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Spend 20 minutes a day exploring AI Chatbots and you’ll be much more future-ready. We’ve prepared this list of our favorites to get you started. |
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RSVP for our Community Building Day |
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Building a community is an art form. With Felix Zeltner, Denise Hayman-Loa, Jerry Li, and Alex Lindsay, we will learn to build. Felix and Alex have built tremendously meaningful communities, while Denise and Jerry offer platforms to bring groups together.
Bring your questions! Show off VEG’s far-flung community. |
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What Child Development Theorists Can Teach Us about Events |
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I spent the weekend at Dust or Magic, an intimate retreat on the Pacific Coast. We discussed the influence of some of the great child development theorists on the creation of kids’ software. But I walked away thinking that adults – especially software developers and event planners –
need to think about developmental rubrics for events and meetings. This may be especially true just after a pandemic, which may have helped us forget some of the reasons people enjoy in-person meetings and events.
Some good examples? Jean Piaget talks about disequilibrium, which informs how we see the world. If the world matches what we understand, then we have a state of equilibrium. If there’s something new (say AI, or a button on an app that doesn’t work as we’d
expect), we’ve got disequilibrium. Seymour Papert and Maria Montessori were both
constructivists and evangelized learning by doing. Again, in the events world, exhibits at trade shows work best with a constructivist approach. You learn how something works, not by listening to a lecture, but by engaging with it. Abraham Maslow, the hierarchy
of needs guy, talks about the “highs” that come from feeling a part of your surroundings and of belonging. And Fred Rogers, everyone’s neighbor, understood how to talk to kids (adults being big kids) using contact and connection, and what he called the sacred space between the TV set and his audience.
Intrinsic rewards, reinforcement theory, magic moments, exploration, and paths to expertise are all outgrowths of child developmental theory that can be applied to any gathering. A particular fave that I learned about? Mihaly
Csikszentmihalyi talks about Flow as the secret to happiness. Break flow (let’s say with a malfunctioning piece of technology, or a bad journey through your exhibit) and you’ve ruined the magic. |
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Generated by DALL·E 2 using the prompt “Fred Rogers, Maria Montessori, Seymour Papert and Abraham Maslow sitting at a table at an event, in a pop art style.”
Figure credit: DALL·E 2 |
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Apple: Giving Headsets Sex Appeal |
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You gotta hand it to Apple. Seldom first to the game, but always upping the ante. Apple announced its Vision Pro, a $3,500 headset that lets you see the real world with an XR overlay. Think dragons coming out of your kitchen cabinet and you’ve got the idea. You can be immersed in this three-dimensional user interface with eye tracking, hand gestures, or voice; user’s
choice. |
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Apple, with its loud megaphone, has plopped XR reality into the face of consumers, but it’s likely that the first buyers will be a combination of zealous gamers and enterprises with deep pockets. And there’s a damn large audience of people who would rather not pay $3,500 for the privilege of wearing ski-goggle-looking equipment with an accessorized battery
pack.
Last week we were at AWE (Augmented World Expo conference), where if you weren’t trying on a new AR/VR/XR solution then you weren’t there. But there were many browser-based XR experiences requiring no extra hardware, too! Despite Apple’s lion’s roar, options remain plentiful,
and you may soon be holding a meeting, product demo, or collab session in XR. To read more about Apple, its competitors, and the browser-based 3D web, read the piece I wrote at AWE, just before Apple’s launch of the Vision Pro. |
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Microsoft Designer (now) in beta testing will ultimately become part of the AI-enlightened Office365 Suite. It creates everything from social posts to invitations and Powerpoint slides. It adds a splash of AI that helps me find supporting images, appropriate typefaces, colors and templates. My favorite part? Using a QR code, Designer will move your images from
your phone into Designer. Makes Instagramming an artform.
Here’s a quick Designer from my weekend. |
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Image credit: Robin with Microsoft Designer |
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We’ve got a growing Generative AI database on our website. Here are a few of this week’s programs that are worth a try:
- BlueWillow, built atop MidJourney, is sort of a MidJourney lite for image generation. And it’s free, at least for now.
- Eleven Labs is one of the best text-to-speech services, with natural-sounding voices in a wide range of accents. It’s a top choice for turning text content into a voice-over for video or to sizzle up a slide show.
- Kaiber lets you start creating with your own images or text description, and it creates a video for you. Free to use, but registration is required.
NYSE's Fantasy
Will virtual worlds help the sluggish IPO world? Wall Street thinks so. The NYSE built a virtual trading floor for IPO events.
From Human to Bot: Cheap Labor
Anyone who remembers the early days of online virtual communities, such as Second Life, remembers that players were so obsessed with their worlds that they hired “stand -ins”, usually from overseas, to tend their land while they worked their day jobs. Today a chatbot can do that for you. Minecraft added AI bots that can play the game for you (and quite well)
in your absence. It’s a cute proof of concept now, but has important implications for the future of work automation.
IMEX Frankfurt
The gap between event tech and its relevance to the current mania for live events continues to widen. Event tech companies would be prudent to glom onto live events providing extra services before, during and after. Stand-alone virtual events will continue to have a place in the events landscape, but an overall smaller piece of the events pie. Miguel Neves from Skift makes this abundantly clear in his summary of IMEX Frankfurt.
Make it an Even Billion: ChatGPT
ChatGPT maker OpenAI is now the fastest growing website, nearing 1bn unique users per month in record time. Traffic grew by 54.21% in March, which is the greatest increase among the world’s leading websites.
Project Spark: AI for Events
PCMA and event technology provider Gevme have partnered on Project Spark, which is both a generative AI platform and an educational initiative exploring the impact of AI on the business events industry. At the core of the project is a
generative AI platform that puts the power of multiple generative AI tools in the hands of business event professionals in a controlled and curated manner to experiment with:
- Content generation, including event and session descriptions, agendas, social media posts, promotional emails, and press releases
- Brainstorming, including event themes, ideas, networking activities, and creating personas
- Repurposing video content, including summarizing and creating written content for articles or social media posts
- Legal insights, including reviewing and generating clauses and reviewing contracts
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Sharing what we gained, lost and forgot about isolation and quarantine. |
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The Axios-Ipsos American Health Index found that 62% of people think the pandemic is over — up from 46% in February. As COVID recedes into the rearview mirror, we should not be thinking of it as “Never Again”. We should not forget the camaraderie and humanity that event tech brought us during the pandemic. Join us on July 27 as we end the summer looking back on the lessons learned from COVID. |
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