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The "Killer Apps" of the Meetings Industry

A killer application (commonly shortened to killer app) refers to technology that is so useful or desirable that it proves the value of some underlying technology.

The VisiCalc spreadsheet was the first killer app - a program that, in the early 1980's, proved so successful for finance workers that it mushroomed early IBM PC sales. Electric lighting could be considered the "killer app" of electricity as the automobile was the "killer app" of the internal combustion engine.

There are many "killer apps" for the meetings industry - programs that are so useful, so cost-saving, so efficiency-increasing, or so service-improving that they have and continue to revolutionize the way that meeting professionals do business.

Online Registration and Attendee Management

The first online registration forms appeared in 1995 and have evolved to become robust attendee management and meeting promotion tools. Compared to the old paper-based methods of the last century (where meeting promotion was largely done by bulk mail; where registration forms were submitted on paper and entered by hand; where payments and confirmations were processed manually, and everything was laboriously reentered into a database if it existed), today's fully automated systems provide digital methods of doing this at a fraction of the cost. 90% savings or more can be yielded going from paper-based to automated web-based methods of attendee management.

In the evolution, a variety of related tools have emerged including housing/travel management, member management, communications management and more.

2007 Corbin Ball Associates
As published in The Meeting Professional Magazine, December 2006 Issue