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VIRTUAL EVENTS GROUP
 

You are not stuck in traffic.
You ARE traffic.

 
 
 
 
 
 
March 31 | 12pm EST | ZOOM
 
Escape Reality with Vii Events
 

Next month we’re heading into a metaverse escape room. Promise to let you out eventually. Don’t forget to RSVP and join us for this one of a kind experience. Note time change to accommodate our host, VEG member, Stas Zaslavsky of Vii Events.

 
RSVP Today
 
 
Sustainable Events
 
We’re in the process of planning our Town Hall on Sustainable Events, thanks to Freeman’s generous sponsorship. If you have insight or know someone who wants to speak about virtual/physical or hybrid sustainability issues please contact us.
 
 
 
 
 
Data Gems from Bear Analytics
 
Bear Analytics is an insights-as-a-service layer that plugs into any event technology platform to help event planners, brands, and marketers drive engagement. We’re totally psyched to introduce some of their insights to you in digestible data gems.
 
 
Personalization: The Next Event Frontier
 

Bear Analytics can help us harness the data provided by our digital platforms, leveraging it to provide personalization during all phases of an event. Examples of how this behavioral and transactional data can be applied to events today are:

  • Tailoring marketing messages to specifically and automatically outline program sessions that align with areas of returning attendees’ interests.

  • Real-time tracking of audience engagement to serve up content and networking opportunities.

  • Pre- and post-pandemic audience comparisons across demographics.

  • Surfacing demographics information to recruit and retain sponsors and exhibitors.

The race to personalize events is on. We’ll be bringing you some in-depth data on this in our upcoming Sponsorship meeting.

 
 
 
My Metaverse, My Office
 

In 2020, one month into pandemic lockdowns, Erin McDannald, CEO of Lighting Environments, asked her staff to start behaving as if COVID-19 was never going away. “If we think it’s going to be here forever, how do we act? What do we do?” So they picked up and moved their offices to a digital twin of their IRL offices in the metaverse, and they started to communicate using VRChat, which requires headsets. They’re getting real work done.


CES devoted a panel to working in the metaverse featuring Georgina Wellman of Sine Wave Entertainment, which does not require any headgear. Meta’s new Workplace, unlike what it’s name suggests, is more of a bulletin board with video.Whereas Meta’s Horizon Worlds is its equivalent of a metaverse workspace. Other 3D metaverse office spaces (no headsets) can be found in Virbela, MootUp, Teamflow and Topia. And you can find more resources in our database, Workspaces are the kissing cousins of event spaces. Your virtual office doesn’t need to host tens of thousands of workers, it does not have to depend on video, and it can include more tools for collaboration.

 
 

Teamflow combines a virtual room with live video. Image Credit: Teamflow

 
 
 
Decentraland Builds for “Digital-Twin Commerce”
 
For the moment the hottest storefronts are opening in Decentraland, blending crypto, virtual malls, and the metaverse. JP Morgan opened its “onyx lounge” in the high end digital fashion area of Decentraland, the Metajuku mall. Visitors are greeted by a framed Jaime Dimon and a roaming tiger (separated at birth?). The bank concurrently released a report on the emerging virtual world ecosystem, expecting it to grow into a $1 trillion business opportunity, and said that the average price of virtual land doubled from $6,000 to $12,000 in six months last year. In this interview for the New York Times, Michael Gord, co-founder of the virtual real estate firm The Metaverse Group, likened it to coming to New York when it was farmland and buying a chunk of SoHo. Gord’s company spent more than $2.4 million last year on a single 116-parcel plot in Decentraland’s fashion district.
 
 

Image Credit @fintechfrank

 
 
 
Scuttlebutt
 
 
 

Roblox’s Darker Side
Parents who think their kids will earn enough creating Roblox games to fund their college education may want to rethink those plans. All Roblox developers, even kids, own a cut of their creations, but much less of a cut than you’d think. For many reasons, most of that money stays in the Roblox currency. This 2-part investigative report was created by two reporters from People Make Games. It raises important questions about the future of work, child labor, and the creator economy.


Other Heady Reads

  • Christopher Mims of the Wall Street Journal writes a great piece tackling the schism between economics and technology when it comes to exploring NFTs, crypto and the metaverse. Will NFTs really be valued for their scarcity? Not if they can be infinitely created. 

  • Salesforce employees are protesting the company’s reported plans to launch non-fungible token (NFT) services. Thomson Reuters Foundation News reports that around 400 employees signed a letter citing the negative environmental effects of NFTs as well as their status as “unregulated, highly-speculative financial assets.”

  • The avatar builder of the moment, from my perch, is Ready Player Me. I visited two metaverses in the past week that use it to generate avatars within their worlds. 8th Wall, the maker of browser-based AR tools, announced that it’s ready for Ready Player Me Too.
 
 

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Contact Us
 
Robin Raskin  | Founder
917.215.3160 | robin@virtualeventsgroup.org

 

Julie Sylvester | Sales & Marketing

917.868.7160 | Julie@virtualeventsgroup.org