We're really excited to announce the release of Zerista's Mobile Social Networking Appication for Events at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. What's more, not only are we releasing the application at MWC, but MWC is also using the application as the mobile version of myMWC, the event social networking portal.
The mobile application enables event managers to protect and extend their core event business by transforming attendees and sponsors into interactive mobile communities. Zerista’s mobile application provides clear benefits to the entire event ecosystem – attendees, sponsors, exhibitors, speakers and event organizers.
We’ve designed our application to be unique in its ease-of-use, the intelligence of its content-sharing and collaboration features, and the aggregation of public media in one integrated feed.
Zerista’s application provides an event feed that uniquely captures and communicates the buzz off what’s happening at the event -- in real-time. The immediate value of Zerista’s mobile application can be recognized in real-time on the show floor as attendees can read and post updates that can be shared with the event community and immediately to the broader social net.
Zerista’s event networking platform integrates web-based and mobile content, providing value through multiple touchpoints with attendees, from their desktops to their mobile handsets.
FEATURE SUMMARY
Zerista’s mobile application provides access to the My MWC portal and its features, including:
• Smart real-time mobile feed that combines filtered public social media channel with private event follower channel, with dual-publishing options
• Personalized feed that provides real-time event updates and check ins from personal contacts at the event
• Event organizer feed to provide real-time updates on schedule changes and other event-wide announcements
• Personalized messaging and networking tools
• Advanced attendee and exhibitor search
• Personalized schedule builder with public events and personal meetings
• Integration with and aggregation of popular social tools like Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and YouTube
Given the significant enviornmental impact of in-person events, many of the clients we work with are actively looking for ways to make their events more sustainable. One of the underappreciated aspects of a next generation event software platform like Zerista is that the software helps make events greener.
The Zerista platform enables a number of enviornmental benefits. First of all, our software reduces event-related printing. Attendees can request, download, and share session content and exhibitor collateral online. As a result, exhibitors can significantly reduce the amount of printed material that they need to have on-hand. Moreover, by providing access to presentations and handouts in one easy-to-access online repository, events can reduce the number of presentations and handouts that need to be provided on-site. An added benefit to attendees is that they have less information to haul around in totebags.
In addition, we've recently taken the step to move Zerista's servers to a completely green data center. Our data center partner is 100% wind energy powered. As a result, our clients can rest assured that the enviornmental benefits of reduced printing are not being offset elsewhere. Our clients benefit from a greener, more sustainble event.
We've had icons for a while, allowing you to upload images to decorate maps, features, and your account. Due to popular demand, we've now added the ability to add photos images to features and maps.
The maximum pictures size is now 640x640. Unlike the smaller image sizes, this large size isn't cropped to be a square. Thus, nothing will be cut out of the image.
Here is what the "Feature Photos" looks like in the feature viewer:
Next up is a photo browser, that lets you see browse through photos using their larger size.
I imagine that most people realize that search engines use bots, or spiders, to continually crawl across the web looking for new content. But I bet most people don't realize how pervasive bots really are.
Analyzing our web logs, 64 different bots visited our site in the last few week. And here are the top ten:
Most people don't realize that over 70% of all web sites are hosted by the Apache web server program. Apache was born at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois. It grew through hundreds of patches contributed by users to the original code base. Thus, it was one of the first successful open source projects and laid the ground work for many projects to come. Today the Apache Foundation has grown into the premier incubator for open source projects as you can quickly tell by perusing its web site.
Having said all that, it turns out that many of the newer web application frameworks such as Rails don't run very well on Apache. Traditionally, each request to a web site starts a new program that performs the request. However, newer frameworks tend to use dynamic languages which means they have slow startup times. On the web that is untenable.
The usual workaround is to start a number of applications to serve requests ahead of time and leave them running. Each request is then sent to one of the application depending on how busy they are. This is often done using a technology called fast cgi. Since Apache doesn't have good fast cgi support, it tends not to be used for web sites that use Ruby on Rails or other similar frameworks.
It turns out though that fast cgi isn't a very good technology. It tends to be unreliable and hard to manage. Over the years, each web development community (the java community, the python community, now the rails community) comes to this realization and looks for a different approach. History has shown the best one is to embed a mini web server into each application. That way the main web server (like Apache) can simply act as a load balancer and forward requests to idle applications using standard web protocols (i.e., HTTP).
However, until the last few months you couldn't easily do this for Ruby on Rails. Thus we have been using an alternative web server called lighttpd. Lighttpd is fast and has good fast cgi support, but lacks some of the features provided by Apache. This has resulted in some surprising bugs that we don't see in development (where we use yet another web server) and that we have to workaround.
In the couple of months though, Apache has surpisingly reemerged as good web server for us. Two key things happened. First, Apache 2.2 released this spring added a new load balancer that is quite good. And second, a new project called Mongrel makes it easy to add a fast mini-web server to a Ruby application.
Thus we spent a day this weekend changing our infrastructure to use Apache, fixing a number of issues in the process. The new setup will be easier to manage, and should provide equivalent performance.
If you're not careful, IT work can quickly eat away weeks of time, throwing the best laid plans into disarray. The are few ways to combat it - 1) hire more people 2) outsource 3) automate everything. Choice #1 is certainly a great choice, but it loses appeal at small startups where every resource is precious. Choice #2 suffers the same fate, leading to choice #3.
Everything should be automated. Builds should be automated. Testing should be automated. Deployment should be automated. Backups should be automated. Monitoring should be automated. And on and on.
Of course all this automation takes a fair amount of time. Someone has to sit down and put in the weeks of work to get everything working correctly. And the work never goes away - there are always minor tweaks to be made, bugs to fix, etc. And when your infrastructure radically changes, then its back to working full-time to make sure everything works as it should.
The last few weeks have been one of those times. We've made significant improvements to our infrastructure, requiring a large update of our internal systems. In addition, we decided to automate some additional processes that were starting to take too much of our time. So although if feels like time wasted on one hand, on the other hand it will free up significantly more time in the future to focus on launching.
