Guest: Salim Ismail - Confabb

Salim Ismail - Confabb
Hi, my name is Salim Ismail. I'm demoing Confabb.com. We're sitting at Dave Wyner's house on the Orange Couch not quite red but we'll get there hopefully, I think we'll migrate to that level one day. So, I'll be showing how Confabb works and we're launching that tomorrow, which is Monday the 12th I think. So, I'm going to turn to the camera or turn to the PC. So, you are looking at the kind of non logged in homepage. Confabb is a community of conference scores, we've built a portal of all the kinds of functions you'd like to see and to track conferences and see what's happening and underneath that we've aggregated the largest database of conferences in the world.

So, you can see here the homepage we've got a photograph from CES, from earlier this year. We track currently 16,581 conferences. Anybody can come and add a conference. This is a tracker saying, there is 533 conferences happening this week, 36 are starting today and 134 are ending today and that updates constantly. And you can click through and just see, which ones they are that were happening this particular week. So, further down there is recent reviews of conferences that the users are putting in. So, we can see that lay blog 2 (ph) was good overview. There's something from blogging goes mainstream, a couple of reviews there; we have featured conferences and active conferences, the ones that have had the most ratings and user input. The site is geared for both conference organizers to enter conferences as well as users to enter conferences that they have been a part of it.

So, I'm going to log in and then show you some of the more details features in the site. Let me login here separately. I'm using a macro about third time in my life. So, I am now logging into the system and the homepage is now tailored for me, and if I go to home you'll see - just waiting for the network. So, what you see here is these are the conferences I'm attending. The Web 2.0, the it@cork session is happening later. There's a tab for which one's I'm watching, I'm watching the TechCrunch party that's happening next week and the Le Web 3, which is happening in about a month. And then there is the ones that I'm speaking at. I'm speaking at the it@cork conference later this month. You can see what's happening with the Le Web 2, Le Web 3, or Web 2.0 at TechCrunch and again you have all the rest of it there.

So, I can go in here now, and say, let's look at Web 2.0, which happened this past week. And this is the detail page of a particular conference where you can see the venues, the location, and the URL. I can mark that I attended it. We have a tag that's a sign to this conference where I can look at Flickr photographs and so on. And across the top we have a discussion board for the conference; you can look at all the speakers for the particular conference. You can see the sessions and we've created a consistent view for the sessions where we have day one, day two, day three and you can navigate the entire session grid and click on sessions that you are attending. And we have calendaring, where you can say add this to iCal and also RSS feeds for the conferences itself. If I click on the reviews tab, these are the reviews of the conference. So, the conference is rated overall, a four out of five, there are 12 ratings a sessions at four out of five, the networking is rated as five out of five. And you can rate a conference against the speakers by the networking, by the shreg (ph), by the venue and by the content. So, if you go in and put in a review you can do that. So, there are a few reviews further down that I can click on and say for this particular session there was good foods, strong drinks, great networking, what more could you ask for and that's what that particular review says. And I can enter my own. And we want to be able to allow people to see that kind of information. These are side events for the conference, we want to add one; we can add a side event like The Web 2.2 thing that Chris here ran. So, I can say event name, Web 2.2; it happened at the Microsoft Centre I think and it happened -- a drop down I can say it happened on the Thursday and it started. And I can add that event. So, now other people can see that these are the side events going on for that particular conference. I can click on the photos tab for The Web 2.0 Conference and see all the Flickr photographs coming with the appropriate tag. And I can click on the link to look at all the photographs from Flickr. There's a couple of Varington (ph) there is one of Tariq Krim of Netvibes, etcetera. And then there is a new tab that goes and gets blog mentions and I can look at Technorati, Google, Yahoo! or Feedster's mentions of that particular conference.

So, that's all the basic categories. We also have sort of basic functionality that you can do around a particular conference. You can also go to browse-by-category up at the top and see all the categories in the system and look at the -- search through the conference database by category. So, we have computers and internet, etcetera. The network is a little slow right now, so give us a second for that to come up. At the top you can add a conference, look at the features, those are obviously our own blog and I'll get to this most interesting feature here called Top Speakers in a second. I've got a bit of delay in our system for some reason. So, while we're waiting for that, let me just click on Top Speakers and see if I can see that easily. Oh! Our site seems to be a little bit down. So, down here we have the recent discussion from the conference etcetera. It looks like the site -- either the Internet's down here or sites down itself, one of the two. Let me add the tab and see if something else I can get to. No, the tab's working.

So, I think our sites maybe a little bit down, they maybe doing some maintenance or something to it. But, there's a tab you called Top Speakers where I can go and see all the Top Speakers as rated by users and ranked by all their ratings and see who has been ranked the Top Speaker and I can see where speakers have spoken at. And we want to make this a place where speakers can have an aggregate view of all the places they've spoken at. Very personally, the last two or three conference that I've spoken, I have received high reviews, high marks for my speaking and I have got no word that actually says that -- no word to show that, "Hey, this is my rating as a speaker, across these various conferences." So, we are hoping this could be a space for that. So, it looks like I can't show you that particular bit because there's something not quite right about it. But I think -- hope I've given you a general overview of Confabb. We launch tomorrow and we're hoping it will be a good place for people to do research on conferences, use it to enter their own and track their own conferences, and then also announce conferences that they want to be at or if they know of conferences we really encourage people; if they know conferences that we don't have in the system please add it so that everybody can benefit from that. The users generated aspect of this site is the very key element that we want to launch with.