May 2013
1 post
Official JCC App Launched!
We’re excited to announce that JCCs across the country now have a mobile app! The JCC app is available in the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store. This means that JCC members all over the continent have a go-to place to find detailed calendars, schedules, and other information to help them engage with their local center, as well as interactive features to help members network and...
April 2013
2 posts
How to Build A Great Mobile Orientation App
Increasingly, schools are turning to mobile apps for their orientations and campus events. There are, however, several important factors to consider when deciding to take your event mobile, including cost, time frame, and features. In our white paper, “What to Consider When Deciding on a School Orientation or Campus Event App,” we give you a concise overview of the major issues that you should...
11 tags
What are the Best Conference and Event Apps Out...
So you’re planning a big event and it’d be awesome to have an app. You begin to envision its functionality and get excited about potential features: an interactive venue map, a personalized scheduler, exhibitor listings, easy social sharing, increased visibility for sponsors, maybe even a user survey or two. Great! Things are progressing. All you need now is to choose a mobile event app...
March 2013
3 posts
Guidebook Goes To Toronto!
Last weekend, Guidebook sponsored and exhibited at the 33rd annual Association of Collegiate Conference and Events Directors-International (ACCED-i) Conference in Toronto! Over 1,750 members from 500 colleges and universities attended to discuss themes in the design, marketing, coordination and planning of conferences and special events on campuses around the world.
The Guidebook app allowed...
How Amazon Impressed its Developers with...
At Amazon’s last big developer conference, AWS re:Invent, most of the developers in attendance used Guidebook to find their way around and interact with the conference organizers. More than 6,000 attendees from 62 countries attended the three-day conference for technical bootcamps, guest speakers and educational sessions. As the official conference app, Guidebook made it easy for attendees to...
Guidebook at the Meeting Professionals...
Katherine, our Business Development Manager, shares her experience at the 2013 Meeting Professionals International (MPI) Trade Show, put on by the Northern California Chapter.
A week or so ago, I had the pleasure of representing Guidebook at a trade show put on by the Northern California Chapter of Meeting Professionals International.
Pretty much everyone at Guidebook tries to go to events...
Guidebook Has Partnered with the Reno-Sparks...
Check out the Trade Show News Network blog’s feature on Guidebook’s partnership with the Reno-Sparks Convention and Visitors Authority (RSCVA). The RSCVA is a marketing organization responsible for promoting tourism and attracting visitors to events, such as conventions, trade shows, and business meetings, that are held in Reno, Nevada.
Now, with the partnership, all events that register through...
February 2013
3 posts
Announcing Guidebook’s Partnership with NISOD
Check out a press release on Guidebook’s partnership with the University of Texas at Austin’s National Institute for Staff and Organizational Development (NISOD). The NISOD — which has almost 500 member colleges — is a membership organization dedicated to the professional development of staff and the improvement of teaching and student learning.
With the introduction of the Guidebook...
Guidebook at the 2013 AAC&U Conference
Katie, one of our account executives, shares her experience at the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) Conference.
Last week, Guidebook was the official app for the annual Association of American Colleges and Universities conference, hosted at the beautiful Hyatt Hotel in Atlanta, Georgia. Over 1,600 deans, presidents, professors, and university staff attended the event,...
January 2013
5 posts
Check Out Our Customer Success Story on the Smart...
We want to share a series of customer success stories on clients who built standout guides and were happy with their Guidebook experience. Let’s start off with the 2012 Smart Jewelry Show guide, which served over 2,500 independent retail jewelers and 550 exhibitors. To read the full story, click here!
[[MORE]]This guide stands out because it makes creative use of the features that we offer. In...
Managing the Calendar or Schedule in Your Ongoing...
Lauren, one of our customer success associates, shares tips and tricks on managing your calendar or schedule in your ongoing guide using Google calendar.
Do you want to have an automatically updating schedule or calendar of events in your Guidebook mobile guide? Now, you can use Google Calendar to set this up for free and with little effort!
This is a common request among many of the organizations...
Guidebook for iPad
We’re excited to announce that Guidebook for iPad is now available. The iPad version of Guidebook is something that has been requested more than almost anything else, both from users and our own staff. It took a long time to get here, but that’s only because we wanted to make sure we built it right. We hope it was worth the wait. Check it out!
Why Guidebook for Places?
Check out our latest in-house production! Our new video showcases Guidebook for places, and gives you a two-minute overview of what Guidebook can do to keep your visitors informed and engaged with what’s going on around them.
Guidebook is all about connecting people with places, and keeping valuable information at people’s fingertips. We can create guides for any place you can think of – from...
Check Out Our Support Site: Get Instant Answers to...
We recently launched our support site to answer questions that we get from customers and users. Although our customer success team is always quick to respond to support tickets, they’ve noticed that they often get the same questions. To save their time and yours, we’ve created a support knowledge base with close to 140 articles (and counting) that you can use to get immediate answers to your...
December 2012
2 posts
Check Out One of Our New Features: Linking!
Andrew, one of our customer support associates, shares one of Guidebook’s new features. The holiday season may be nearing its end, but we promise that Guidebook is a gift that keeps on giving! Users may have already noticed that the hard-working Guidebook Gears development team has rolled out an incredibly useful new feature: linking templates. Users have often used the linking feature to...
Why Guidebook?
Check out our new video to get a two-minute overview of why you should use Guidebook for your next event! It’s homemade, so we’re pretty proud of it.
To request a demo, please click here. Or, if you’d like to get a more in-depth look at both the advantages and challenges of offering a mobile app for your event, check out our white paper here!
November 2012
2 posts
Timeline for Building a Guide from Start to Finish
Using Guidebook to create a mobile guide is an easy, straightforward process that should take no more than a few hours once you’ve gathered all the information you need to populate your guide. It is a good idea, however, to figure out what each step entails so that you can allot your time properly.
We’ve created presentations that go through the step-by-step process of creating a guide from start...
New Features in Gears 2 – Creating a Mobile Guide...
Over the past year, we have gotten a lot of customer feedback on how to improve our content management system, Gears. For the past few months, our developers have worked extremely hard to make Gears even more intuitive and easy-to-use. We’re excited to finally announce the release of Gears 2!
We’ve added several new features that will greatly enhance the user experience. To check out all of the...
October 2012
3 posts
Check Out Our Favorite Guides: Cherry Creek Arts...
Guidebook started out offering event guides for conferences, conventions, and trade shows. Over the past year, however, we have expanded beyond event guides and started offering comprehensive guides for schools and community centers as well. To give you a better idea of the scope of guides we offer, we thought we’d highlight a few standout guides in a series of blog posts.
The Cherry Creek Arts...
Tips and Tricks for Excel: Sort a Custom List By...
Here’s a post about how to sort a speaker list, exhibitor list, or any other custom list/directory in Guidebook. We’re going to show you how to do it through the example of putting a speaker list in alphabetical order.
Suppose you finally uploaded your speaker list to your guide … but now you realize that the speakers are sorted alphabetically by first name instead of last name!
Don’t worry –...
All About Widgets: Putting a Guide Icon on your...
Sorry iPhone users, this post is for Android users only!
We are excited to announce the incorporation of Widgets into Guidebook! A Widget allows you to create an icon that links directly to your guide on the home screen of your Android device. Apple currently does not allow widgets, so you won’t be able to do this on your iPhone or iPad for now.
This icon will consist of your guide icon and event...
September 2012
3 posts
Important Statistics to Consider When Choosing...
In the rapidly evolving smartphone industry, it is important to stay up-to-date with the latest market trends. A recent Nielsen Wire study brings to light two important statistics that anyone thinking about a mobile event app should consider.
Nielsen reports that iPhone and Android now cover over 85% of the smartphone market, and that 2 out of every 3 Americans who acquired a new mobile phone in...
Check Out Our Free White Paper!
Selecting a mobile app for an event can be a daunting task. There are several things to consider including cost, timeframe, user interface, and features. In our white paper, “What to Consider When Deciding on a Trade Show or Convention App,” we try to simplify the process of choosing a mobile app by addressing the major issues that come up when deciding on one. Our white paper covers both the...
Event App Options
If it were up to us, every event organizer would use Guidebook to create mobile guides to their events, but we don’t mind a little friendly competition. Event planning blog eVenues just came out with a pretty comprehensive article featuring a dozen-or-so of the most popular event apps on the market. In the post, each of the companies was asked to give a short answer to two questions:
1)...
August 2012
6 posts
Check Out the Fan Expo Canada 2012 Guide!
Known as the “Comic Con” of Canada, Fan Expo Canada draws over 80,000 comic book, science fiction, horror, and anime enthusiasts to the Metro Toronto Convention Centre each year. For four days, attendees get to take their pick of a variety of panels and sessions featuring special celebrity and comic book guests, and browse over 700 exhibitor booths in Artists’ Alley.
An event of this size and...
500,000!
Guidebook passed 500,000 unique guide downloads today! That’s a huge amount of guides downloaded, and we couldn’t have done it without you guys! So — thank you!
Ways We Try to Keep our Office and Our Product...
Alex, one of our guide-builders, shares Guidebook’s Environmental Promise.
Being environmentally friendly is at the heart of Guidebook’s operations and company culture. We help clients reduce their paper waste at a variety of events including conferences, conventions, and trade shows. Back at Guidebook headquarters, we also strive to recycle, take public transportation, and provide reusable...
Guidebook 2.0
Over the past year Guidebook has transformed from a simple events app into a platform for bringing people and places together. You have used Guidebook to power your weddings, orientations, campuses and conventions. You have shared your photos and your thoughts; managed your schedules and organized your experiences.
Over the past year we have studied how Guidebook is used, and are now extremely...
Ways to Promote Your Guide - The Definitive Guide
Sara, one of our expert guide builders, offers you a few tips on how to promote your next guide.
Creating a mobile guide for your event with agendas and other helpful information is only worthwhile if people use it. Promoting your guide to all of your attendees is just as important as making the guide. The more you promote your guide, the higher your download rates will be!
With this in mind, we...
Associations Are Rapidly Developing Mobile Apps
Consulting firm One Orange Feather just came out with an interesting study about how associations use mobile apps. They surveyed hundreds of associations and most of the prominent app makers in the industry (including Guidebook) during the course of their research.
Associations use mobile apps mostly for meetings and conventions, the study found. And, impressively, associations were able to sell...
July 2012
2 posts
Mobile Event Apps can Help Create Great Photo...
Whenever I get a chance to use Guidebook out in the field, I learn new ways to use the features. Recently, I had the pleasure of using it at an event that I go to every year called the Family Nature Summit. It’s basically a week-long “conference” in a beautiful wilderness area, where people spend time hiking, bird-watching, and generally appreciating and learning about nature.
It seemed...
How a Mobile App Can Improve Your Next Orientation
Mobiles guides are great for academic events like orientations and welcome weeks. Visiting students will be in a new and unfamiliar surrounding, so having important information – i.e. maps, schedules, and directories – all in one place will help them make the most of their orientation experience. You can also include helpful information such as checklists of freshmen activities, campus POIs...
June 2012
1 post
How to Get Sponsors for your Mobile App
Does your event have sponsors who are eager for ways to get more visibility? As an event organizer, it can sometimes be difficult to find sponsorship opportunities that are effective and reasonably priced enough to attract buyers, yet still bring in enough revenue to make them worth your while. Guidebook occasionally sponsors events, and some of the options that we are given aren’t exactly...
May 2012
2 posts
Ideas for Festival Mobile Guides
Festivals are prime candidates for mobile guides. They have tons of things going on, which are spread out around a large area. The visitors really want information about what to do and where to go at their fingertips. The people who come to show their wares want more visibility. There are performances and demonstrations at different times. And people tune in to Twitter to find out what others are...
Guidebook at the JCC Association Biennial...
A few of us Guidebookers are in New Orleans for a few days to attend and present at the Jewish Community Center Association’s Biennial Conference from May 5 to May 9. We’re working with several JCC’s to provide them an app that lets their members and visitors know what is going on at their local center.
[[MORE]]These mobile guides contain things like fitness schedules, calendars of cultural...
April 2012
3 posts
Webinar: How to Use Mobile and Measure its Impact...
Guidebook and Eventbrite are hosting a free webinar for people who want to learn about some good ways to use mobile to increase registrations, increase engagement, and earn extra revenue. We’re planning on going through some helpful data on the quantities and demographics of people who use mobile and what they use it for. Then we will discuss some of the options available to event organizers to...
Thanks!
Guidebook just hit #6 in the free business apps category in the app store, so we wanted to reach out and thank everyone who is helping make Guidebook a success and an awesome place to work.
From everyone at Guidebook, thanks!
Custom Web Pages to Promote your Guide
When you’re offering a mobile guide for your event, it’s important to let people know that it’s out there, and why they should download it. With our newest release, we just made that easier. In addition to the poster and email templates that we provide, we now give you a custom promotional web page! Once you publish your guide, a page is automatically generated that is customized for your event....
March 2012
1 post
Extra! Extra! News Feeds in your Guide!
Have news that you want to share? You can now sync it with your mobile guide so that you can have a mobile-optimized news feed. Each article can have a picture, a headline, and full text, as well as links to outside sources. The best part is that there is no need to manually upload text and pictures for each news article. If your website or blog has an RSS feed (most blogs and news sites have...
February 2012
4 posts
New: Outdoor Maps
Guidebook 1.6 launched last week and with it came a feature we are really excited about: outdoor maps. This is something that has been both requested by a huge number of users and desired by our internal team for quite some time. Sure, floorplans of the exhibit hall are great, but when your event lets out for the day… where do you go? What do you do?
Guide managers can now start providing...
5 tags
Seven Tips for a Successful Event App
Here at Guidebook, we have checked out a lot of conference apps, trade show apps, and all sorts of other event apps. We have seen the good, the bad, the ugly, and the what-were-you-thinking-nobody-would-ever-use-that! We thought that our research and observations might be helpful to event organizers who are considering diving into mobile this year.
Of course, we’re a bit partial to our own apps,...
3 tags
How to Sell Tickets Through Your Guide
You can now sell tickets for your event through your event’s guide. This means that your potential attendees can purchase their tickets straight from their iPhones, Android Phones, Blackberries, or any other mobile devices. When you include ticketing in your event’s mobile guide, attendees just have to click the ticket icon and enter a little bit of information, and their ticket is emailed...
Share Photos
A professional photographer can’t be everywhere, no matter how talented she is. But now, you can make everyone that is using your Guidebook mobile guide into an unpaid member of your photography team (without getting in trouble with HR or getting sued by the Department of Labor!)
Yo dawg, I heard you like photos…
[[MORE]]
Our Shared Photo Album feature recently came out, and it has...
January 2012
3 posts
Our User Interface Has a New Look and Feel
Guidebook launched a huge update to our user interface, Gears, over the weekend, capping off a complete re-think of the user experience. Gears, initially, was designed to support an application which was quite small: the initial release of Guidebook had only a single-track schedule, an exhibitors list, and basic maps. As Guidebook grew and added new features, Gears gradually lost the ability to...
Guidebook 1.5 is here!
We have been hard at work making Guidebook better. I’d like to share three of the new features just released in version 1.5!
Share Photos
Everyone knows it: sharing is in. The new Photos module allows your users to upload and share photos from your event or location. We’re really excited for this feature because we think there are a lot of creative ways to take advantage of a shared...
Guidebook has a blog!
Why do we need a blog? Well, each month we come out with new features, develop new partnerships, and think of new and creative uses for Guidebook’s mobile app, and we want to share these things with our users. So, we gave birth to GuideBlog. (We have a serious addiction to portmanteaus using the prefix “guide”…if you worked here you would understand). GuideBlog will be a place where users...
