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Event Timer is a free fullscreen countdown timer for conferences, meetups, workshops and panels. Set the speaker slot, put it on the stage screen, and let the colours do the work: green while there is time, amber under 2 minutes, red under 30 seconds. At zero it buzzes, flashes TIME UP, and counts the overrun as a negative time.
We built it because we kept needing it. C4E has spent twenty years running conferences, dealer meets and corporate offsites, and the timing of a room is still handled with a phone face-up on the lectern or somebody waving from the wings. Neither survives contact with a speaker in full flow. So the timer is free, there is no account, and nothing is upsold. Take it to your event.
A screen at the back of the room competes with the audience, and a speaker mid-sentence will not go hunting for it. What you want is a confidence monitor at the front of the stage, near eye line, angled at the lectern. If there is only one spare screen, the floor in front of the first row beats the back wall. The digits scale to fill whatever they are on, so a laptop propped on a chair still reads from ten metres.
Green, amber at two minutes, red at thirty seconds. Tell the speaker what those mean in the green room, before they walk on. A speaker who has been told that amber means start landing the plane will land it. A speaker who sees an unexplained colour change reads it as a rebuke, panics, and talks faster, which is the opposite of what you wanted. Thirty seconds of briefing prevents it.
One person starts and stops it, and that person is not the speaker. Give it to whoever is running the room, on a laptop they are already holding. Space starts and pauses, R resets, F goes fullscreen. Keyboard control matters more than it sounds. Hunting for a mouse pointer on a stage screen in a dark room is how a timer gets started ninety seconds late.
At zero the buzzer sounds for three seconds, the screen flashes TIME UP, and the clock counts the overrun as a negative number. The negative number is the useful part. "Four minutes over" is a fact a chair can act on, and the session after this one knows exactly what it has to make up. Decide beforehand who walks on and at what point, because the timer will not do that part for you.
The Play buzzer button exists because sound levels in an empty room lie. Run it through the venue system during the tech check, on the machine that will actually be feeding the desk. If the buzzer is going to embarrass someone, better it happens at eleven in the morning to an empty hall. If you do not want sound at all, mute it. The screen still flashes.
Plug in the second screen, set the display to extend rather than mirror, drag the browser window across, and press F. The controls disappear and the clock fills the display, so the room sees a clock and nothing else. Your own screen keeps the browser, and you carry on working.
It runs in a browser tab, so a spare laptop, a tablet, or a smart TV with a browser all work. Once the page has loaded it keeps running without wifi, which is the normal state of affairs in a hotel ballroom. There is no login and nothing to install, so a venue's locked-down AV machine will usually run it when it will not run anything else.
A speaker timer needs to be readable from the stage, warn before time runs out, and show overtime. Event Timer is a free fullscreen countdown timer that turns amber under 2 minutes, red under 30 seconds, sounds a buzzer at zero, then flashes TIME UP and counts the overrun as a negative time.
Open Event Timer on a laptop, pick the session length, press F for fullscreen and put the screen where the speaker can see it. The clock fills the display and the colour changes warn them without anyone interrupting.
At zero a buzzer sounds for three seconds and the screen flashes a large TIME UP message, alternating red and black every second, with the overrun counting down past zero underneath in large digits, so you know exactly how far over the session is running.
Yes. Event Timer is free, needs no account and no install, and is a single web page. Once loaded it keeps running without an internet connection, which matters in venues with unreliable wifi.
Yes. There is a mute button, and a play buzzer button so you can test the sound level through the venue PA before the session starts.
Event Timer is free, and is made by C4E. We run corporate events, conferences and MICE programmes. If you would rather someone else ran the room, talk to us.