There’s nothing worse than meticulously planning a meeting replete with carefully crafted PowerPoint slides, handouts, and a speech you worked on for weeks, only to look up and discover that everyone is playing Angry Birds and checking the weather on their devices. You want to storm out in disgust. But you have to soldier on.

This frustration is magnified tenfold for conference planners. Every detail is carefully plotted. Yet the only thing anyone talks about afterwards is the great party they were able to arrange on some social networking startup app during the boring speech about web design best practices.

There was a time when everyone hated their phone.…