Event Tech Atlas, the directory and decision-support platform co-founded by Tess Vismale and Keith Johnston, has released a 2.0 update built around two long-running planner frustrations: working out what is actually in your tech stack, and finding honest peer reviews of the tools in it.
The headline addition is the Tech Stack Tracker, a dashboard sitting inside every registered user’s account. Free users can log up to 10 tools, with a higher allowance on the premium tier. Each entry can be linked to a listing on the Atlas itself, annotated with notes and sentiment, costed, and tagged with a renewal date that triggers an automatic reminder.
The pitch is straightforward. Most planners do not own the procurement relationship for the tools they use. IT, finance, or the global meetings team often does. That leaves the planner running an event without a clear view of what is in the stack, what it integrates with, or when contracts roll over.
“I don’t expect planners to know everything about technology, but they’re in charge of keeping track of the contracts, what everything integrates with, and they may not know what they have, especially if the IT department is managing the relationships,” said Vismale in a statement issued with the launch.
A comparison feature is flagged as coming next, designed to let users model what would happen to their integrations if a tool were swapped out. That is the question every renewal conversation is trying to answer and very few platforms answer well.
A peer review pod, not a review site
The second notable addition is the Event Tech Atlas Peer Review Collective. Planners and event technologists join pods, with each pod selecting three technologies to review over the course of a year. The first pod opens in May, with applications on a rolling basis.
The structure is deliberately different from a TripAdvisor-style open review site. Event Tech Atlas is asking groups of practitioners to commit to extended review cycles rather than soliciting one-off star ratings, which tend to attract either the very happy or the very angry. Whether the model produces useful signal will depend on the calibre of planners who join, how transparently the reviews are published, and how the platform handles vendors who push back on negative findings.
The smaller updates that matter
Several quieter improvements sit underneath the two headline features.
Search across the Atlas is now AI-assisted, using context as well as keywords and forgiving typos. The system also retains the last 10 companies a user has viewed without requiring them to be saved manually. Downloadable resources are now collected on a personal dashboard rather than living in whichever folder users last saved them to.
Listing management has been opened up so that more than one user from a vendor organisation can edit the same listing, which fixes a small but real problem where the original claimer leaves the company and access is lost.
Vendors can also connect related listings, which matters in a sector where group structures and acquisitions have made parent and subsidiary relationships harder to follow. Event Tech Atlas is planning to surface integration relationships between listings next, which would feed directly into the comparison tool.
The homepage feature slots are now allocated randomly to any company that has updated its listing and added a featured image, removing one of the easier accusations to throw at any directory product.
What to watch next
Event Tech Atlas has committed to releasing new features on the first Friday of every month. The interesting question is whether the Tech Stack Tracker becomes the durable hook. Search and listings can be replicated. A dashboard that an event team logs into to manage renewals and contracts is much harder to dislodge once it has data in it.
Event Tech Atlas is a division of Pull Up With Us, LLC, the digital media business co-founded by Vismale and Johnston, which also produces the Event Tech Pull Up podcast.
