Prep for SmallSat conferences with Precious Payload’s new tool

This year marks our third SmallSat conference attendance as Precious Payload team. It is one of our favorite space industry get-togethers so we tend to prepare ahead. This week we are sharing a database of participants that we used to plan our meetings in Logan. The full version is available here: https://airtable.com/shrTIiQUTuJOnEHY6

You can either have a look online by clicking on «View larger version», switch between several tables using the menu icon in the top left corner or download the whole table and adjust it to your own needs.

Preparing for a big event in a small startup like ours is a real challenge. After 30+ industry events, we still remember the pain of setting up side-meetings, booking tickets and accommodations, going through several hundred speakers and exhibitors to figure out all the necessary meetings – you see, that’s a huge chunk of work. 

 

Today, we’d like to share a useful tool we created – a SmallSat Utah 2019 AirTable (AirTable mobile app is just great!) for public use. We believe our conference planning approach can be helpful to similar teams.

We’ve gathered information on all speakers with their topics, exhibitors and their locations, added some tags. Feel free to use it to save your time while finding people to talk to, sessions to listen, workshops to attend, and even check the event statistics, due to tags we’ve added for splitting and grouping the data. We have manually organized it into 8 tabs, then added and names categories like types and countries of participating companies, universities, agencies and research organizations. Among the most interesting tabs, there are companies (list of business, government, non-profit, educational and research organizations that are attending SmallSat) and schedules. 

You can find 9 columns in the companies tab. Try grouping the table with companies by type. You’ll find SmallSat to be a great attractor for different universities and research organizations. There are 104 universities and 46 research institutions among speakers and exhibitors. Representatives of satellite manufacturers and launch provider segments are lagging far behind – 32 and 22, respectively.

Try arranging the table by country/category to check your target market. What’s not all that surprising – the vast majority of SmallSat participating companies, 164 grand, are from the United States. Germany brings the second-largest number. Who’s the third? That’s quite an insight. Research our table to find out. 

Also, try to expand the record of a company or a speaker. Here you will find what sessions and at what time the company is taking part. And don’t get lost in this conference planning fever. We’ll see you in Logan, Utah on August, 4th-8th. 

PS. Note that we’ve parsed all the data from the conference website, there’s a chance that the schedule and session names will slightly change.