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NEWSLETTER 117
 
VIRTUAL EVENTS GROUP
 

British economist Ronald Coase: “If you torture the data long enough, it will confess to anything.”
 
 
 
 
 
 
February 16 | 12PM | Zoom
 
A Virtual Love Fest
 
Last chance to register for Thursday’s romp to the city of love with Stefanie Palomino and Room3D. Plus Joe Federbush of Evolio Marketing will answer all of your questions about your love/hate relationship with event data. It’s our Valentine’s Day #loveyourdata celebration.
 
RSVP NOW
 
 
NAB Show Meets the Creator Economy
 

Broadcasting is transforming itself with new tools, new channels, and lots of new creators leaving their mark on media. From generative AI to new streaming channels to video-first shopping, we’re connecting the dots between creators and broadcast worlds. Find out how you can get involved. Contact Gigi@virtualeventsgroup.org.

 
 
 
From Boom to Doom: What Do The Zoom Layoffs Mean for Events?
 

Eric Yuan’s mantra for Zoom says it all: “Delivering Happiness to Our Users.” During the darkest days of COVID that’s exactly what Zoom did, with both scale and generosity. The first forty minutes of Zoom video conference time is still free of charge, schools still enjoy special programs, getting in and out of Zoom is still the easiest and most reliable, and Zoom still has commendable video quality and low latency across devices.


But now Zoom, like so many other tech companies, has laid off 15% of its workforce, with Yuan announcing that the company needs to adapt to the “uncertainty of the global economy.” Understood, but which jobs are being cut and what is the future direction for the downsized darling of video conferencing?


First, Zoom suffers from the old 80/20 rule: 80% of the people use 20% of the features 80% of the time. They won’t be the first, nor the last, to spend inordinate amounts of time spitting out features that no one really used, or were too buried in settings to find. Does anyone really want Zoom to turn themselves into an avatar during a meeting? Does any large event but Zoom’s own Zoomtopia get hosted on the platform? Can anyone find the “transcribe my meetings” setting? (I’ve tried to no avail.) 


On the enterprise side of the equation, Zoom’s strategy was to grow beyond its roots in video conferencing to become a super app/platform that could compete against the biggest players. Zoom added an app store, events management and ticketing, strong webinar and training tools, hardware partners, and more. The problem? Enterprises already standardized on systems like Microsoft 365 could more easily integrate MS Teams than Zoom. It may be inferior (it is) but it’s easier for admins to deploy. As for hybrid events, Zoom can do them but I can’t recall attending any large B2B hybrid events hosted on Zoom other than its own events. As I’ve said before, Zoom’s pricing structure feels like it pigeonholes you into inflexible event planning


To err is human, but here at VEG we still find Yuan and the Zoom team incredibly endearing. They pivoted from servicing enterprise customers to helping individuals muscle through COVID with heroic fortitude. I could write pages about how they might re-focus, simplify, and come out as the undisputed winners of the video-conferencing market. But as it stands they are overbuilt, especially as an events provider. 


Our advice? Zoom shouldn’t toss all the features they’ve created. Instead, it should repackage them, playing to the needs of today (work from home) while looking at the needs of tomorrow (augmenting physical events). What the live events industry is experiencing now is the irrational exuberance of being in person again. Over time, the pendulum will swing. It always does. 


Fun Zoom Facts: 

 
 
 
Screen Grab of chanting Hanuma Chalisa, a Hindu prayer, made the Guinness Book of Records. Image credit: The Dialogue
 
 
ChatGPT is Giving Us Something to Chat About
 
 
 

Generative AI is so new to the consumer market that it’s basically unregulated. Issues like copyright, IP, and royalties deserve immediate attention. There are signs everywhere that things are about to get super messy.


In the who’s suing whom category there’s Getty vs. Stable Diffusion. Getty Images filed a lawsuit in the US against Stability AI, the creators of the open-source AI art generator Stable Diffusion. The stock photography company is accusing Stability AI of “brazen infringement of Getty Images’ intellectual property on a staggering scale,” claiming that Stability AI copied more than 12 million images from its database “without permission ... or compensation ... as part of its efforts to build a competing business.” And a class action suit filed in California by three artists alleges that the software's use of their work broke copyright and other laws and threatens to put the artists out of a job.


Schools
are apoplectic as to how they’ll teach and grade writing. And the legal system is relying on ChatGPT to automate our justice system. One law school Dean co-authored his 14-page paper with ChatGPT. A judge in Columbia used ChatGPT to help him rule in a recent case. ChatGPT can now code well enough for it to be recruited by Google as an L3 (Level 3) coder. (A Level 3 coder makes an average of $183k/year.) Over at CNET, a tech news site, ChatGPT was writing articles that were apparently fraught with mistakes and loaded with plagiarism. CNET has stopped publishing AI-generated articles for the moment. 


Google just announced Bard
, its salvo into the generative AI arena, competing against Microsoft’s super-savvy decision to integrate ChatGPT into Bing, its search engine. Google won the first battle of search, but this restart gives second tier search engines such as Bing a second chance. Search newcomers such as You are making inroads by organizing the information it searches into categories and keeping users’ data more secure. Lest you think this is a "Made in the USA" phenomenon, be aware that China tech giants Alibaba (basically the Chinese version of Amazon) and Baidu (the Chinese Google) recently announced that they are creating their own AI tools. We’re a little worried that AI wars will spoil the importance of this tool. Like the Internet itself, AI is too important to play turf wars. On the other hand, make sure to experiment while it’s free because free is not forever. 

 
 
Scuttlebutt
 

Just When You Thought You Understood the Influencer Market 
The hashtag #deinfluencing has racked up more than 76 million views on TikTok according to NBC's Today Show.


CEOs of Tech Companies March Like Lemmings to the Sea
Have you noticed how tech CEOs go on hiring sprees en masse, followed by layoffs in unison? Even the percent of layoffs (typically from 6-10%) has a #MeToo vibe. And for good reason. Investors love layoffs; employees hate them. CEOs aim for a balanced equation. Here’s more on the CEO herd mentality from Fast Company.


InEvent Adds integration with ChatGPT 
As far as we know, InEvent is the first event tech company to integrate ChatGPT natively. InEvent supports live, virtual, and hybrid events, and has been in business since 2013. For starters, they trained AI on every promotional piece they ever wrote so it can generate new ones, but that’s just the beginning. Surely, it won’t be the last.

 
 
 
InEvent’s CEO made the announcement on Twitter. Image credit: Twitter
 
 
 
VEG MEMBERSHIP
 
NEW MEMBER
 
Welcome to our new member and our old friend Aug X Labs. It’s an AI-ish prompt to help you create visually beautiful videos. Stay tuned, we’re working on our first VEG video powered by Aug X Labs.
 
 
 
UPCOMING
 
VEG Events
 
 
The End of Events, The Dawn of Engagements
March 15 | 11:30AM-12:303PM CT
 
To succeed in the new world of data, experiential gatherings, and the element of delight, traditional events are due for re-invention. We have come not to praise Caesar, but dust him off a bit.
 
 
 
 
 
 
Build Your Brand Like a Creator
March 23 | 3PM EST
 
Meet three young creators who are Growing their own platforms.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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Robin Raskin | Founder
917.215.3160 | robin@virtualeventsgroup.org

Gigi Raskin | Sales/Marketing

917.608.7542 | gigi@virtualeventsgroup.org