February 26, 2024

AirWaves February - Key Takeaways

Our customer webinar series, AirWaves, kicked off 2024 with a bang. This month (and for the year ahead), we’ve focused on technology and product. 

AirWaves is our bi-monthly customer webinar, where the EventsAir team announces exciting product releases, new tech upgrades, company updates and more. Here are some of the highlights from our February AirWaves. 

Company update – Chris Ridd, CEO  

Looking back over 2023 

Our first webinar of the year provides the perfect opportunity to reflect on the year that was, 2023 highlights included:  

• New leadership team and 40 new faces across all departments 

• Introduced product management with a more disciplined approach to our roadmap 

• Launched our open API, built on cutting-edge technology, GraphQL  

• Launched Smart Connectors for CRM, Finance and Membership 

• Launched EventsAir Pay 

• Azure modernization project (more on this below!)  

• Focused on our security posture  

• Uplifted our Customer Education and Custome Success teams and processes 

• Improved the way we communicate with you, our customers, prioritising transparency 

• And much more... 

Let’s talk about tech in 2024 

What’s in store for 2024? EventsAir will continue our laser focus on technology and product, specifically: 

• Hosting infrastructure uplift for improved performance and reliability 

• Improvements to the way you integrate EventsAir with the rest of your business 

• Enhancing your audiences experience: 

• Rebuilding our Attendee App  

• Uplifting our Interactive Sites 

• Simplification of virtual/hybrid solutions 

• User Interface (UI) uplift of EventsAir 

Recent and upcoming events 

Gartner CFO and Finance Executive Conference – Sydney 

EventsAir CEO, Chris Ridd, takes the stage alongside AirWallex to discuss harnessing next generation tech to bring finance operations to the front office. This is an event not to be missed for finance professionals, so send the details on to your team.  

AIME - Melbourne 

We’ve just wrapped up a couple of big days at AIME, it was very positive to see an increase on last year’s registrations and a general optimism towards the state of the events industry. Thank you to everyone who dropped by the stand.  

International Confex - London 

Come and say hello to our EMEA team and Chris Ridd at booth G14C. We’ll be showcasing our Smart Connectors, EventsAir Pay and offering Event Tech Health Checks.  

Product update – James Flynn, Head of Product 

Attendee App Strategy 

This year we are investing heavily into improving the experience for your attendees and one of our key areas of focus is our Attendee App. We will be taking a three-pronged approach:  

1. Rebuilding Attendee App – this is our longer-term solution; we will rebuild our App with the latest technology to ensure an excellent attendee experience and help you deliver transformative events.  

2. Integrating a third-party app – we are thrilled to be integrating with Entegy, a proven solution for major conferences. Entegy is a reliable and robust App solution and has parity of features with EventsAir.  

3. Uplift our existing Attendee App – we are improving the look and feel of our current Attendee App by redesigning the User Interface. Sneak peek below! 

AirTime Roadmap Playback 

We recently released a 14-page report summarizing the feedback from our product workshop sessions at AirTime. This report is the collective voice of our community and is based on over 1,000 pieces of feedback from across the globe. This feedback came from a broad group of our customers including PCOs, Associations, Corporates, Education and Government.  

Summary of takeaways from the report: 

• Continue to ensure the platform is reliable, performant and without bugs 

• EventsAir is a feature rich platform; many requests were for specific variations in existing features and their implementation 

• Ensuring the best attendee experience was the highest area of request, from where we’ve determined three key priority areas: 

1. Event / Interactive Sites 

2. Attendee App  

3. Speaker and Abstract Management 

This report will feed into our strategic plan. Thank you to everyone who contributed to these sessions. 

Early access to new features 

Would you like to provide feedback on our User Interface Uplift or Attendee App Design? We need your input on new features and other product enhancements we’re working on... before they are released. Join out Beta Testers by emailing ux@eventsair.com  

Technology update – Mehdi Khalili, CTO  

API Release 

We released a new version of the API on 15th of February, for full release details, please visit the developer portal.  

The release included two key highlights: 

1. We have added support for accessing and managing contact stores, including CE and Membership contract stores. This allows us to integrate EventsAir into membership management platforms. 

2. Advanced filtering for contacts, function registrations and registrations. This gives you more flexibility and power on how you can query contacts, registrations and function registrations.  

Azure modernization project  

In May 2023 we kicked off an initiative to modernize our Azure architecture. This has been a substantial undertaking. Our new architecture has four key pillars: 

1. Improved security – allows us to detect and protect against an even larger number of security threats 

2. Performance efficiency – the new architecture increases and decreases the scale to cater for the demands on the platform very efficiently 

3. Operational excellence – better monitoring and observability to easily troubleshoot 

4. Reliability – uplifts the availability, resiliency and reliability of the platform 

We are in the final stages of executing and validating the migration in the test environment. Once that is done and verified, we will finalise the plans for migration in the production environment and communicate the migration window with you. 

New releases – Nick Thornton, CRO  

Smart Connectors 

Smart Connectors provide an integration experience designed to simplify your event management and transform your tech stack. Smart Connectors allow every single EventsAir customer to integrate their favorite tools with their event management platform.  

Imagine effortlessly syncing data between your events and CRM, Finance or Membership platform. The result? A cohesive and unforgettable user experience for everyone. Our Smart Connectors build a foundation of reliable, configurable, pre-packaged integrations, that we manage, monitor, support, and enhance on your behalf. 

EventsAir Pay 

Ready to make registration even easier? Discover an unrivalled payment experience and say goodbye to the hassles of third-party payment processors with a seamlessly integrated and secure solution – EventsAir Pay. Now available in Australia, Europe and the US.  

Create a smooth registration experience for your attendees with EventsAir pay:  

• Powerful, sophisticated and secure integration 

• Seamlessly embedded within your registration page 

• Directly action reimbursements in EventsAir 

Discover more payment options to boost registration conversion rates as you cater to a wider audience. Beyond credit/debit cards, EventsAir Pay supports Apply Pay, Google Pay, and WeChat Pay. 

Plus, global remittance is made easy as EventsAir Pay supports transaction in multi currencies, ensuring your money flows through a single, convenient platform.  

Wrap up 

Join us in April for AirWaves, it’s going to be a big one, with a live demo of our new User Interface with our UX Lead plus we will be announcing the dates and locations for our annual customer conference, AirTime. See you there!