New app could consolidate meeting planning

As young entrepreneurs jostle into the mobile Web market to woo individual users, Eventown, a company that offers web-based and mobile-web services for site selection and management of meetings, is trying to transform the meetings-service industry by providing services for business clients.

Speaking on the future of the meetings industry, Eventown's founder Li Jian says that with the use of a single app, participants can check in by scanning a special code and obtain all the meeting-related information. They don't have to exchange business cards, since they can talk with all of the other participants in an inclusive meeting social network. And during the meeting, they can give a thumbs-up to their favorite speaker and ask for a contact number.

"It will be all realized soon. We're still on our way. Now I'm focusing on providing Web and mobile-Web meetings services for our business clients," says Li, 37, whose company is testing a social network app for meeting participants.

Li established Eventown in 2007, when business executives still had to go to hotels or meeting locations in person to find a suitable meeting site for their companies' conferences.

In the previous three years, Li was in a traditional meetings-services company. He felt overwhelmed when one of his clients asked for a quick recommendation of 10 meeting sites in 10 cities.

It took Li and his colleagues two days and nights to draw up a plan. It was then that he decided to set up a company for Web-based selection of meeting sites, the first of its kind in China.

Now the company has a database for meeting sites in 152 cities across China with about 7,000 space providers cooperating with it.

"Most of our users are multinational companies and top Chinese companies. We still need time to attract small private-company users. They are very different from individual users, who are more open to embracing new things," Li says.

Li compares his company to the US-based Cvent, a Web-based company that offers software systems for meetings. Cvent went public on the New York Stock Exchange in 2013 and raised $117.6 million. Li's company received an investment of about 10 million yuan in 2013 and is about to finish its second-round financing of an estimated 100 million yuan this year.

Li says the meetings-services industry is burgeoning, especially in China where people seem to love meetings. In addition, the maturity of social network apps promises a big opportunity: when people chat in a private online group for some time, it's natural for them to organize a meeting offline.

"We're very lucky to hug both the Web and the mobile accesses," says Li.

Many meeting sites are chosen for their attractions as well. Cities like Xi'an, the capital city of Shaanxi province famous for Terra-Cotta Warriors, the island city of Sanya and the coastal city of Qingdao are among popular meeting destinations in China.

However, the new trend among Chinese companies is to go outside of China to have meetings. As more Chinese companies, such as those in the pharmaceutical and insurance industries, expand their businesses overseas, their need for overseas meeting sites has grown.

Li says they are producing apps and software systems to satisfy these new demands.

Although Eventown is concentrating on business users, in the meantime, Li says they will consider offering mobile services for individuals such as wedding sites and gatherings of friends.

"I'm sure young entrepreneurs born after the 1990s can quickly get into the mobile Web market with their apps to attract young users in a short time. But for O2O mobile Web services like ours, resources and channels are not easily available," adds Li, when talking about potential competitors.

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