This post looks at related news items to our social networking application.

The Travel Industry is Growing [1]
It has been reported that the global travel industry is set to grow at a sustained rate throughout the next decade. Our social networking application is focused on bringing people together, and enabling them to travel to their events together. If this industry is growing, therefore implying that more and more people are travelling around the world, then our application would be appealing to an ever growing market of travellers.

Event Management Applications are proving successful [2]
Eventbrite is an event management application that allows you to create events, promote them, and sell tickets for them, and it has proven to be very successful. “In 2013 alone, Eventbrite processed nearly 60 million tickets in 187 countries, totalling more than $1 billion in gross ticket sales.” Obviously our social networking application does differ from this (as described in our previous post) in that it is about organising the event and organising the travel, instead of selling tickets for the event. However, it does show that there is clearly a market for event based applications, and that even though there are social networks that cater to event management very well such as Facebook, there is scope to approach this organisation from different angles, like Eventbrite have, and like we intend to do.

Twitter and Facebook and Events [3]
Twitter and Facebook offer some useful event organisation features, such as being able to track RSVP numbers (Facebook) and Tweeting about your event to attract interest (Twitter). Our social networking application will allow you to track number of attendees to your event, and in addition people will be able to sign into our application using their Facebook and Twitter accounts. Therefore there is the potential to link these accounts more comprehensively with the events such that people could tweet about them.

Event Organisation is Trending [4,5]
Scheduling and arranging various kinds of events are one of the the most apparent trends these days. It is underlined by IT vendors who are evaluating this trend and deploying some ideas about events. Microsoft is establishing Microsoft Public Safety & Justice Event Series which is about creating events which serve to solve problems related to crimes and safety.

Conclusion
These news stories illustrate that there is a market for both event and travel based applications, and also illustrate the importance of social networks such as Facebook and Twitter in making these events a success. Our social networking application aims to provide both event planning and travel organisation services, in addition to allowing people to sign in from multiple social networking accounts, and invite people to their events who don’t have any social networking accounts. This also means that people can use our application without having to add yet another social networking account/profile to their web presence, which they may not want to do.

References
[1] http://www.travelweekly.co.uk/Articles/2014/04/02/47522/global-travel-industry-set-for-period-of-sustained-growth-says.html
[2] http://www.eventindustrynews.co.uk/2014/04/01/eventbrite-enables-people-world-plan-promote-sell-event/
[3] http://www.business2community.com/social-media/chicken-waffles-social-media-event-marketing-0826350#!Cw8A9
[4] http://www.microsoft.com/government/psj-events/Pages/about.aspx
[5] http://www.microsoft.com/government/ww/safety-defense/blog/Pages/post.aspx?postID=398&aID=22