If you send electronic requests for proposal through the StarCite system and use any of Starwood’s 960 hotels and resorts for your meetings, a new e-RFP/sales system integration should be of interest to you. Starwood and StarCite executives are expecting the new partnership to provide planners with faster service and improve the way changes on RFPs are tracked.

Mingle360’s handheld networking tool, MingleStick, has been generating some buzz since it debuted last year, but its most significant introduction to the meetings industry may be next month at TS2, the trade show about trade shows, when each attendee gets a device to put to the test.

Two articles caught my eye recently. Here’s the first sentence of one: “I sat in on an ExactTarget Marketing Webinar earlier this week, and, although WebEx kept freezing my computer trying to get the audio to work (quite obnoxious), I thought there were a few good takeaways.” The rest of the article talks about the value of the presented material. But the writer felt strongly enough about her technical experience to make it the lead sentence. And in the second story, technical difficulties are highlighted right in the title: “Schwarzenegger’s Webcast Technical Difficulties Don’t Stop Dissatisfaction From Pouring in.”

I’m not pointing out these situations to embarrass the companies or to say that you shouldn’t use them. No webcasting technology is foolproof. But here are five strategies to help you avoid webinar problems and frustrations.

The Active Network Inc., the company that last year acquired RegOnline and WingateWeb, two major event management software products, last week announced the release of ActiveEvents OnDemand, a scalable, Web-based event management tool.