SISO, The Society of Independent Show Organizers, the largest association of the leading for-profit trade and consumer show organizers, unveiled the nominees for its sixth annual “Event Innovation Battlefield.”

The nominees this year are Conference Pulse, Everthere, Lennd, Preview and qual.ai.

The competition will take place Aug. 9 in front of an audience of for-profit show organizers and suppliers in the industry as part of its annual SISO Leadership Conference, on tap this year Aug. 7-9 in Orlando.

The event attracts large and small trade and consumer show organizers who are interested in the latest innovations and best practices to manage more than 4,000 trade and consumer shows represented by its’ members.

“The Event Battlefield is an important motivational hub for innovation, ideas, talent and products,” said David Audrain, executive director of SISO.

He added, “It gives our members the ability to see what’s on the drawing boards now that will drive our industry in the future. We can also help incubate, develop and assist in the delivery of products and services to the market. It’s a win-win-win which will advance the event industry.”

This year, the nominating committee chose five out of 50 considered organizations looking for breakthrough event technology or amazing new business models.

According to David Adler, CEO of BizBash and Co-chair of the SISO Battlefield project, “We are excited to present organizations that will stretch che imagination, showcase forward thinking and encourage our members to raise the bar on innovation. The program itself is a version of American Idol meets Shark Tank where attendees will vote on their choice for the most innovative of the innovative for 2018.”

Here is some background on the 2018 Nominees:

Conference Pulse (https://conferencepulse.com/) ConferencePulse is a market network for the events industry. We help event professional find and secure sponsors and exhibitors, by providing them with insightful data, predictive analytics and contact details of key decision makers. Current clients include but are not limited to O'Reilly Media, Techstars, and Opus Agency. Founders are serial entrepreneurs and have worked together for 5 years. The CEO had a successful 10-year career on Wall Street, he worked for Credit Suisse where as part of his strategy role he helped manage the events portfolio of the investment bank. The CTO is a 12-year veteran full stack developer with deep understanding of many programming languages, machine learning and natural language processing. The company was awarded the IBTM Tech Award for Best Marketing Startup in the events industry, it was featured in many industry publications. ConferencePulse also graduated recently from AngelPad, the #1 ranked startup accelerator in the United States with less than 1% acceptance rate.

Everthere (https://www.everthere.co/) Everthere partners with the world’s leading show organizers to add value to both the visitor (buyer) and exhibitor (seller) journey by sharing personalized offering that drives unparalleled buyer-seller engagement - 10x higher than existing marketing solutions. Everthere adds incremental revenue twice: Exhibitors that are buying in and non-endemic, digital sponsors from Everthere’s network.

Lennd (https://www.lennd.com/) LENND is a next generation event management platform that simplifies and centralizes event operations for some of the largest live events and festivals in the country. These event teams leverage LENND as their core platform / database to collect, approve, manage and communicate their most critical operational information, orders and workflows for their vendors, sponsors, artists, speakers, media, contractors, volunteers and staff. In a market where most of the operations of an event are still run via spreadsheets, google docs and paper, there is an incredible amount of inefficiency, mis-communication, mistakes, cost over-runs, low quality assurance and little knowledge sharing, even amongst the best teams. What Salesforce did for the enterprise, we are doing for the event world.

Preview (https://preview.tech/) Preview is a SaaS technology platform providing live event organizers with a sponsorship opportunity to improve communication and education for exhibitors and attendees. By creating a new revenue category for sponsorship sales, Preview helps event organizers to grow sustainable bookings with a tool that proves event ROI like nothing before.

qual.ai (qual.ai) qual.ai uses AI to help event producers focus on the highest-quality sales leads. It has three parts: 1. Finding new leads by identifying companies that are a great match for your show. 2. Prioritizing leads using advanced artificial intelligence. Using thousands of signals, our AI calculates a proprietary Q-Score to prioritize your sales efforts. And even better: each AI is custom-trained specifically for your organization, learning from your own successful sales! 3. Notifying the sales team when the lead could be ready to buy. Imagine if you could call your exhibitor the same day that they announce a new product. By watching for dozens of discrete timing events, qual.ai provides real-time suggestions on when to approach a lead.