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Scan With Caution! About 1 out of 11 phishing attempts are carried out through a QR code. That represents a 2200% increase from just a year ago.

 
 
 
 
 
 
NOVEMBER 16 | 3PM EDT | SCOOT APP
 
A Scoot Thanksgiving Fest
 
Join us on Scoot, a great meeting platform, where we’ll host a Thanksgiving scavenger hunt. Sign up today and we’ll send you the details of how to play. Prizes for winners.
 
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FEATURED STORY
 
Celebrity Meets Virtual Humans
 
 

Scarlett Johansson is taking legal action against an image-generating AI called Lisa AI: 90’s Yearbook. The generative AI company used her digital likeness in their ad campaign without seeking consent. Johansson is not alone in her litigation.

 

As tools to create synthetic virtual humans become widespread, less expensive, and accessible to all, it’s going to be increasingly difficult to tell what’s real and what’s fake. For many, it will cause outrage (and lawsuits); for others, it may produce entirely new revenue streams. 


Real Tom Hanks can’t be everywhere all at once, but fake Tom Hanks can and is. He can be seen (again, without permission) hawking dental plans. But with his consent, he can remain eternally young and in multiple places. Hanks and actress Robin Wright have already signed on to star in an upcoming Robert Zemeckis film where Metaphysic, a company that specializes in creating digital humans, will de-age them using AI instead of traditional CGI and special effects. Hanks joins a bevy of other celebs rushing to secure their digital likenesses. 


It’s taking over Hollywood faster than Ozempic. Media-savvy Paris Hilton already has numerous virtual personae: as a chatbot on Meta’s Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook platforms (where she was paid a hefty sum), doling out NFTs, and building Slivingland, her own Roblox world. Her control center for all of her virtualness is her media company, 11:11.


Ninety-one-year-old James Earl Jones signed away his eponymous Darth Vader voice to a company that uses Respeecher, which uses sound bites to “clone” an actor’s voice. This allows a studio to record his voice in perpetuity. Actors can be anywhere, everywhere, all at once, forever.


Hollywood celebrities are flocking to digital studios to create, claim, and manage their own digital likenesses. Remington Scott, CEO and Chief Architect of Hyperreal, creates amazingly realistic A-list virtual humans with an underlying rights management system to ensure that digital likenesses are tracked and compensated across multiple platforms.


Hyperreal produces hypermodels, which are ultra-realistic digital re-creations of a person's entire body, face, and voice, plus motion-captured movements and mannerisms. The company has created near-perfect likenesses of young Paul McCartney, TikTok star Madison Beer, and others. 

 
 
 
Paul McCartney ages in reverse with Hyperreal. Image credit: Hyperreal
 
 

The highly detailed, 3-D models can be licensed for future use, with royalties going to the artist or their studios. Hyperreal takes a fee for managing the platform. 


Metaphysic, like Hyperreal, is showcasing its company’s take on digital celebrities. It’s luring top-tier actors and actresses who recognize the need to get out in front of ownership of their virtual likenesses. The company’s roster of clients includes Tom Hanks, Octavia Spencer, Anne Hathaway, and more. 


For now, ultra-realistic high-tech motion capture and scans are costly, but these prices will come down. And virtual actors and actresses are already finding new work training AI chatbots


The likely scenario is that we’ll all have digital likenesses with immutable, persistent tracking. Come that day, we might all be sending our digital doppelgangers off to work on our behalf. 

 
 
Hubilo: The Harder They Come, The Harder They Fall
 
 

Hubilo, the event tech platform that became a pandemic darling, recently laid off one third of its staff. It’s the company’s third round of layoffs as it tries to rightsize for a new reality. While the company provided event services before the pandemic, it was COVID that rocketed it to fortune. The India/San Francisco-based company quickly raised about $300 million in funding from major VC firms that recognized the demand for virtual events.


In the latest set of cutbacks, CEO Vaibhav Jain called this moment the “collapse of the virtual events industry.“ He wrote, “As the pandemic receded, the pendulum swung and physical events came back strongly. Organizations preferred to use the same vendors that they used before the pandemic for their physical events. Also, event mobile apps are a commodity now, allowing very little room for Hubilo to innovate and capture a sizable market share in physical event space.” 


The reality is that virtual events are on the rise and are expected to grow steadily through 2030 at a compound annual growth rate of 21%. Companies like Hubilo need to specialize, finding the places where virtual events make sense. Tech platforms need to differentiate themselves with special skills, moving away from cookie-cutter solutions. 


Some platforms will specialize in employee training with test-taking modules. Others will beef up security and compliance for finance and health. Others will offer spiffy-looking product launches. Education solutions will include attendance and grades as part of the system. There are many such specializations. Some platforms, probably the more experienced companies that were well established before the pandemic, will have an easier time finding their way. Pandemic babies such as Hopin and Hubilo are right-sizing to find niches in community-building and webinars, respectively. Still others, such as Jugo and Canvas, are emerging to create a new generation of more cinematic, engaging solutions.

 
 
WEEKLY
 
Scuttlebutt
 
 
 
 

YouTube viewers who use ad-blockers will now see this. Credit: Ars Technica.

 
 

To Block or Not
YouTube has launched an all-out war against ad-blocking software. The platform is now showing a prompt about violating its terms of service if it detects an ad blocker’s presence. Viewers who rail against YouTube’s “ridiculous amount of ads” are reacting negatively to this latest development. But creators who depend on ad revenue are trying to educate viewers on the benefits of ad-supported content. Ars Technica has a good article on the ongoing dispute.

 
 
 

Your Brain on Zoom
As work from home and virtual meetings continue to thrive, scientists will continue to study the associated behaviors. The latest from Yale is a study that shows brain activity drops during a Zoom meeting when compared with IRL meetings. 

 
 
VEG EVENTS
 
Up and Coming
 
 
 
 

Image credit: Consumer Technology Association

 
CES 2024
 
In my last incarnation, I ran Living in Digital Times, a conferences and events company that was acquired by CTA in 2019. But I’m still lucky enough to continue doing what I love doing for them, planning and producing some of their conference tracks. VEG will be producing the Fintech, Retail and Lifestyle tracks at CES 2024. CES remains one of my favorite tech events. Let us know if we’ll see you there.
 
 
 
 
Creator Lab at NAB Show 2024
 

According to Goldman Sachs, fifty million people around the world now work in the creator economy, and the industry’s total economic value will jump to $250 billion in 2023. That number is expected to double in the next few years as the creator economy approaches 25% of the overall global value of the entertainment industry.


In partnership with NAB Show 2024 and Jim Louderback, we’re building Creator Lab, which includes interactive experiences, expert panels, hands-on workshops, and networking events that focus on creators, equipment, distribution channels, and monetization strategies. Sessions will explore the role of AI in the production workflow, the importance of video in corporate messaging and branding, and building a robust and flexible infrastructure to power the creator-first content economy.

 
 
 
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Robin Raskin | Founder
917.215.3160 | robin@virtualeventsgroup.org

Gigi Raskin | Sales/Marketing

917.608.7542 | gigi@virtualeventsgroup.org