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TechCalendar Helps Find Startup Holy Grail: Thought Leadership

This article is more than 9 years old.

TechCalendar is a new product that is aimed at helping technology vendors, new and old, get on top of the plethora of different conferences that they can attend. I spend a lot of time talking with new startups who invariably want to find a “voice” in a crowded marketplace. Often times the conversation starts with the company in question asking something like: “how do we become thought leaders in our space”. Now, while I hate the term thought-leader, being a central part of a conversation in the area in which they specialize is a smart way for startups to become known.

One of the best ways to build this presence is to spend time at industry conferences. And the best time spent at these conferences is to present. It’s a little known fact outside of the conference industry, but event organizers are always looking for good speakers who can present well. Given the horrendous vendor pitches that I’ve seen at some conferences, there isn’t a massively high bar to cross here.

Travis Van is a recovered PR agent who spent time in his former life writing speaking proposals for his clients. One of the big problems he and other PR practitioners face is having a single source of event and award information in the technology industry. With every event having its own website, building a workflow or even providing visibility across events is difficult – traditionally technology companies and their service providers use spreadsheets to manage this data.

Van knew there had to be a better way and has launched TechCalendar. TechCalendar is a directory of technology events, speaking opportunities and awards. Says Van:

There are tens of thousands of tech industry events, awards and speaking opportunities, and trying to track it all manually is a fool’s errand. TechCalendar combines the most comprehensive indexing of these opportunities with a CRM-style workflow allowing users to find and take advantage of highly relevant opportunities quickly and easily.

TechCalendar features a number of options for tech companies to track events important to their brand: one-click “following” of relevant opportunities, the ability to search, find and track specific consumer and enterprise topics of interest, easy options to follow specific event organizers, and a variety of sharing and exporting tools for easy data integration.

TechCalendar is a really useful tool. Sure its design is perhaps a little sub-par but at its core it delivers a really valuable service. It’s a tool that I’ll be recommending that the companies I’m involved with use. It’s simple, effective and helps them to build their brand. That’s a win in anyone’s language.

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