“We’ve all attended conferences where we were excited to speak with luminaries in our field and meet potential collaborators, only to end up lost in a sea of name tags talking to the person in front of you in the buffet line,” says Pathable CEO Jordan Schwartz, explaining how he formulated the company’s concept. He drew from his years of tech-industry experience when he founded Pathable. The company served its first customer in 2007, and has since evolved into a sophisticated mobile meeting management site, working with groups as large as 20,000 people.
Pathable doesn’t need to be downloaded, as it works on any device with an Internet connection. Another unique feature is that if a planner wants to communicate a sudden room change, or attendees wish to let someone know they are running late, the program can send SMS messages, which work with any phone and are more reliable than in-app notifications.
Pathable’s approach focuses on community building and year-round attendee engagement, and the search tool can be useful for wading through the crowd of fellow attendees to find others with common interests.
Like most meetings management tools, Pathable also includes individual attendee profiles, discussion forums, calendars, social networks and registration information.
