking opportunities for clients :) I’m very glad somebody’s picked it up again - it would be wise for them to reach out to the marketing and publicity trade publications out of the gate, they should be very sticky users.

  2. Mik Atkinson

    November 13th, 2006 at 11:08 am

    This is great. I have seen some industry sites try to track, but tying in these services will be much better. I’ve used sites like VentureCapitalConferences.com in the past, but Confabb looks to be the authority for all interests.

  3. Darren Herman

    November 13th, 2006 at 11:17 am

    Great! Looking forward to see how this plays out… but would love to know the revenue model of Confabb. My guess is that they take a % of each conference registration sold through this platform and/or charge a listing fee eventually to anyone who registers. I’ll be checking this one out.

  4. Justin Kistner

    November 13th, 2006 at 11:31 am

    Maybe someone will post info from the Webmaster World conference going off tomorrow (nudge nudge, wink wink)

  5. Brian Solis

    November 13th, 2006 at 12:45 pm

    I like this from a marketing services perspective. We’re constantly asked to evaluate shows and events for everything from CE, enterprise, storage, DV, etc. If other service providers jump in, I think it can get legs outside of the 2.0 realm.

  6. ventureblogalist

    November 13th, 2006 at 12:46 pm

    Marshall, how did they get the data on 16k conferences?

  7. Marshall Kirkpatrick

    November 13th, 2006 at 12:56 pm

    Ventureblogalist- they bought some lists but say they found them inadequate so they built this giant list by hand with a small team. They won’t be spidering for conferences either, it will all by user submitted.

  8. ~rick

    November 13th, 2006 at 1:06 pm

    Great reference material..Always nice to know there is a good source for this information. Although, it may be some limited in focus at this point, the possibilities are endless..~rick

  9. Danny Sullivan

    November 13th, 2006 at 1:08 pm

    I’m mixed. On the one hand, looks like a nice, useful site for those thinking about going to conferences and wanting to read up more about them. As a conference producer, I see a lot of features and tools that would be handy.

    Then again, it’s a bit offputting to discover that Confabb has unilaterally declared a conference tag for my conferences without consulting, not to mention having effectively copied my agenda, session descriptions and etc. without my permission. The legality of that is uncertain, the wholescale rip and reprint.

    I was impressed by how accurate things were for our upcoming SES Chicago show, http://www.confabb.com/conferences/ses2006chicago/ compared to http://www.searchenginestrateg.....hicago06/, but I guess it would have been nice to have been asked first (and it’s possible someone else in our conference group was asked. If so, my apologies).

    I look forward to trying out some of the admin tools — though I suspect one of those probably needs to be to have a conference delisted. I’d be more likely to lean toward keeping ours up, but a choice is nice to have.

  10. Brandon

    November 13th, 2006 at 1:25 pm

    Awesome, I was just looking for a site like this the other day.

  11. Salim Ismail

    November 13th, 2006 at 1:35 pm

    Hey all, thanks for the great comments. Here are some initial responses:

    - Our business model will be as a marketing partner to conferences to help attendees find them and increase their registration

    - We’ll continue a data entry effort to ensure we have all the conferences that we can possibly find… we estimate we have most big conferences, but there are lot we don’t have, so we won’t slow down the data aggregation effort. We have a team of data entry folks as well as user submissions, which are pouring in as I speak.

    - Most of all, I’m very proud of how we built confabb. It was build in 4 months with 6 people all working part-time and we’ve gone live without spending a dime. It’s an interesting model using a short-term founders stock vesting instrument (I spoke about it at startup camp and it’ll be the subject of my talk in Ireland). Using this approach as derisked the venture considerably so we a) don’t need a huge amount of investment and b) can take some real risks. We’re hoping to be profitable within 6-8 months with a relatively small team.

    It’s amazing what a well-functioning team can do when working cohesively and I can’t praise the guys enough. It’s been a lot of late nights and everyone really had to believe in it. Even Engine Yard, our fabulous hosting partners, deferred invoicing us for the first few weeks. I think this is an interesting model for how companies today can get started, and I’ll be blogging more about this approach (”You’ve Got Ismail, at http://www.salimismail.com).

  12. Jon Aizen

    November 13th, 2006 at 1:36 pm

    I just used Dapper ( http://www.dappit.com ) to create an RSS feed for any category.

    http://www.dappit.com/transfor.....leArg_0=81

    Replace the 81 at the end of the above URL with the numeric ID of the category you’re interested in (find it in the URL on the Confabb website), and you’ll get an RSS of the upcoming conferences in that category.

    Enjoy

  13. Patricia

    November 13th, 2006 at 2:20 pm

    ^ aw that’s cool salim. i have something that might be helpful, i’ll hit your site and try to find an email. :)

  14. Salim Ismail

    November 13th, 2006 at 2:54 pm

    Hey Danny, thanks for the comments.

    Sorry if we seem to have ripped something off. If we used a tag, it was done explicitly based on what the community (or the conference site) is saying - we don’t try and be an authority on that. If we overstepped, I apologize.

    Aside from the cursory conference details which are publicly available in any search engine (pun intended!), we only we only use data from users who have explicitly entered it into the system….

    Regarding organizer tools, any organizer can ‘claim’ a conference and have full ownership of what is published about it. We have a process in place for that, though clearly it’s not explicit enough. Please give us a call if you have other concerns - we certainly don’t want to be taking actions that are considered unfriendly. And frankly, we’d love to talk and see what else we can/should be doing.

    Cheers,
    Salim

  15. Jean-François Petit

    November 13th, 2006 at 3:09 pm

    I think a site like Confabb is a great idea. I had a quick look (not an exhaustive analysis) but I was amazed to see that there is no search filtering or narrowing. For example, if you search “food”, Confabb returns 232 conferences. The results are paged (24) and there is no way to narrow down a list according to geographical location, date range or topic subcategory. You are forced to go through the whole list, sorted by date in chronological order, by name or by city. I might have missed something, but user experience would be greatly enhanced if these features were brought in ASAP. Salim: May I ask if there was any real-world user testing before launch? Just curious. It would definitely help you guys develop a better product.

  16. nemrut

    November 13th, 2006 at 3:15 pm

    Salim — an immediately useful feature would be to list the number or pages for conf results or have a ‘View All’ link. Right now the painpoint is paging through 10-15 results at a time without knowing how many are left. It would also be nice to sort by alph, date or geographic location.

    Anyway nice work..i was geting tired of Googling for potential conferences to attend.

  17. Martin Wells

    November 13th, 2006 at 3:26 pm

    No rss for search results… :(

  18. Chris

    November 13th, 2006 at 3:43 pm

    Jean-François, it’s interesting your note about filtering/narrowing results down.

    What would be the best way to achieve this in your opinion ?

  19. Salim Ismail

    November 13th, 2006 at 3:49 pm

    Jean Francois, Nemrut, Martin, thanks for the suggestions.

    JF, guilty as charged on the search capability! We had a tough call with either waiting several weeks for the search feature to be fully ready and delaying launch till January or going live now and iterating like hell. We tried to, er, de-emphasize some of the missing functionality, but you’ve nailed us.

    We’ve been using a set of alpha testers that were complaining loudly that they couldn’t publicly use the site and “when are you going live already goddamit” and it got too loud to ignore. There are about six areas where we could really improve the service and we decided to see the response and let the community decide what our first focus areas ought to be. Better search, better categorization and RSS tracking are the current hot favorites.

    Please continue to hold us to task..!

  20. puff

    February 20th, 2007 at 4:44 pm

    dsd

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