Current Version: 1.11.0.0

Benefits of Using The Big Event

How The Big Event Increases Your Business

• Customer Confidence: Allows you to get information to your customers instantly while they remain anonymous; increasing customer trust.
• Customer Loyalty: You can help retain your customers by using The Big Event like a loyalty card.  Give them special deals if they're connected to your file.
• Advertising: Do you have too many of last year's clothes in stock?  You can create a sale ad and have everyone connected find out about it, in seconds.  This is the best form of advertising in these economically unstable times.  It's FREE.
• High Quality Presentations: Want a highly formatted notification but don't have a graphic artist and don't know HTML, just start typing, format and color the text, drag images in, and you're done!
• Teaser Ads: You can notify your real estate customers about new houses on the market or open houses... with video, specs, and a link to your web site!
• Control Over Lulls: Having a slow dinner hour at your pizza restaurant?  Offer a special deal to any customer that calls or comes in from now until 8:00 PM and mentions a special phrase, or brings in a printed coupon that you just created.  No need for waiting for a newspaper ad, or taking time to hand deliver coupons.
• Timeliness: Want to create a sense of urgency for your products?  Update your file with the inventory count of a hot item.  People can watch the decrease and realize they need to quickly go get one before they're gone.

How People Find Your Event File

• Partnership: Afraid people won't know about your event file?  List it publicly.  Ryppl will notify people about all new event files with a special notice form that pops up right in the application.  There is also a page on the Ryppl site devoted to listing all public files.  If someone sees its description, they could wind up discovering it before they even knew you existed.  That's brand new customers!
• Discoverability: Anytime someone using The Big Event clicks on the menu item to see public Event files, it's listed in an easily searchable manner with all the rest of the public files.

How The Big Event Improves Government

• Accountability: Imagine being able to get updates of how your congressmen voted on bills.  Talk about accountability!  Think of CSPAN statistics and voting tallies being condensed and put right on your desktop.
• Increased Awareness: Use The Big Event like a blog and post your political opinions, proofs, and arguments.

How The Big Event Makes You Safer

• Amber Alert Version 70.0: Imagine getting near-real-time notifications of missing children, with photos and video, just seconds after it's made available by the authorities!  Just think how many more children would be found if the child happened to be near someone who was looking at the instantly received image of the child!  Think of it as Amber Alert on a triple dose of steroids!
• Weather Alerts: Imagine a weather alert file for your city that audibly notifies you when a dangerous storm is approaching, and getting that seconds after a tornado sighting or other rapid development!
• Suspect Alerts: Imagine if your local police department used it to post photos and video of criminals caught in the act just seconds after a crime was committed.  If it went out to desktops around the city there would surely be someone near the suspect that could phone in a tip.
• Neighborhood Watch: Imagine being able to instantly warn your neighbors of suspicious behavior with the use of descriptions, images, and video in seconds.
• Freedom From Viruses: The information window contains only text, formatting, images, and links to web sites, which only reside in memory.  The media player does only what is necessary to play back the audio and video.  Plus, you can disconnect from an Event file anytime you choose.

How The Big Event Improves Your Social Life

• Friends Network: Imagine being able to invite all of your friends to a last-minute party or outing in seconds and have it instantly notify them audibly, via email to their phone (if they have configured that), or discreetly only through visual cues on the desktop.

How The Big Event Improves Everyday Life

• Garage Sale Ads: Imagine being able to plan a garage sale in a couple of hours and be ready for it the next day, with people lined up at your door.  Have images and descriptions ready and on people's desktops by morning.  You can even update the file as things are sold and people have the latest information.

The Free Features

• Countdown timer that shows the amount of time until the event (in days, hours, minutes, and seconds).  It cannot be minimized or hidden.
• Pop-up Information page that contains the date and time of the event (as of your last file update).  It pops up when the mouse rolls
  over the countdown timer.
• The ability to connect to any event file and stay up-to-date.
• Easy "drag and drop" connection to event files.
• The ability to easily find public Event files to connect to.
• Enhanced, attention-grabbing appearance when the event is 5 minutes away (the default alert time).
• Play back video and audio files that are streamed to you from the event organizer.  No files are stored on your hard drive!
• View and save preferences for customizing the operation of The Big Event (they don't take effect until you register).
• View upcoming events in either a list or calendar format.
• View all events from all event files in a single calendar display (on the right-click menu of the master timer).

The Cool Features

Once you register your copy of The Big Event you get access to these enhancements.

• Drag-n-Drop placement of the countdown timer.
• Connect to multiple event files in the same program and individually control the preferences.
• Change the font size of the countdown timer.
• Customize when the timer will start flashing to alert you.
• Set audio files to play at either the alert time, the event time, or both.
• Record your own audio files.
• Choose a text-to-speech plugin to announce the alert time, the event time, or both, along with the title of the event and you can add your own voice plugins (with a little .NET programming).
• Optionally send yourself or someone else an email at the alert time and the event time.  This can go to your phone if it has that capability.
• Customize the timer to display just the days, hours and minutes, and/or hide the time portion until the day of the event.
• Hide the countdown timer until a wake-up time that you specify so you won't be distracted.  For instance, don't show the timer
  until 2 days 3 hours and 45 minutes before the event.
• Specify how often to check for updates to the information, from every 5 seconds to every 2 hours.
• Print the event information from the monitored event file in rich text format.
• Create your own Event files so that you can coordinate events and keep them on-track.  Plus you can include a video or audio file.  This includes the ability to make them public so that anyone using The Big Event will be able to see that you're offering an Event file and can easily connect to it.
• Simple FTP interface so that you can easily transfer your event files, media files, or whatever, to or from your remote web server.
• Have your information displayed using "rich text", including images.

For a demonstration, watch The Big Event Demo.
Get the latest update by clicking here.


The Big Event requires .NET Framework version 3.5 (free download from Microsoft).   If it is not already installed on your PC, the installation program will install it.  .NET Framework version 3.5 is incompatible with Windows 2000.  If you have Windows 2000, then download the update file (here) and unzip it to your local drive and install .NET Framework version 2.0 to use the application without the video playback feature or the public file feature.