Events Unlimited.

First of all, for all the non-twitter users a hashtag is the sign which people use while tweeting. You might have noticed it has caught onto Facebook as well.  The two horizontal and two slanted lines is used to refer to the relevant topics which the tweet is about.

Christmas is round the corner. Though it is not one of the most widely celebrated festival in India but you can be rest assured that there are plenty of places you can visit if you are planning to have a good time during Christmas.


2) Pondicherry: A complete contrast to the one on the top of the list, Pondicherry is the place to be if you want to have a tranquil Christmas. A small Union Territory in the southern part of India, it still retains parts which suggest the French colonial rule in the past. Christmas is a rather quiet affair here as compared to Goa but it does not mean that it is not celebrated with joy which is how it is meant to be. A lot of French styled architecture is ready to greet you here and whose beauty just amplifies owing to the Christmas lights. The midnight mass is a definite yes during Christmas just because of the decorative gothic churches. The so called ‘Little France’ is filled with a variety of French cuisines for your taste buds. Overall if you want to have a fully family time spent Christmas Pondicherry should be on the top of your list.


3) Mumbai: Probably the only place where you will encounter people from all religions. The unique thing about Christmas here is that it is not celebrated only in Christian community. It is celebrated all around. The western suburbs of Bandra is place to see. Churches are decorated with lights and people gather and spread joy. The Hill Road is something you shouldn’t miss out on during Christmas. The entire length of the road is decorated with lights and xmas trees. If you are a party goer then there are plenty of Christmas parties at various pubs in the city. With the city in such a merry mood you can’t expect the food to disappoint. You can find all kinds of cuisines at various restaurants across the city. The bakeries are filled with Christmas specialities.


4) Bangalore: Known as the Garden City as well as the IT Hub of India the place wouldn’t strike you as a Christmas destination but you couldn’t be more wrong. The St Patricks Church is a must go place to capture the true essence of Christmas in Bangalore. Apart from that Bangalore provides a unique shopping experience on Brigade Road and Commercial Street. The locals get into the spirit of Christmas but there is a sense of togetherness. As was the case with Mumbai, Bangalore too offers great Christmas parties at various pubs. And with any city in India you will not be disappointed by the array of delicacies available.

Sahyadri Ranges are better known as trekkers’ paradise. There are 350+ Trek destinations in Sahyadris. All of the treks are thrilling and adventurous. But after doing survey from one of the top trek organizers in Maharashtra, we have come up with the list of the top 5 treks you MUST go on..

1) Kalsubai:
Known for: Highest peak of Sahyadris!!! Kalsubai Peak is the highest peak (1646 meters) of the Sahyadris in Igatpuri Taluka, of Nashik district of Maharashtra, an Indian state.
                              
How to Reach there?: There are various routes one can opt for to reach the summit. The main route starts from the village of Bari. You can reach Bari by taking an early morning bus from Igatpuri going towards Pune and get down at Bari. If you are from Mumbai you can take early morning local and get down at Kasara station. There are buses and share taxis from Kasara to take you to Bari.

PhotoCredits: Pankaj Zarekar
                                                                                                                 
2) HarishchandraGad:
Known for: It is known for Konkan Kada from where you can get to see breath taking views of the surrounding region and the sunset. The most interesting thing about Konkan kada is that it is shaped in the form of a overhead like a cobras hood. Then there is the Harishchandragad temple which some people say is the pride of Harishchandragad fort. The temple is famous for the sculpture especially that of Nandi and Shivling. Nearby there is Kedareshwar cave which has a peculiar and interesting story.

How to reach there?: Harishchandragad is a hill fort in the Ahmednagar region of Maharashtra. It can be reached from Thane, Pune or Ahmednagar districts. If you are from Mumbai you can take a bus to Ahmednagar district from Kalyan which is in Thane district. You can get down at Khuba Phata and from there take a private vehicle or Bus to Khireshwar village. The village is 7km from the footsteps of the fort. From Pune there are daily buses to Khireshwar village.

PhotoCredits: Matador
  
3) Vasota:
Known For: The entire Vasota fort is surrounded by the dense forest, the view of this fort is really amazing and fabulous. To experience the trekking on the cave of Nageshwar, you would need to spend a night.

How to reach there?: Vasota Fort is situated near Bamnoli in the Satara district in the state of Maharashtra. If you are going from Pune take a bus to Satara, it is around 110 Kms. It will take around 3 hours to reach there. You can go by bus, the bus frequency is good. This hill forest is situated in the region of Koyna. To reach this fort, you need to take a boat from Bamnoli and cross the Shiv Sagar Lake, through the boat. Vasota fort forest is located in the middle of the dense forest, that’s why before visiting this fort, people have to take permission.

 

4) Rajmachi Fort:  
Known for: Rajmachi is one of the longest treks in Sahyadris. The trek is approximately 18 kms long. It takes around 4-6 hours to reach on the top. Rajmachi is one of the most beautiful treks in Sahyadris. You get a chance to see amazing waterfalls on the way. The view is breathtaking from the top. If you haven’t been for this trek then you are missing something.

How to reach there?: It can be reached via Lonavala, a town near Pune. You can reach Lonavala via train from either Pune or Mumbai. The summit is approximately 20km from Lonavala.


 

5) Sandhan Valley Trek:
Known For: Sandhan Valley is one of the greatest canyon in the splendid spreading for Sahyadri. The water carved valley is 200ft deep and 15 ft long. At some places its width is less than 3 ft. because of which sun rays are unable to reach the ground. Hence, it is popularly known as valley of shadows. This is one of the most beautiful treks in India.

How to Reach there?: If you are from Mumbai take a local to Kasara Station. From Kasara Station you can book a private jeep which will take you to the base village Samrad Village. The jeep may cost around Rs2-3K.

 

Trekking has a rich human history. Some people trek to get sense of adventure, some do it to visit places of worship and others do it to take a break from monotonous routines. Whatever the motivation, every trekking experience changes you from within that too for the better. Following are the reasons why -




1) Sense of purpose - Every trek starts with a single purpose i.e. to reach the peak. You negotiate all hardships and pains but try to fulfill this one singular purpose of the trek. Although the trek ends, but something remains i.e. the conditioning, of your mind & body to go after your aim despite all the adversities.




2) Team work - I remember the lines of our trek leader, when we started a difficult trek of Tapovan, he said - "this place is 4500 meters above sea level and -15 degrees at night so everyone should remember one thing, together we survive, individually we die". And trust me, never in years I had experienced such a quality team work where everyone tried to compliment one another, sharing the workload and backing up each other. After the trek, we came back becoming better team players.





3) Friend generator - Treks are time for lots of walk, as well as lots of talk. The setting works perfectly to lower one's guard and share openly with fellow trekkers. If the trek includes night stay with bonfire, well it's a bliss. I am still great friends with many of my fellow trekkers even after years. Whenever we meet, we relive those fun & thrill moments.




4) Sense of beauty - Treks give you unique opportunity to connect with nature. And mind you, it is not the artificial one i.e. found in parks or gardens, but nature's most raw, untouched and beautiful form. In words of John Keats - "A thing of beauty, is a joy forever".


What are your trekking experiences that changed you? Let us know in the comments.

Image credits - Image-1 | Image-2 | Image-3 | Image-4

•  Set up a stall in your locality, college etc and sell T shirts, badges or you could even give away ribbons. Be unique with your T shirt design. Tell people that the proceeds from the sale will go towards any AIDS cause. You can set up the stall in the mall too as many mall owners are quite helpful in such cases.

Townscript is doing online ticketing for the Vibes Outdoors. These treks are the must visit for the trek lovers. There are some events in which you will be able to experience Scuba Diving, Rapeling and other adventures.

List is as follows:

1)Kojagiri Konkan Tour- Experience Scuba Diving with Vibes Outdoors
Start Date: October 18, 2013 It's a great opportunity for the photographers, sea lovers and adventure lovers. After the rain ends, all of the konkan looks like newly born child of mother Earth. Sea is full of clean waters, plenty of sunlight and mouthwatering sea food. With Vibes Outdoors you will explore the beautiful Malvan Area, during your two days visit. You will be covering, most beautiful part of konkan beaches, and some awesome activities like SCUBA DIVING.

2) Duke Nose Rapelling & Traversing
Start Date: October 26, 2013 Dukes Nose near Khandala which is named after Duke Wellington, is a huge pinnacle seen while traveling from Mumbai to Pune. The sight from top is unique and magnificent as one sees a vast landscape and the winding Mumbai-Pune expressway cutting through the ghats and trains chugging along the tracks. It's famous for rappelling, rock climbing and valley crossing activities.



3)Republic Day Konkan-kada Rapelling
Start Date: January 25, 2014 If you want to experience some serious adventure, this trek is for you. This will be the most thrilling rappelling of your life. Townscript and Vibes Outdoors bring for you this season an Extreme Adventure (January 2014). Event is going to organize for 1800 feet RAPPELLING at KONKAN KADA, HarishchandraGad






To know about more awesome events keep following us on Facebook & Twitter :-)

Townscript did its debut online event ticketing for the Sahyadri Trekking Group.

The trekking event was a huge success and Townscript really solved the problem of money collection of the Sahyadri Trekking Group. Not only that, Townscript provided a great online presence to the group. According to the trek organizer they observed 30% of increase in their number of attendees.

Watch this amazing video of Night Trek to Rajmachi organized by Sahyadri Trekking Group & Townscript! :-)

Getting attendees to an event has always been a tough task. Challenge is to market your event among potential attendees. But if you plan early, and follow right steps, your event shouldn't experience any dearth of them.

I have been talking to many organizers in past few months. And thanks to endless interactions with them, I have gathered following useful tips.

Tip one:
Start early with your marketing & promotional efforts. At-least one month prior to event day.

Tip two:
Setup a registration/ticketing page on sites like +Eventbrite, +Townscript, Splashthat etc.

Tip three:
Share registration page on various listing sites like - Meetup, ZEvents and any other i.e. popular in your geographical location, like PuneTech & PuneOpenCoffeeClub are popular in my city. Don't forget to create a Facebook event as well and to link it up with your registration page.

Tip four:
Select a small and catchy hashtag for your event. Aggressively use this hashtag for posting your event related news & content on twitter, facebook & instagram. Idea is to start creating social media buzz for your event.

Tip five:
Email campaigns. Setup a brief and attractive Email that gives out brief details about your Event and contains link to your registration page. Use free email marketing software like MailChimp to make the email designing & sending task easy. If you already have an email database (of past attendees) with you that would be awesome. Otherwise, a mailing list that includes your friends & colleagues residing in your city would come handy. Also, don't forget to post the email to various mailing lists & groups that are related to Event's topic.


I hope following the above tips would really boost the attendee presence at your Events. If I missed anything here, please mention it out in comments section. Cheers!

Most of the small event organizers whom I have met face a major problem of reaching their attendees. In my last few meetings, one of which was with a Robotics workshop organizer, I found that only ten people turned up even after putting so much efforts into marketing. I had another meeting with a trek event organizer who also faced the same problem of reaching the trekkers. The budget of small event organizers is low. They can't invest a lot of money on marketing.
Here are best practices to increase your event's presence which can make your event a big success:

1) Start minimum 3 months before: If you are planning to organize any type of event(workshop, trek etc), you need to start the event planning before 3-4 months, it will help you planning out your marketing strategy.

2) Identify your potential attendee: Who are the ones who will love to attend your event? You must be very clear about your potential attendees. For example if you are planning to organize a trek event then people who have hardcore interest in going for the trek are your potential attendees. Then, you need to prioritize your potential attendees.

3) Find your potential attendee: Once you figure out who can be your potential attendee, finding him can be a tough task but if you crack it, you will crack your problem of market reach. Identify the forums(online and offline both) where your potential attendee can be active. Start engaging on those forums online or offline both.

Taking example of a trek organizer, there are many trek forums on internet where trekkers are active, there a trek organizer can find out potential groups of trekkers.

4)Publicize your event: Now you have listed out your potential attendees, it's time to market for them. Social Media is the best tool for small event organizers. In our previous blog,Effective ways to generate killer social media buzz we had mentioned about the best ways to create the social media buzz of your event. Engage your attendees effectively on your social media pages.

An Expert Tip:If you are an yearly event organizer, always maintain one facebook page. We have observed that some event organizer make a new page every for example summit'11, summit'12 and so on. The problem with that is you will have to start from "0" likes every year. Instead of that have a single page. Similarly try to have a single hashtag on twitter for all the events.

Events & festivals are inherently social in nature, hence event organizers can't ignore the importance of creating the buzz on popular social networks. But this is not a trivial task, and requires good amount of effort from organizers. Here are some of my easy tips to generate an awesome social buzz for your event.


Engage your potential attendees early.
Don't wait for all the data to be available and then starting your social marketing efforts. Get your event website updated with a landing page & with whatever little information you have.

Post about agenda, planned talks, some speakers and venue information for a start.


Make use of various listing websites.
Just keeping your regular event website is not enough. Create a facebook event, and post about your event on other listing websites. That will help you in building an early visibility and traction.


Twitter activity.
Select a hashtag, ideally a small one, for your event. Use this hashtag extensively when posting content on twitter or facebook. Request your speakers to post about their talks using this hashtag.

Start early with twitter questionnaires like "What topics you want to hear at Developer Conference? let us know by tweeting with hashtag #IwantToHearAtDeveloperConf".

Run twitter contests during your conferences, shell out some prizes and let your attendees have engagement with fun.


Reward good content.
Reward your attendees who write blog posts, post pictures or tweets. For example - give out free a free ticket for your next event, to the attendee who posts best pictures.


Aren't these things easy? Hope you have a rocking social buzz at your upcoming event!

Attended my first Startup Saturday event in Pune yesterday. It had following speakers Arun Purohit (Co-founder Wicfy), Ruta Potnis (Faculty for UX, Symbiosis Institute of Design) and Kiran Sabnis (UI Practice Head, Fiserv). Overall the sessions were good and informative, though not many entrepreneurs were part of attendees, crowd was enthusiastic & curious.

I went there with 2 motives. First, to listen and learn from entrepreneurs & speakers, and secondly to understand how an event & conference software solution can be made useful in such settings. So here are the lessons I learned:

1) Everybody introduced themselves at start of the event, and this went around for 40 mins. Although it had some entertainment value, but usefulness can be questioned. One thing is that it takes up time. Another is that I can hardly recall names and info of 2-3 attendees out of 50 that were present. Any solution that lists out the attendees i.e. their name, designation, company, twitter url and bit of their bio would be pretty nice.

2) Speakers used PPTs while giving their speaking sessions. After Ruta Potnis's session, couple of attendees asked if her PPT can be made available after event is over. Agreeing to that said she will check how to do that and will inform accordingly. So an easy solution, where speakers can put their content before/after the event would be a real value add for the attendees.

3) Every talk was followed by Q & A session. Since time constraints allowed only to have maximum 4-5 questions that left many attendees with unattended queries. An utility that makes it possible for speakers to attend these questions post event, with other attendees able to see it, would be handy.


These were some nice lessons I learned yesterday. Hopefully technology, and our startup +Townscript in particular, will be able to do some justice to these needs, and make event attending a much more engaging & richer experience. Cheers!

Note: This is copy of original article that was posted here on 12th May 2013.

Being a socially active person, I have been attending number of national/international conferences for many years. Sharing my experience of conferences, whenever we attend them, very often during the conferences we face a number of difficulties:

1) As we know, one of the main aims of attending a conference is networking. Due to the high number of participants, it becomes difficult to interact with everyone.

2) The conference organizers provide us the schedule, list of venues and other important information on a printed paper form. It's always a tedious job to frequently check out the list of the speakers, etc. by taking out papers from our bag. Many a times we tend up losing those papers .

Townscript has solved the above problems in a very smart way both by making a mobile and web application. I am going to share the way our mobile app works, same features are provided on the web application

This is how it works:


1) The conference delegates will be able to see the basic information, venue, list of speakers, schedule, list of attendees and many more important stuff.
Pic. 1 Basic Information of the event


2) No need of distributing papers for schedule, speakers and conference venue. Delegates will be able to check that out on their mobile phones.

Pic. 2 Schedule and the details of the speaker who is going to talk at a particular session




Pic. 3 List of speakers and bios of each speaker


3)Conference delegates will be able to network and engage more efficiently even much before the conference starts. They will be able to check other delegate's profile which includes short bio, facebook/twitter profile link, Job description.


Pic 4 Details of all the attendees and a brief information about one of them


There are few important features that we are going to add soon in version 2. Those features are going to be revolutionary in terms of networking in conferences.

We have already tested the above product in conferences. The customer feedback has been very positive. We look forward to make it a standard product for all the conferences in Asia and other parts of the world.

Our mobile and web application for conferences is one of the offerings of Townscript. In the next blog, I will be sharing about our innovative product for events.

Thank you!

For more, check out our mobile application in action:

We now live in super connected world. We are connected to all our school & college mates, thanks to facebook. We are now connected to all past colleagues, thanks to linkedIn. We are connected to friends, thanks to Whatsapp.

And this connectivity is going to only increase with time. Soon it will also venture in settings where we meet new people i.e. meetups, seminars, conferences, hackathons, fundraisers, parties, concerts etc.

The visiting card method is obsolete. It gives out too little details, doesn't sparks conversations and people tend to lose them.

Why can't we have better systems where we this information sharing becomes seamless and effective? Is that difficult in today's times where most of folk's data, history & interest graph is already stored in cloud?

I guess solution lies in creation of a socialization platform around events.

Since it is a trade-off between utility & effort, considering that people already have too many social networks to manage, hence a good event social networking platform got to have following qualities:

Instant setup. For any new networking, users are NOT going to spend any much extra effort to put profile pics & their history data. Reason is simple, users have limited time, and they maintain this already on Facebook, LinkedIn & Twitter. The platform should just make good use of their existing data & networks.

Ease of group creation. In Events, users don't know much of the folks personally. So onus shouldn't be on them to participate in group creation. It should happen independently of the users involved. Can be done on Organizers' level or tied to registration process.

Mobile first. Even though existing networks like Facebook & Linkedin's usage is heavily moving towards mobile, they were first developed for desktop level. It is easier to connect with your old college friends or company friends on a lazy sunday morning sipping coffee :) but Event networking is bit different. Much of it happens at the Event, where users are physically present, involved & rely on mobile


As someone who likes to learn new things and meet interesting people, I look forward to emergence of such social networks, which expand beyond the realm of existing bonds.