SHARE:  
 
Get Involved With VEG
Membership | Subscribe
 
 
NEWSLETTER 172
 
VIRTUAL EVENTS GROUP
 

Gartner predicts that only 25% of business meetings will occur in person by 2024, driven by the demand for remote work and changing workplace demographics.

 
 
 
 
 
 
MARCH 14 | 3PM EDT | ZOOM
 
Meet the Creators
 
The State of the Creator Economy: Join us on Thursday at 3 PM EDT with a fully loaded program that explores the creator economy, from supporting the talent to building the perfect studio, monetizing your content, staying legal, and more. This kicks off our countdown to the NAB Show where we are building a Creator Lab on the showfloor. To attend NAB use the special code CL15 for free registration.
 
RSVP NOW!
 
 
 
TikTok’s Ticking Clock
 
With the exception of Joe Biden, who chose TIkTok over the Superbowl for his first foray into the 2024 campaign, it seems clear that everyone in Washington has nothing but animosity towards the platform. The one (and maybe only) thing that both sides of the house seem to agree on is that TikTok should be divested from its Chinese parent, ByteDance, or face being banned outright. Citing TikTok as a risk to American security, there is a new bill in Congress that would give TikTok six months to find a new owner or be banned in the US.
 
 
 

A quick recap. So far, the House Commerce Committee overwhelmingly approved the bill. TikTok galvanized its users, telling them to call their representatives to push back against the bill’s passage. Lawmakers were pissed and complained about calls flooding their lines (arguably it's their job to hear from constituents). 


Creators who use the platform as a source of revenue fear loss of income. Even the ACLU has gotten involved saying the bill would “violate the First Amendment rights of hundreds of millions of Americans who use the app to communicate and express themselves daily.” President Biden, despite the fact that @BidenHQ is on the app, says he’ll support the bill if it passes. 

 
 
Event FoMo, NoMo
 
 
 

There was a great post from David Berkowitz, Founder of the AI Marketers Guild, that appeared on LinkedIn this week. It advised folks who weren’t heading down to SWSW to just fake it. It’s so easy to make it appear that you’re attending a large event, even when you sit it out. While his FOMO is Austin specific, you can play the same trick at any “must-be-seen-at” event. 


Excerpts from Berkowitz:

 

“When people say they want to meet, or you see people you want to meet, say you will figure out your schedule on the fly. It sounds insider-ish. Beyond a few must-attend things like certain dinners, almost no one knows which things they'll stop by in Austin regardless of what they responded to.”


“Do not actually go to SXSW. This is EXTREMELY important. If you go, you will ruin the whole plan. It's a shame because unlike the Las Vegas Strip, Austin has a lot of charm going for it. Most people like going to Austin, and the breakfast tacos are worth the trip. But it's better to visit when it's not SXSW anyway. Locals run for the hills that week if they can (they don't run too far because Austin is in Hill Country).”


“If someone texts you during SXSW and wants to meet, ask where they are, and then, no matter what they say, say you are too far away right now and you'll never be able to get there in time. They will have to believe you.”

 
 
WEEKLY
 
Scuttlebutt
 
 

Does This AI Make Me Look Lazy?
Has this been happening to you? That big deadline is tomorrow and there’s a fork in the road. You can sit down and ruminate on your writing or summon a little GPT genie to do it for you. I posed the question to ChatGPT herself and while she professed to have no emotions or physical attributes she could attribute to laziness, she told me that “if someone relies too heavily on AI for tasks they could do themselves, they might become less inclined to engage in those activities independently.“ Guilty as charged.


Life of the Partiful
Eventbrite has felt kinda stale for years. And besides you can never find the invite when it's time to retrieve it. Partiful is the new kid in town. It takes the ugly drudge work out of the party invites with a simple, fun interface, that’s easy to track.

 
 
Partiful puts the fun back in e-vites. Image credit: Partiful 
 
 

No Code Tools
Feeling wistful because you never learned to code? You’ll be hearing more and more about no-code tools that build an application for you without needing to program a line of code. No-code apps rely on visual interfaces or drag-and-drop interfaces that connect blocks of pre-built code. If you want a no-code (or at least a low-code) app, look at Zapier, good for app integration, and Figma, a collaborative application builder. 


Virtual Chatbots Are Your Friends?
One of our go-to places for assessing the impact of technology and society is the Pew Research Center. Lee Rainie, longtime friend of VEG, is the Founding Director of Research. Together with Elon University, he’s now expanding on that work for a project called Imagining the Future. It doesn’t take much imagination to know that AI will affect us, but how? Follow along as the future is imagined, like in this essay about the ubiquity of virtual chat agents and how they’ll add a new level of complexity to what it means to converse.

 
 
 
Upcoming Event
 
Innovation
 
We've been having so much fun building the #CreatorLab with the NAB Show team. Join us at NAB as we explore the boundless opportunities in the Creator Economy with industry leaders Robin Raskin and Jim Louderback.
 
 
 
Sign up to get us in your inbox.
 
Get the
Most Recent News
 
SUBSCRIBE
 
 
LINKS
 
Home
Platforms
Tools
Productions
Events
 
 
 
 
Contact Us
 

Robin Raskin | Founder
917.215.3160 | robin@virtualeventsgroup.org

Gigi Raskin | Sales/Marketing

917.608.7542 | gigi@virtualeventsgroup.org