Eventbrite's New iPhone App Brings Official Check-Ins To Conference And Parties

Before you go to a conference these days, everything is online. You can see the schedule, speakers, and buy a ticket all from your laptop. But when you get to the conference, everything reverts to paper. Even when you check in to get your badge, usually a volunteer has to find your name on a list and check it off with a pen.

Online ticketing service Eventbrite just made the check-in process digital with its new iPhone app which just launched today. The app is for people putting on conferences and other events who use Eventbrite to sell tickets. With the app, whoever is manning the registration table only needs an iPhone to check against the attendee list as people arrive. Of course, Eventbrite can be used to manage the guest list at parties, weddings, or any event.

Events can also be broken down into different dinners and meetings with different check-in lists. It can all be managed from the iPhone. The app also ties into the Eventbrite dashboard so that event organizers can see how ticket sales are doing from wherever they happen to be. The one thing the app cannot do is actually sell and issue tickets. “There are other apps for that like Square,” says CEO Kevin Hartz.

The iPhone app is another step towards “democratizing ticketing,” he says. Instead of a $3,000 custom-designed ticket scanner, all you need is an iPhone. And while the official iPhone app does not come with barcode-scanning feature to scan the tickets, Eventbrite’s APIs allow other developers to create such apps. In fact, Hartz expects the first Android app to have that feature and to come from another developer.