Hello, My Name Is…

Cheezy title, isn’t it? Sorry, couldn’t think of anything else just now. Maybe it’ll change before the end of the post.

Which is all about some new services we’ve rolled out to keep ‘feeding the beast,’ or the group of rabid users who are constantly looking for more, more, more. Well bring it on–we love it. And because you ask, we deliver. Recently you asked us about a marketplace for jobs and vendor listings; today, we’re rolling that out.

Introducing Confabb Resources and Confabb Jobs.

Resources is our answer to the meetings, conferences, trade shows and events “Yellow Pages.” Look here first if you’re an organizer and you need to find a great vendor in any given city. If you run a business that caters to event organizers, get in touch with us fast so we can get your business in front of a web-wide audience of potential clients. We’re currently taking “preferred vendor” listings, which provides even better visibility. We’ve got any number of categories, including associations, speakers bureaus, schwag, displays, blogs and even registration companies.
Jobs –wait, not that one; this one: is our industry-specific job board. If you’re a trade show, conference organizer or other events-type company looking for talent, advertising on Confabb Jobs will get your open position in front of the exact audience of potential candidates. On the flip side, if you’re looking for a new gig check us out. Chances are good you’ll find a shiny new opportunity and be able to supersize your life. Drop us a note if that happens; we love happy endings.

We’re also fond of great beginnings, and we’ve had more than a few of those recently. We’re excited to have added a conference registration function from right within the site. Organizers need to take a look to see if their event is in Confabb; chances are it is. Once found, register for free, claim it (or add your conference if it’s not there already) and use Confabb to help promote the show. Sign people up and sell that sucker out. Email us at: registrationvendor [at] confabb.com.

Keepin’ the title.  Sorry.

At some point it’ll become unnecessary to celebrate “milestones” for the amount of conferences Confabb has in its searchable database, but until then it’s still fun to look at and talk about the number; today it;s 61,574 (as of this writing) and counting. That’s a lot of conferences, meetings, conventions, trade shows and association gatherings. It makes us very proud to have more than any other site on the web serving the meetings and conventions industry after having been at this for just a a little more than a year.

Most of the work uploading shows into the Confabb database has been done by users for their particular event’s audiences of speakers, attendees and potential attendees, and they tell us it’s a labor of love. We get that; we’re constantly reminded why we started Confabb: to provide ourselves with a central hub of information about events we wanted to attend or follow through the web. Seems as though we were on to something.

Thanks, everyone, for helping to grow Confabb. We want to repay the favor by making sure we’re delivering all the bells and whistles you’d like to make your experience on the site better. Please let us know what else we can do here through the blog or to all of us at corporate (at) confabb.com.

All the best,

The Confabb Team

Well the conference season has slowed down, and just in time for us to begin to gear up for next year. The past year has been a great one for us here at Confabb and we are thankful for all those who have helped get us to where we are.

It is with that I will keep this short. Whether you spend the next few days with your family gathered around the Christmas tree, or at the movies and eating chinese food, or just enjoying a few days off of work, we at Confabb would like to wish you Happy Holiday and a great New Year, see you all soon.

And here is a little holiday humor from the co-founders here at Confabb. (may not work in FF)

Hopefully you’ve noticed the change on Confabb’s home page. The flashy “New” sign modifies what we hope will be a huge resource to our users interested in their specific industries rather than the entire meetings industry at large.

Today we’ve expanded to launching the first of our Conference News Hubs. Where Confabb.com is the first stop for anyone researching events they’re interested in attending and services more than 400 distinct verticals, the Conference News Hubs provide a central resource for audiences interested in all of the events taking place within a specific industry.

News Hub content is generated by a combination of automated feeds and original content created by experienced News Hub Editors, who will edit the Hubs from week-to-week and serve as community resources.

The Conference News Hubs include:

• Industry-specific job boards
• Original content from the Hub editors
• Industry news aggregated from the top blogs and news sources in these industries
• Top Five Conferences in each industry, with the ability to click for a macro-view of the entire industry’s events via the main Confabb.com site
• The Editor’s featured conferences, speakers and continuously updated news links

The first of the Conference News Hubs are live. They are/edited by:

Identity Woman, Kaliya Hamlin on Internet Identity – confabb.com/identity;

David Coleman on Software Collaboration – confabb.com/collaborate;

Howard Greenstein, writing about Social Media – confabb.com/socialmedia;

The Content Wrangler, Scott Abel on Content Management – confabb.com/contentmanagement.

We anticipate six more Hubs to go live before Christmas, and many more after that. The News Hubs came about as a response to user requests more than anything else. A little over a year ago, we launched Confabb and the response among the meetings industry has been fantastic. But we also heard a lot of requests to drill deeper into specific verticals. Because of the size of the Confabb database, and the networking tools we’ve built on top of it, we found that difficult to do. So we carved out some sub-sets of the data, created individual (yet linked to the “mother ship”) sites and found interested editors–people active within their individual disciplines, go to tons of conferences within their industry and love to blog–to be community shepherds.

So if, for example, you’re interested in social networks there’s now a central resource for you to visit manned by an industry expert who delivers on-demand insider information, news, moves and event notices.

The Conference News Hubs were designed and built with the help of one of our partners, Brattleboro Tech Collective, who are top Ruby on Rails developers and have been an important part of our development team for months now.

Coming up this week: more on the individual editors who’ve jumped into this with us and the sites they’re leading.

Today’s our birthday (officially)! Techcrunch scooped our announcement on the 13th of November last year but we consider the 14th our first full day of being open. Take a look at the difference in the number of conferences in our database from launch until now: we went live with 16,599 shows in the database. As of this writing we’ve indexed more than 52,000 for a difference of a little more than 35,400 conferences. That’s 97 (and change) conferences, conventions, trade shows and other types of professional meetings shows uploaded into our database by the Confabb community A DAY. We love you guys!

Huge thanks to the entire Confabb team! Obviously without your vision, perseverance and of course, sweat equity Confabb would have never come to be. This has been an interesting journey, both for what we’ve accomplished and how we’ve gotten this far. We certainly learned a lot along the way.

To all our users; past, present and future: stay tuned for some very cool, new stuff we’ll be announcing next week. Here’s to a fantastic first year, and an even better year two!

The Confabb team