This year marked the 50th Anniversary of CES. The Eventbase team just got back from delivering the official app at CES® 2017, the largest consumer technology trade show in the world with more than 165,000 attendees and 3,800+ exhibiting companies. There’s a tremendous amount of value and insight to garner from an experience like CES.
This year, we saw an increase of up to 25 percent of app adoption rates across platforms at CES, when compared to last year. Mobile adoption continues to rise, as smartphones replace computers as the most important smart connected device.
Here’s a look at some key takeaways and findings from CES.
We successfully deployed the largest deployment of proximity beacons at a show to date, across more than two million square feet of trade show space. The beacons helped attendees easily navigate the show floor by providing venue-wide location and routing on a detailed 3D map using Heidelberg Mobil's Deep Map™ technology. This was an incredible accomplishment and a remarkable team effort with the help of our partners at RightRound.
Additionally, offline connectivity is crucial when attending an event of this size. CES attracts more than 165,000 individuals from around the world and the density of crowds can make it challenging to provide Wi-Fi connectivity to such a large audience. In order to ensure the best user experience, our apps work offline and integrate with your device’s hardware. A majority of our app features perform extremely well in situations where there is limited connectivity – making for fast performance and search capabilities. At CES, the app's offline connectivity gave attendees full access to the schedule, maps, navigation, favorites and other features that were critical in order to navigate across the various venues.
Lastly, analytics are increasingly playing an important role in the event planning process. Mobile app technology allows us to tap into unique insights via analytics, that help event organizers plan and execute seamless campaigns. A key capability of our platform is the ability to generate meaningful analytics that gather a deep understanding of attendee preferences, behavior and intent. Attendee behaviors are strong indicators of their interests and anonymized data that complies with user privacy helps event organizers understand these preferences. This includes a look into the number of people who visited various booths throughout an event, how many people attended the keynote and trends in traffic across venues.
Three common themes at CES included big data, the Internet of Things and artificial intelligence (AI), and often times how all three coalesce. Many products announced integrations with smart digital assistants like Amazon’s Alexa, Google Home, Apple’s Siri and Microsoft’s Cortana. Mobile innovations are transforming key aspects of technology and business operations across industries, particularly when it comes to event technology. At Eventbase, we’re committed to building intelligent apps that help attendees and event organizers get a better understanding of what’s happening at their events, create meaningful connections, understand enhanced analytics and other smart technology that will create memorable and engaging experiences for event attendees.
