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From ETS

== Pathable Demonstration 8/5/2009 ==

Pathable A community building conference tool. Attendee features include the ability to create your own conference agenda (viewable on iPhone and Blackberry) and connect with other attendees who've indicates similar interests. Host features include a registration system,ability to print name badges, and generate reports. Jeff spoke with Doug Schulze, VP Business Development about using Pathable for the Symposium and other ETS events.

Product Summary

Pathable integrates with your current conference space. Basically, it is an extra tab off your conference site. It works in the back end and this tab has the same look and feel as your conference site. The Pathable tab contains all the most recent activity including an aggregation of Tweets, feeds, tags, and events. There are three main components to Pathable: 1)as a community building tool, 2) as a scheduling tool, 3)as an administration console.

As a community building tool, attendees can, when they register, create a page in Pathable with biographical information including a photo and links to their other community spaces (blog, twitter, Facebook, Linkedin). You can search for others attendees through several mechanisms: based on your entered communities (e.g. other individuals on Linkedin attending the conference), topics, people, tags, and sessions. Pathable lets you know what members from your current networks are also attending the event. People can connect through discussion forums on mail via Pathable.

As a scheduling tool, Pathable displays the day-at-a-glance. Attendees can also create a customized agenda that can be printed or viewed on a Blackberry or iPhone. The day-at-a-glance links to detailed abstracts of each session. Session presenters can post biographical information, a description and include other materials such as handouts and pre-session activities, such as gauging topic interest. You can see a list of others who are planning on attending that particular session and contact them.

As a administrative tool, we can manage the attendee list sent messages to the attendees, generate polls, print name badges and sign-in sheets, and generate activity reports.

Cost

Generally there is a $1,000 setup fee for each event and a $6 charge for each attendee. I spoke with Doug regarding our interest in using this for multiple events (Symposium, Summer Camp, and 2 Tailgates) and they are willing to adjust the pricing. I asked him to give us an estimate based on 4 events and 500 unique attendees. This is what he came back with:

"Assuming a basic registration with your home grown system and site set-up there would be a one-time cost of $1,000 for the first event and then $500 for each of the other 3 events. The cost to host the application for a year and manage the 4 instances of each event would be $3,000. Payment for the initial set-up and 50% of the Application fee would be due at contract signing and the remainder would be due following the first event."

Implementation

It will take approximately a few days to setup and integrate Pathable into the symposium site. They use asp/SAS. Pathable would work with us on the integration. Availability is for 1 year. Pathable works with all operating systems and browsers. I mentioned to Doug we may want to pilot Pathable for a fall event. This was his reply:

"It should be easy to get through our contract and I would allow a couple weeks for the implementation. If you were thinking of using the application for your October Tailgate event to kick things off, we should plan on finalizing the deal by the end of the month. That would allow us to launch the site in early September giving about a month of community activity before the event."

Advantages of Pathable

Adopting Pathable enables us to tie together all ETS events. It allows us to keep the conversation and community interaction going throughout the year, especially is we create an uber-ETS event site to aggregate all our activities. The ability to generate name badges and track registration is also a major plus. These are two areas of great stress in our current process. All data is exportable in .csv and .xml format. Also, the aggregation of activity off a single homepage eliminates a lot of logistical work needed to aggregate our content. At the end of each event we have the raw materials aggregated that can be used to generate a summary of the event.

Limitations of Pathable

The major limitation lies in it's connectivity with our current registration system (SemReg). Since we are using a homegrown system there will be moving of data (between SemReg and Pathable via .csv import-export).

Potential Next Steps

The following options are available to us:

• Make the decision to adopt Pathable and being the integration process. The timing would need to be coordinated with moving the Symposium site to Movable Type

• Make a counter offer. Perhaps a limited pilot with the fall Tailgate before making a decision?

• Not to adopt pathable

Doug is willing to do another demonstration if we need to show the application to others (Cole, JTH, Kevin) before making a decision. I can set something up with him. Here is the text of Doug's follow-up email proposal with further details regarding the product, pricing, and implementation: Pathable proposal for Penn State