Cincinnati, OH – Fern Exposition & Event Services, a Cincinnati-based national service contractor serving more than 1,000 expositions and events held annually throughout the United States and Canada, announced today that it has made a strategic investment in KiwiLive, a mobile-web platform for audience engagement during and after live events.
As a result of the deal, Jeff Mason, KiwiLive’s founder and CEO, will become Fern’s Director of Customer Technology Innovation.
Mason will drive strategy related to delivery of Fern services through technology. KiwiLive also is based in Cincinnati.
“Fern recognizes the increasing pervasiveness of technology in every aspect of commerce, especially big data for targeted networking and sales,” said Aaron Bludworth, Fern President and CEO. “Our partnership in this transaction has the unique dimension of bringing Jeff into the Fern organization in very strategic forward-thinking role.”
Mason, an engineering graduate from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, founded KiwiLive in 2014 after working for two Fortune 500 companies. A mechanical engineer turned entrepreneur, Mason also is a graduate of a prestigious business startup accelerator program.
Bludworth says Mason will focus on customer-facing technologies and the customer-user experience. KiwiLivc has been used by more than 2,000 events as a tool to enhance audience engagement. KiwiLive allows speakers, presenters, associations and event organizers to perform real-time audience polling, deliver documents to audience members electronically and strengthen attendee-to-attendee networking.
“The result of using KiwiLive is that attendees immediately capture the exact information and connections they need,” Mason says. “Meanwhile, event organizers can use the engagement data KiwiLive provides to serve their attendees even more effectively.”
In a statement, the company added, “The partnership of the two companies accelerates Fern’s technology-focused strategy of empowering organizations to grow relationships between audiences and brands. Fern has numerous strategic relationships with marketing and event technology organizations, which the company will continue to build and develop to offer integrated solutions and Fern proprietary technologies.”
Reach Aaron Bludworth at (513) 562-0432 or abludworth@fernexpo.com; Jeff Mason at (309) 507-2915 or jeff@kiwilive.com
