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We’re back this week with a selection of Blackberry® mobile apps that can be utilized by busy event and meeting managers for productivity on the go. We hope you find this list useful.

5 Meeting Management Apps for Blackberry® Devices:

1. Meeting Cost
Meeting Cost is a proven method for increasing meeting efficiency. Meeting Cost creates awareness among participants about the approximated running cost of the meeting. The display of increasing cost creates emotional identification that encourages participants to use efficiently the meeting time. Click here for pricing and screenshots.
2. trackIT: TimeZone Edition
trackIT: TimeZone Edition gives you access to over 500 time zones and cities worldwide. This is an excellent tool for any traveller or individual calling friends, family, or business offices in other cities. trackIT includes a time conversion calculator and a meeting planner to ease selecting meeting times with offices in various time zones. trackIT: TimeZone Edition will easily become an invaluable tool you won t be able to do without. Click here for pricing and screenshots.
3. CardSnap
CardSnap allows you to quickly and easily convert business cards into contacts on your Blackberry®. CardSnap uses the high resolution camera of your device minimum 3.2 mega pixel required to capture an image of a business card and processes it through a cutting edge optical character recognition i.e., OCR engine and sophisticated contact data element identification algorithm. This results in little if any manual modification in order to create a new contact. Click here for pricing and screenshots.
4. Conqu
Conqu is an easy to use yet powerful task management tool designed to help you conquer your inbox and get things done. With Conqu, you can organize the tasks by criteria that makes sense to you and then find the right task to do at the right time and place. Whether you are a GTD® pro or you just need a simple to-do list, Conqu will provide you with all the tools you need. Click here for pricing and screenshots.
5. Remote Print
A Blackberry® first – Remote Print for Blackberry® allows you to wirelessly print almost any file from your device including emails, photos, PDF, Excel, Word, address contacts, memos, all Office documents and more! If you can print it from your PC, you can print it with this application! Remote Print also lets you send files from your Blackberry® wirelessly to your PC. ANY printer, ANY wifi network, ANY file that you can normally print from your PC. Click here for pricing and screenshots.

Have a meeting management app you’d like to recommend? Please leave us a comment in the comments section. Stay tuned for upcoming posts about meeting management mobile apps for Android devices.  (And if you missed it, click here for our recent post about meeting management mobile apps for iDevices.)

Note: App descriptions are based on those submitted to the Blackberry App World™ App store by the App developers.

Busy meeting professionals today are fortunate to have access to a wide array of productivity tools – many designed for on-the-go usage, but wading through all of the choices to find tools that work for you can be quite a daunting task.  In this and several upcoming blog posts, we’ll spotlight a selection of handy mobile apps for cultivating faster and more efficient ways to work smarter, not harder.

5 Handy Meeting Management Apps for iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad:

1. Super Planner
Super Planner is a business app for the professional event planner. It provides a variety of planning tools, including calculators for venue capacity, staffing, catering, staging, projection and dance floor, as well as useful tips in several areas. Features include a capacity calculator, food and beverage calculator, staffing calculator, plus calculators for audio visual portions of your event and presentation and projection tips.  Click here for pricing and screenshots.
2. Meeting Mngr Pro
Meeting Mngr PRO is an iPad app to make meetings more interactive by giving people an easy way to participate, create surveys,vote, share documents and give feedback in real time. The app allows as many iPads as necessary to be connected without the need of an online server or internet connection for most of the functions. This app brings meetings into the 21st century and the era of the iPad.  Click here for pricing and screenshots.
3. myAgenda
myAgenda is designed for the manager or executive who wants to prepare and run effective meetings. Use myAgenda to organize and manage every meeting and synchronize them with your iPhone calendar. This app allows you to create meeting agendas containing a title, select attendees from your Address Book, add topics, subtopics, and notes. You can create your meetings based on events already in iCal or have the new agenda event added to your calendar. Lastly, email the agenda to yourself or the attendees ahead of time to ensure everyone is ready for a great meeting. Click here for pricing and screenshots.
4. Fuze Meeting
For users of the Fuze Meeting service, this free Fuze Meeting app brings the office to your iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad. Use Fuze Meeting to host and attend web conferences with full presenter controls, view multimedia content (including high-resolution images) in real time, schedule and perform other meeting management tasks such as accepting or rejecting attendee requests, and more. Click here for pricing and screenshots.
5. Business Card Reader
Instant business card recognition right on the iPhone. Import contact information from a business card directly to your iPhone address book. Native LinkedIn integration: contact creation, contact information, picture import and convenient LinkedIn search. Features include: Accurate recognition of business cards with multi-language support, smart contact field filling: emails, phone numbers, websites, LinkedIn support: search, contact adding, import of info and photo, ability to search and sort contacts, e-mail and call contacts directly, and anti-shake image capture. Click here for pricing and screenshots.

Have a meeting management app you’d like to recommend? Please leave us a comment in the comments section. Stay tuned for upcoming posts about meeting management mobile apps for Blackberry and Android devices.

Note: App descriptions are based on those submitted to the Apple App Store by the App developers.

Productive Meetings Call for Focused Participants

A seasoned meeting planner knows that what is intended to be a productive meeting can easily be derailed by any number of meeting blunders, including those relating to the actions of its facilitators and attendees.

If, as a meeting organizer, you have ever wished to categorize these distracting meeting participants, Robert Half of CareerBuilder.com does so quite well in this article.  As Half observes, the meeting facilitator AND the attendees can be at fault for meeting mishaps.  Click here to read more.

Providing a breakdown of the types of distractions that can cause a meeting to go awry may help key meeting leaders in your organization identify areas for improvement within the meetings they hold, keeping meetings more focused and more productive.

Meeting Planning TipsHaving a speaker cancel after painstakingly planning a meeting or event is probably a meeting planner’s worst nightmare. After all, event organization doesn’t happen overnight, and finding an alternate speaker or some way to fill an empty time slot is NOT something any meeting professional wants to be doing at the last minute.

If you want to be sure your event goes well despite a hiccup in your speaking lineup, professional speaker Thom Singer offers these suggestions:

  1. Always have a plan B.
    Keep handy the contact information of one or more “backup” individuals who could be called upon in case of the emergency need of a last minute speaker.
  2. Consider your agenda and past or future speakers.
    If you are missing your keynote speaker and your event spans more than a single day, perhaps one of your other break-out speakers could step up to fill the keynote spot and vice-versa.  Also, speakers who have previously participated in your organization’s events may be willing to come back for an encore presentation on short notice. Or, a speaker who is lined up for a future event may be willing to give a talk early.
  3. Create a roundtable.
    Choose a few questions that are relevant to the topics covered at your event, select a Master of Ceremonies, and take advantage of an opportunity to crowd source knowledge and best practices from the experts in your audience.
  4. Allow time for networking.
    There’s always room for more time to mingle. Encourage attendees to connect with each other during time that would otherwise be filled with a speaker’s presentation.
  5. Create an “Expert Panel.”
    Do you have thought leaders in attendance at your event? Invite four to six of them to participate in a moderated Q&A session with your audience.

Click here to read more on Singer’s suggestions.

Spend $250 or more and Receive a $50 Lowe’s Gift Card!

Spend $250 or More and Receive a $50 Lowe's Gift Card!

Mention Coupon Code: BIG250 | Offer Expires October 31, 2011

This offer applies to online orders only.

Shop Online Now at BigBadgeUSA.com!

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