Tackling a major jewelry trade show with efficiency requires a solid game plan, excellent time management, and—let’s be honest—a pair of hardworking shoes. Technology can also go a long way in streamlining the trade show experience by providing shortcuts for daily tasks, transactions, and on-the-go organization. Simplify your next trade show trip with these five (free!) tech hacks.
Annotable
Your phone’s camera makes it easy to snap and store photos of jewelry and gems to create a visual journal of the product you’re buying or mulling over. But the danger of snapping product photos all day is, later, not being able to recall the specifics of a jewelry piece or even the name of the designer or collection. The Annotable app accesses your photos and provides pragmatic tools—including arrows, highlighters, and lines—for marking them up with notes. Once you’ve annotated a photo, you tap to save and it’s stored in your phone’s library forever. (moke.com/annotable)
How to organize all those note-filled photos? Download Pinterest’s easy-to-use mobile app and load up pix on secret boards (which are visible only to you or contacts you choose). Take a few minutes to do this every night in your hotel, and you’ll leave a show toting virtual jewelry cases full of future and/or prospective products. (pinterest.com)
Wantedly People
The latest generation of business card scanning apps can scan cards in bulk. Wantedly People, one of the best on the market, opens instantly in camera mode and is ready to scan up to 10 business cards with one shutter click. The app recognizes most default fields, including name, email, address, and phone number—and stores that data in an orderly address book that can be imported to other platforms. (people.wantedly.com/en)
Viber
Download this instant messaging platform to your mobile phone to stay connected to your colleagues and industry friends at fairs. Create chat groups by adding individuals by phone number. Once a group is created, you can easily fire off notes (“Let’s meet for lunch in the Oceanside Ballroom at 12!”), contacts, website links, and photos and videos from the show floor. The app also lets you record quick-send video and voice messages to contacts. Messages from others simply pop up on your phone’s screen, so they’re hard to miss—unlike emails. (viber.com)
Trade Show Apps
Major jewelry trade shows often create apps packed with event information, vendor descriptions and booth locations, daily schedules, and GPS-enabled maps that get you where you need to go. The best of the lot (including the JCK app) also allow you to create personal itineraries, peruse new product by category, and even message questions. When you can always see where you are, getting lost is a thing of the past. (Find the JCK app in the App Store and Google Play.)
(Bonninstudio/Stocksy)