Konf goes live: Finally, a virtual event platform for people who love people!
Today, we announced that we came out of private Beta, making our platform available to the general public. Konf is focused especially on networking and driving new connections between attendees at virtual events.
Events and conferences aren’t simply about watching someone speak on-stage. It’s about the connections we make with other humans, bonding over a shared goal or topic. Konf is a serendipity engine — bringing people together through technology. The product is a full end-to-end platform, including ticketing, video delivery, a comprehensive speaker and attendee experience, and the tools organizers need to deliver successful events.
Conference attendees are given full control over their experience. They can select the speaker they want to see featured on their screen at any given time. Attendees are at choice as to whether they look at the speaker, their presentation, or both. For panel discussions, attendees can choose to watch all the panelists at once or choose which of the speakers they want to feature on-screen. They can also choose which break-out rooms to join, and which sessions they want to be part of.
The platform also uses smart ticketing, which means that a ticket-holder can only log in once, making it impossible to forward tickets around. This is particularly important for paid events, where it is too easy to share tickets, a practice that costs event organizers thousands of dollars per event in lost revenue.
“We use magic log-in links sent to your email. If Bob buys a ticket, logs in to the event and then forwards his ticket to Anna, he would get logged out if Anna uses the ticket,” explains Damien Tanner, co-founder and CTO of Konf. “If we detect too many people trying to use Bob’s ticket, we invalidate it. We then send Bob a friendly email with a new ticket, reminding him to keep it to himself.”
For organizers, Konf offers a self-serve tool to schedule a multi-day, multi-track event. The platform is complete with break-out rooms, chat, registration, ticketing, and everything they need to run a successful conference.
What is a multi-track conference, you might ask? Enabling multiple concurrent sessions means that conference organizers can program events with much more granularity. The additional flexibility helps keep attendees engaged throughout the event.
Unlike other providers, the entire Konf platform is an in-browser experience, so there is nothing to download or install.
Likewise for presenters, the platform is extremely easy to use — screen sharing is a total breeze. It’s even possible for a presenter to invite multiple people to share their screens. This enables richer, more complex storytelling and more creative presentation styles.
For sponsor-supported events, the platform has a suite of tools to enable maximum engagement between the sponsors and attendees. Konf features sponsored tracks, sponsor talks, and special break-out rooms where attendees can engage with the sponsors.
“Nobody gets on a plane to fly 3,000 miles to sit in a darkened room with 3,000 other people to listen to someone recite a Keynote presentation. If that’s the purpose, then just send me a YouTube video. At least that way I can listen to it at 1.5x the speed, and skip the boring bits,” says Haje Kamps, co-founder and CEO of Konf. “The whole point of going to a conference is to create new business connections, make new friends, and to find interesting collaborators. Without that, it just doesn’t make sense. We feel like our competitors fall seriously short on that front.”
“We started Konf because we care about the environment. More than 1.5 billion people travel to events every year. The original idea was to make a platform that is good enough that flying looks a lot less tempting,” said Damien Tanner. “Of course, COVID-19 changed the urgency for virtual events, but our core mission continues: help the planet breathe easier by building the best virtual events and conference platform around.”
“COVID-19 has brought a new way of working to the mainstream, but what excites us is permanent behavioral change,” concludes Haje Kamps, “Even people who have never done a video call have figured it out through necessity. We’ve seen five years of behavior change in the course of just a few months. That rapid development unlocks the possibilities for connection in the virtual realm.”
The platform has been in private Beta, testing with early customers for several months, but today, Konf opened the doors for organizers to use its sophisticated self-serve tools to create and host truly engaging events.
Alongside the platform itself, Konf is launching the Konf Academy, where the company is building out an education center for organizers, speakers, and event attendees to help everyone get the most out of their experience.
Find out more about Konf on Konf.co
