There are have been several conversations going on in the LinkedIn event and meeting tech groups about what apps to get for meetings.

I deal with this issue all day long as I talk about mobilizing meetings and the benefits associated with our meeting technology solutions.  You can’t figure out what to buy until you have defined what it means to be successful.  So here are some questions you should ask yourself as you start to research your options:

• How big is my meeting and can it be supported by mobile web only? Until really cheap, high bandwidth Internet becomes available in your venue, you have to be careful about choosing a mobile web only solution.  You also have to be careful about choosing a “hybrid” solution that looks native but it really a native wrapper with web pages inside of it.  If your users can’t get on the app it doesn’t matter how cheap and easy it was to put together.  It will fail.  Mobile web works well for small meetings where there will be a reliable Internet connection.  Our clients who use our other products for their big meetings will use our Pipit mobile web product for the smaller ones with great success.
• How important are my sponsors and advertisers? What is going to matter to them?  (Please take a look at our post on what questions sponsors should be asking you about your apps.)  If your goal is to build mobile into a new sponsorship channel (as print moves to mobile the advertising dollars associated with it will follow) then the next most important pivot for deciding should be based on what is going to best monetize the mobile app.  Sponsors want numbers and so your choice of an app should look carefully at what kinds of numbers the app providers are getting.  Here are some of the numbers we are getting and you should ask your app providers to provide comp’s:

Between 50 and 90 percent of attendees download our apps.

Our repeat visits reach as high as 96 percent of attendees.

People access our apps an average of 12 to 15 times a day.

People spend an average of 9 minutes for each visit.

• What device types do I need? If you are going purely native then this is a big decision.  If page views and visits are going to be the means by which your sponsors value your apps then the more devices you invest in, the more usage you will get.  What do I do about BlackBerry?  For many meetings, users are going to come with BlackBerry devices.  So a native BlackBerry app may be a essential.  At the same time, according to a recent poll by USA today, 40% of travelers are bringing iPads and phones.  That number is consistent with what are seeing at our large meetings.  So you may be able to support iPhone, iPad, and Android and have mobile web as a back up.
• How important is integration with registration data? Some meetings, like SAP’s TechEd which we did last week, need integration with web services to go mobile.  SAP’s attendees wait by their computers to reserve popular sessions and their agendas need to seamlessly download into the app.  Does your app provider know how to do this?  Does your registration company offer an integrated service?
• Do I like these people? I just spent some time at the Mass General recently and noticed that the doctors and nurses there are incredibly good looking.  I guess if you can get the best in the world, you can also get the best looking.  When it comes to buying your apps, you have a lot of options so you might as well work with people you really like.  (Since you may never see us, it doesn’t matter as much if we are good looking.)

These are my top five questions.  For the experienced buyers out there, any advice you would like to add?

This blog post from Andrea Driessen about what Angry Birds and Righteous Pigs can Teach us about Meeting Design is a brilliant analysis of how games can influence our thinking about meetings.  Driessen makes a compelling case for how meetings need stories; how a desire to improve our skills keeps us engaged; how multi-sensory input and kinesthetic experiences are critical; and how rewards work.

She references a great article on the cognitive aspects of Angry Birds by Charles Mauro.  These two pieces give us wonderful new ways to look at meetings and meeting technology.  I highly recommend them.

Today’s New York Times has an editorial about the advantages and disadvantages of moving education to the web.   My alma matter, Stanford University, is experimenting with a free online course — An Introduction to Artificial Intelligence — that has 130,000 students enrolled worldwide.  By taking this course online, Stanford has given the highest quality education to hundreds of thousands and created an efficiency in the delivery of the course material and reducing the cost to 1 to 2 percent of what the live course costs.

I am particularly interested in this subject because it was the value proposition of my last business.  I had an online learning company that delivered very high quality education from top tier universities to broad numbers of students.  Our courses were not open.  They were aimed at paying professionals.  But the principle was the same and I learned a lot about the limits of virtual meetings.

Now I’m back to delivering technology for live meetings and I have to say that I agree with Stanford’s president who says that there is nothing like the give and take of a live community to hone critical thinking, writing, and public speaking skills. And it isn’t clear, says Hennessy, that online students learn the most important lesson of all:  ”how to keep learning.”

I believe strongly in the value of live meetings.  But I also believe they can be made greatly more efficient by using mobile technologies.  Not only do our mobile apps make meetings greener, but they save people a lot of time.  We can see in the analytics of how people are using our apps that they are finding where they want to go (searching sessions) and then locating themselves on our venue maps.  In all of our meetings these types of utilitarian functions are in the top five categories of the content accessed in the apps.

Surprisingly, very few people are using our built in social media tools.  We have a great Twitter client that allows you to embed the hashtag for the meeting and post from the app.  It isn’t used very much.  Maybe because the hard core tweeters are using tools that let them track multiple feeds.  And the social networking tools are barely used.  It seems that people need that give and take of a live community and don’t need social media while they are immersed.

I do believe in making the knowledge created at meetings widely available.  And the iPad app is turning into a knowledge management platform where meeting content in the form of links to slides, handouts, and videos can be republished after the event as an “archival app.”

I applaud Stanford’s experiment and may well enroll in the course.  But I want to see my colleagues and hone my skills and continue to learn how to learn.

At last week’s ICCC conference in Orlando, Corbin Ball gave a presentation on mobile technology for meetings.  He concluded his talk with a section on Near Field Communication as the next big thing.  (Here is a link to the wikipedia page on NFC.)

And NPR just did a story on QR codes that essentially came to the same conclusion:

The issue I have with QR codes is that marketing is a little bit like telling a joke, and the longer the joke, the better the punch line has to be — and [using] QR code is a really long joke,” Floyd says.

Instead people are looking to NFC because it is simpler and can do more:

Unlike QR codes, this technology can be used to pay for things. So instead of using a credit card to pay for your salad, you’d just tap your phone to a plate by the register, and the transaction will file with your bank and the business.

“With near field communication, you’re dealing with transactions that people can profit from,” Williams says. “The banks have got an interest because every transaction that occurs, they take a percentage.”

We will be exploring the possibilities of NFC for mobile meeting apps.  If you have suggestions about how these new technologies could be used for your meetings, please post them or send them to us by email and we will explore them.

SwiftMobile was selected by SAP to produce apps for SAP TechEd (9/12/11) at the Venetian/Palazzo Congress Center, Las Vegas, Nevada. This annual event provides essential training for IT professionals who work with SAP systems. The four-day event attracted almost 6000 attendees and offered more than 1,000 hours of educational content.

We built native apps to support this event for iPhone, iPad, Android and BlackBerry devices, as well as a mobile-Web version of the app for all other devices, and loaded the apps with the content we thought was most relevant and indispensable to SAP’s attendees. We also made sure the apps met our highest standards for performance and super-fantastic usability.

The results were were nothing short of amazing. For the event’s 5,800 attendees, we logged a total of 388,005 page views for 3,452 unique visitors. SAP TechEd attendees accessed the apps an average of 112 times and spent an average of 16 minutes in the app. And here is an interesting piece of information:  the iPad owners used their apps much more often and much more heavily than iPhone users. In fact, we’re starting to see are rapidy growing and  intensive use of the iPads at our events—25 to 40 percent of the users are coming in through their iPads. And more than 90 percent of the apps users were repeat users.

That’s the kind of use you’d want to see if you were interested in sponsoring or advertising. High rates of use can also help you assess the ROI of establishing a mobile program in the first place.

SAP TechEd’s apps contain private content and require a log in. If you download them from the app stores, you won’t be able to see much. But, if you’d like a demo, please email me at kathleen@swiftmobile.com.