In the past couple of months we’ve been devoting all of our energy to our Pathable Beta so we could do some private testing on a few events this coming month. As a part of the process we did a few interviews with event organizers when we were down at E-Tech this past week—very illuminating.
The core technologies and concepts behind Pathable, namely the tagging and social matching algorithms as well as the social badge concepts, were developed this past year and tested at several events, including O’Reilly Media’s FOO Camp, Seattle’s BizJam and the Thingamajiggr technology event. In the early stages, the social networking facility was provided by a partnership with Crowdvine. We decided a while ago however to really leverage our social matching and face-to-face integration points we needed to produce the entire end-to-end experience internally.
I’m really excited about how the Pathable online directory is looking. I’ve been obsessed with mapping out social spaces for years now and I really think this is going to be a great way to do so for not only events, but any community of practice.
This is a picture of our badges….produced on PDFs, easy to print! We have a few other cool designs in the works. People really, really do care about how they are being presented to others. I’m always surprised by how so many event badges seem like an afterthought.
Congratulations! The improvements look fantastic. We were happy to work with you, but I totally understand the need to be independent. Good work and good luck!