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Bros will be bros! Any thoughts on why a16z (Andressen Horowitz) would give disgraced WeWork founder Adam Neumann a $350 million dollar second chance for his new real estate company? Are they hoping for the film rights? 

 
 
 
 
 
 
July 14 | 3pm EDT | Zoom
 
Back to Events School
 

September means we blast off into the events season. There’s a lot that’s changed. Denzil Rankine, the author of Reinventing Live, shares his latest thinking on the evolution of events. And the renowned artist, dancer, and mime Steven Colucci, along with IP attorney and NFT aficionado Mike Hassard, will show us how to keep out of trouble in the NFT world.

 
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Ukrainian Blockchain Heroes
 
 
Image credit: Kyiv Tech Summit
 

Americans have notoriously short attention spans. After six months of unrelenting war in Ukraine, Americans seem to gain more distance from the war and its casualties on a daily basis. 


About a month ago I met a vivacious young Ukranian woman, Inna Kosianets. She’s beautiful, brilliant, and exhilarated about the power of tech to solve real-world problems. By day Kosianets is a Senior VP at an NYC-based investment firm. After hours she and other activists, many of whom are part of the Ukrainian diaspora, are all working feverishly to coordinate a hackathon that they believe can help solve some of Ukraine’s most pressing wartime problems. The event is called Kyiv Tech Summit and runs from Sept 6 to Sept 9th. 


It will be a live event, but only local Kyiv residents can attend in person, and the location still remains undisclosed because of safety concerns. The event will also be streamed online. Kyiv Tech Summit’s mission is to engage the local blockchain community of programmers, designers, and innovators, as well as others across the globe, to build technology that will “make war-time life easier for Ukrainians and the world.” Learn more about it on Devpost and see how you can get involved.

 
 
 
What Are PFP NFT Collections?
 
 
Have you noticed that more and more folks are using NFTs as their social media profile pics? Image credit: The Verge
 

You know, there used to be hard and fast research about what types of profile pictures got the best results from your viewing audience. Well, toss that wisdom aside. These days, it’s your NFT PFP (Picture for Proof) that speaks volumes about who you are. PFPs can either be bought, or created. Folks are posting their PFPs on social media such as Twitter, Facebook, Discord, TikTok, and Instagram. (Less so on LinkedIn because it’s more business-oriented.) They’re using them to divulge their interests, gain some social cred, create community, and earn bragging rights. Even as NFTs might be losing some of their potency as high-value revenue generators, they may be a quick source of small, but more scalable revenue for a mass market.


Used somewhat interchangeably, the initials “PFP” are shorthand for “picture for proof” or “picture for profile.” A succinct definition comes from Kate Irwin at Decrypt. ”In short,” she says, “it’s an image, typically static and two-dimensional, that can be bought and sold as an NFT. Typically, they take the form of a head-and-shoulders portrait depicting an animal, person, or other such anthropomorphized creature.” And here’s a TikTok video showing you how the “in crowd” is using its NFT PFPs. 


Why is this important? Because social media companies are realizing NFTs’ super powers. And they’re learning how to authenticate true NFTs as opposed to mere screenshots. Twitter Blue, Twitter’s paid subscription service, is not performing very well as a revenue stream for Twitter, but one of the service's highlights is that it allows you to upload an NFT from your wallet and use it as your profile image, as explained by Input. Meta recently announced NFT verification for Facebook users and has already released it for Instagram users. When users can connect their wallets to their social media and showcase their collections with proof of ownership and authenticity, the nascent NFT industry benefits. 

 
 
Notice how the Bieb showcases his NFT. Image credit: Twitter
 
 
MS Teams, Zoom and Google Meet Want You
 

Zoom is still conferencer-in-chief, according to recent data, but Microsoft Teams is enjoying growing popularity. Tech Radar, relying on data from SimilarWeb, stated that roughly 730,000 more people visit Zoom pages each month than Teams. Teams’ big advantage is its integration with Office 365. To get the same functionality in Zoom, you'd have to delve into their Apps and deal with the complexity of their app store. 


And then there’s Google Meet. It’s slimmer in features than the others, but it has two big advantages. First, it’s the default choice for meetings in Google Calendar, which is a lazy scheduler’s delight. Second, it just got a killer new feature that eliminates the squirrely effects you get when you use a virtual background. The underlying tech issue Google solved is that your computer gets confused about which part of a webcam image belongs in the foreground and which goes in the background. The results are those disappearing arms and pixelated heads that happen when you conference with a virtual background. Google’s solution is to use its hardware in the cloud to process the effect when the computer doesn’t have adequate performance. Offloading to the cloud also lets the new version of Google Meet be more efficient in overall CPU use, leading to longer battery life for laptops. 


Elsewhere in conferencing wars, Protocol created a nice piece of content about how “Zoom uses Zoom.” Some great tips like using personal chat to take notes, turning yourself into an avatar so you can sneak in a quick lunch, and suppressing background noise, make this a worthwhile read.

 
 
 
Scuttlebutt
 

Metaverse Mainstream
When NBC daytime TV takes you on a metaverse shopping trip, you know the ship has sailed. Plus, the VMA (Video Music Awards) added a new category this year, ”Best Performance in the Metaverse.” With performers like Justin Bieber, Arianna Grande, Travis Scott, 21 Pilots, and Lil Nas X all strutting their virtual stuff, the award seems like a timely addition. 

 
 
 

Lo Siento 
According to Gizmodo, Meta’s launch of Horizon Worlds VR in Spain forgot something pretty important. Spanish! There were no Spanish translation tools for the VR launch causing ¡mucha frustración!

 
 

Mark Your Calendar for Nvidia’s View of the Metaverse 
NVIDIA will host its next GTC conference virtually from Sept.19-22, featuring news-packed days of AI, metaverse, and accelerated computing with a keynote by founder and CEO Jensen Huang. Registration is free and open now (but not required to view the keynote).

 
 

A Good Read if You Love VideoGames
Just finished a great novel by Gabrielle Zevin. Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow is a wonderful story of two friends (not lovers) who love making video games, following them through decades from Boston to California and back, with video games as the backdrop. “What is a game? It’s tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. It’s the possibility of infinite rebirth, infinite redemption".

 
 
VEG News
 

Don’t forget to register for one of our upcoming working group sessions. It’s a great way to increase your expertise, bond with colleagues, and effect real change in the events industry. 

 

We’re also leading two metaverse conversations and tours for the publishing community in September. One is with Techonomy, the other with Observer.com. We have limited guest passes available. Write to Julie@virtualeventsgroup.org if you’d like to attend. 

 
 
 
 
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Robin Raskin  | Founder
917.215.3160 | robin@virtualeventsgroup.org

 

Julie Sylvester | Sales & Marketing

917.868.7160 | Julie@virtualeventsgroup.org