Android and iPhone App Makes Smartphone Guides for Events Free and Simple

PALO ALTO, Calif., May 3, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Large events have started offering mobile apps that help their participants find out where they should go and what they should do in real time. But these apps are often expensive to develop, making them inaccessible to smaller gatherings, and they are dependent on unreliable Internet connections.

Guidebook, Inc. (www.guidebookapp.com) offers event organizers a way to develop an easy-to-use, easy-to-update mobile event guide for a fraction of the cost. Guidebook offers a free basic service and allows clients to upgrade to premium services to fit the size and complexity of their events. And because the guide is stored directly on the smartphone, it still works even when the Internet is overloaded by crowds of people or unavailable.

Just three months old, Guidebook (originally called the Conventionist) has made mobile guides for 50 events and already has 100 more lined up in the coming months. Because of its unique, cost-effective design, Guidebook has been able to create guides for gatherings of all sizes, from a few hundred participants to tens of thousands. On May 3, their guide is being used at the WIRED Business Conference, attended by top executives from some of the nation's most successful companies and headlined by Bill Gates.

"Offering a guide for smartphones is quickly becoming a must-have for events," said Guidebook CEO Jeff Lewis. "Event organizers are finding that it no longer makes sense to rely solely on printed schedules and maps that are expensive to create, difficult to update when information changes at the last-minute, and impossible to integrate with interactive features and social media."

Although the company began by specializing in guides for conferences, their platform allows them to create guides for any type of organization, even those who operate year-round. Clients have hired them to build interactive smartphone guides for museums, universities, and community centers.

For events, Guidebook puts everything a participant needs in one place. Attendees can see the most up-to-date schedule of events, a list of exhibitors and their locations, and maps of the premises. They can set up a personalized schedule with reminders of the events they want to attend and a to-do list. And the guide allows users to monitor the buzz around the meetings with one-touch access to the Twitter stream, and a rating system that allows them to see which events are the most popular.

"As a volunteer who has a day job in addition to organizing an annual event, I appreciated how easy it was to set up everything for our guide," said Barbara Nelson, who coordinated a Silicon Valley conference for product managers. "The attendees loved the convenience of having the session schedule at their fingertips, as well as the ability to create their own schedules. And being able to monitor the Twitter feed was an added bonus."

Guidebook makes it simple to create a guide for any event. The event host simply has to enter their map, schedule of offerings, and descriptions of offerings into an intuitive, non-technical online form and the guide is up and running within minutes. If information needs to be updated, the host simply changes it online and the guide updates almost instantaneously and sends a message to participants. And when a wireless signal is available, attendees can easily update the guide with any new information at the push of a button.

About Guidebook, Inc.

Guidebook, Inc. provides organizations of all kinds the ability to easily and inexpensively create a mobile guide. Guidebook was founded in 2011 and is headquartered in Palo Alto, CA.

Contact: Alan Blank
[email protected]
707.633.8674

SOURCE Guidebook, Inc.