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VIRTUAL EVENTS GROUP
 

Dressing for the Job. Accenture bought 60,000 Oculus headsets from Meta for its workforce. Part of the reason is to hold company-wide onboarding which I only imagine can be quite disorienting (paywall).

 
 
 
 
 
 
May 18 | 4:00pm EDT | ZOOM
 
May Town Hall Series: Creating Great Sponsorships
 

Virtual events have a great track record for securing guests as speakers. Who doesn’t want to speak from their living room? But creating happy sponsors is trickier. Learn the tips and tricks for creating solid sponsorship experiences with this crackerjack team of speakers: Lisa Farrell of MeetYoo, and Joe Federbush of Evolio Marketing, Arianna Black of Women in Product, Jennifer Baranowski of SIIA, and Nick Rosier of 2Heads. RSVP to secure your space.

 
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June 8 | 4:00pm EDT | ZOOM
 
June Town Hall Series:
De-Tangling Data
 
BPA is an association known for how it handles the auditing of real world events. Now they’re tracking digital events with standards and a common language for digital event reporting called Reporting Standards for Digital Events (RSDE). Find out what they’re doing and how you can benefit.
 
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Get Smart
 

Cathy Hackl is a smart cookie and a true metaverse evangelist. From co-authoring a new book called Navigating the Metaverse, to heading up Decentraland’s FashionWeek, she’s a geyser of information. Her latest “spout” is a series of great metaverse tutorials on LinkedIn aimed primarily at marketers. Lively, straight to the point, and easy to follow. 


And If it’s the blockchain that baffles you, check out this course from Event Farm. It focuses on blockchain for beginners, but in the context of what it can bring to events. 

 
 
 
Gas Pains
 

This past Saturday was the fart fest of gas fees. The blockchain imploded under the weight of The Bored Apes Yacht Club's debut of its new metaverse where it is selling parcels of land in addition to its insanely priced NFT art.


Think of gas fees as transaction fees, shipping fees, or any other sort of service fee. And like many fees they get higher when there’s more demand (think about high peak train tickets as an example). So you pay more in fees to have your transaction processed on the blockchain when things are busy. And boy were they busy when Bored Ape opened its properties. 


Last Saturday evening one user wanted to buy $25 worth of Ethereum. It cost them $3,300 in gas fees. The Club sold 55,000 virtual plots of land in Otherside, its new metaverse, for about $5,800 each. While the transactions were done in ApeCoin, the NFTs were minted on Ethereum block chain. According to the press reports, the virtual land deeds sold out, and buyers paid a total of about $123 million in gas fees to send Yuga Labs (creator of the Bored Ape) about $320 million. “Ouch,” says Shelly Palmer, who ran a nice piece on the episode this week.

 
 

Otherside is the Bored Ape Yacht Club’s new metaverse selling parcels of land. Figure credit: Otherside Trailer

 
 
 
Direct to Avatar
 
Forget the humans. Humans need supply chains, mailboxes, physical goods, shipping information and returns. “Direct-to-avatar” (D2A) is a new business model that sells digital goods directly to your avatar. You can walk around naked. Just a year ago D2A was mostly part of the gaming environment — buying swords and weapons — but forecasters predict rapid growth in the D2A Industry.
 
 
 
Pain-Free Video
 

Alfred Poor, our technical editor, believes that “Content” may still be King, but “Connection” is the Ace in the deck. And video is one of the best ways to get your content across. Producing video content can be a time-consuming chore, especially if it’s not the focus of your skill set. Fortunately, artificial intelligence is powering these three amazing video creation and editing tools from VEG’s Tools database (in alphabetical order):

  • Descript starts by uploading your video and creating a transcript of your content. You can then edit the text, and it will edit the video to match your changes. It has lots of other features, including a text-to-speech generator for voice-overs.

  • Designs.ai lets you create logos, videos, banners and mockups by turning text into graphic format. It matches your words with the proper ingredients. The program draws on 10M video clips, 170M images, 500K audio files, and 50 voices to create a fully-edited design. You can even have it scaled for Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, and other platforms.

  • Rephrase will turn your text content into a video by creating a human avatar to deliver your script. It’s easy to create different segments with and without a narrator to fit your content. The company calls itself the “MailChimp of video”.

 
 

Rephrase lets you type lines of text and then create a video message and narrator generated by AI.
Image credit: Rephrase.AI

 
 
 
Scuttlebutt
 
 
 

Diversify
Fidelity said it plans to offer its 23k employers the chance to add bitcoin to their company 401(k)s. The government has expressed concerns. Kudos to Fidelity for giving its employees the option. 

 
 

Chart of the Week
According to Allied Market Research, America's corporate event market is worth $100 billion and includes event halls, hotels and transportation. Tech commands the largest share for the foreseeable future.

 
 

Image credit: Allied Market Research

 
 

Zoom Thought of the Week
Communication mediums seldomly disappear (well, maybe cuneiform). They pile atop each other to offer more choices for how to communicate. I remember saying to my email-centric magazine staff years ago, “If the guy likes faxes, send him a fax.”


That brings us to Zoom. Its recent growth has been more sluggish with less demand. But don’t relegate it to the graveyard of dead media. It’s rolled out a slew of new features and is a great solution for a raft of activities like classroom, work from home, webinars and more. 


Zoom’s biggest problem is articulating its ease of use and breadth of features. It has reached the 80/20 rule, 80% of the people use only 20% of the features. Trying to use a new feature (say the green room) means finding out which version you have, which features are in which versions, and more. Zoom, if you're listening, why not create a list of certified Zoom experts! Oh wait, you do that already. Can you simplify?

 
 

Drones for Mass Market
Snapchat’s Pixy ($229) is a flying pocket-size camera for capturing and uploading videos. It’s adorable. It’ll hover around you and its app-based augmented reality tools really make your videos fun. There’s a dress-up in-app shopping tab for browsing try-on products and templates for shoppable AR ads. Snapchat reports more than 250 million users have used its AR shopping lenses more than 5 billion times since January 2021. I can see these as the new selfie stick at events, can you?

 
 

Image Credit: Adweek Adweek (4/28)

 
 
 

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Robin Raskin  | Founder
917.215.3160 | robin@virtualeventsgroup.org

 

Julie Sylvester | Sales & Marketing

917.868.7160 | Julie@virtualeventsgroup.org