How technology helps to organize in person/offline meetups

This month, members of the Valuepickr forum (http://forum.valuepickr.com/) decided to meet up in person. As a fellow member suggested half jokingly, such meetings may be a sign of market touching a bubble (people showing more interest in value investing :D), but I digress. For Mumbai, the effort kickstarted with members getting added to a whatsapp group and expressing desire to meet, but noone stepping forward to 'bell the cat'. I did the honours by suggesting a venue, and finally others chipped in with comments/suggestions and finally the event happened with 45 attendees
http://www.meetup.com/Valuepickr-Mumbai-meetup-for-Value-Investing/events/233931806/ with the meeting report below
http://forum.valuepickr.com/t/valuepickr-mumbai/6978/98?u=andy161161

Though technology does distance us from the offline world, it can act as a force multiplier as well. For example, below tools were helpful

1. Instamojo for collecting payments at a cost of just 4% (pricing was 2%+Rs 3/txn+tax)https://www.instamojo.com/
2. Meetup for getting publicity to the event and ensuring RSVP/certain details
3. Whatsapp as a communication tool
4. Gmail for sharing presentations and coordinates
5. Valupickr for starting the critical mass and getting people.
6. Breathingroom https://breathingroom.co/ for helping get meeting rooms-though we discarded it it was still of great help to book a venue on demand

So far, without payments integration in India, Meetup is not an end-end platform.