65% of the documentation that is made available  during a professional trade show or conference ends up in the trash bin.

Eco-friendly events should be in the agenda of every event organiser. What can you do to reduce the paper waste and make your event more sustainable?

New mobile technologies available in the market can help reduce the use of paper in professional events. The new generation of mobile phones is a reality that is quickly gaining traction and market share. Smartphones put computer-like functionality in the pocket of your attendees. leadSpot helps you leverage the power of smartphones to reduce the carbon footprint of your event and at the same time improve the user experience of your attendees.

leadSpot offers a portfolio of mobile solutions that will help your event become greener, increase your  revenues and enrich the experience of attendees to your event through new value-added services: exhibitor’s search, interactive floor maps, personal agenda, alerts and notification messages, etc. Our applications work natively on iPhone, Android and Blackberry phones and as a mobile web app on other platforms. Check leadSpot Mobile or contact us for more information.

A  graph is an abstract representation of a set of object or entities and the way they are interconnected. More specifically, a graph is one representation of the reality in form of nodes and vertex or links that connect them.

With the proliferation of social networks, storage, processing and information retrieval systems based on graph theory have become popular because they allow for the creation of a data model to store the information that is more simple and closer to reality. Moreover, this systems are much more efficient when executing queries that imply working with relationships between nodes if we compare them with more traditional systems like relational databases.

leadSpot uses a graph-based data model to represent the relationships among companies and  business professionals (i.e. exhibitors and visitors in a trade show) at several levels:

1. Individual level, information about the particular person like his position in the company, city where he lives, etc.
2. Company level, information about the company represented by the individual like the industry, product and service offering, etc.
3. Objective level, what are the business needs the individual and/or company are trying to fulfil like selling a particular service, finding partners for one business line, etc.

Based on the information available about each individual, company and objective, leadSpot builds a graph that puts them in relationship according to the attributes that define them. Once the information has been structured, in  a first step leadSpot uses matching algorithms that leverage the knowledge of the sector from experts (i.e. the organiser of a trade show) to identify those relationships among all the individuals in the database that have a higher probability to close a deal. In this step, all relationships from an individual or company node to other nodes are explored and leadSpot looks for connections with other individuals are companies based on their different attributes.

In a second step, the system applies recommendation algorithms based on artificial intelligence leveraging the user’s feedback to identify patterns in the  subgraph that connects one entity with others and that has lead to a successful business relationship in the past. Afterwards, leadSpot explores and analyses all the relationships between entities that follow a similar pattern to maximise the probability of success in the relationship between two entities, being able to identify the business contacts that can better fulfil the needs of each individual and company.

With the increasing competitiveness of the trade show market, as an organiser you must provide new value-added services that differentiate you from the competition and maximise the ROI of your clients. Attendees to trade shows want to generate the maximum number of qualified leads that will generate new business opportunities for their companies. This, however, is not currently an easy task because trade shows don’t provide adequate tools that automate and simplify the lead screening and selection process before and during the event. No tools exist either to do the management and follow-up of the generated leads once the event is over.

Currently this process is rather manual and consists on going through the catalogue looking for companies that could potentially be interesting. More and more organisers provide an electronic version of the catalogue where users can search using keywords although there is no specific information about visitors that is available to exhibitors and other visitors.

leadSpot addresses this situation with web and mobile solutions that improve the qualified lead generation process for exhibitors and visitors to trade shows through matchmaking focused on commercial relationships. We develop customised solutions on top of our technology platform to help attendees identify the key business contacts that they should absolutely meet in order to develop new business opportunities. Our platform can also provides the tools to contact and organize meetings with them. Our solutions do not require the user to be proactive and because we know attendees to trade shows are very busy professionals, it automatically provides each attendee with a personalised list with the best qualified leads available at the trade show based on information about exhibitors and visitors that we obtains from several data sources, including the registration database and the Internet.

The platform uses proprietary matching and recommendation algorithms based on a technology platform developed by DAMA-UPC, the prestigious laboratory of data mining from the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, to identify the best leads available at the trade show for each and every exhibitor and visitor. The platform is offered as Software as a Service (SaaS), that is, it does not require any installation as the software runs on our servers and users can access it through any computer with a web browser or a mobile phone through a native app.

Moreover, leadSpot Expo also handles and manages all the contacts made during the trade show, and ensures that generated leads are followed up based on priority and time horizon.