Tag: events

Towards hybrid events

“It’s hard to imagine to going back to 200 shows a year on the road, which is what I’ve done for my whole adult life” Instead, he pictures a combination of in-person and virtual concerts. While a show at home is obviously different than onstage, “We’re sharing a moment, and that’s at the heart of any live musical performance.”

They are in talks with venues to partner on integrations, which would allow them to put cameras in bars and clubs across the country to stream shows even when touring resumes — along with clear restrictions, such as not offering a streaming option until the in-person show sells out.

many events in the future will be hybrid, and the more seamless the interfaces are, the more impactful.

Solving online events

It’s often struck me that networking events are pretty inefficient and random. If you’re going to spend 1 hour or 2 in a room with 50 or 500 people, then you could take that as a purely social occasion and enjoy yourself. But if your purpose is to have professionally useful conversations, then what proportion of the people in the room can you talk to in 1 hour and how likely is it that they’ll be the right ones? Who’s there? I sometimes suggest it would be helpful if we all wore banners, as in the image at the top, so that you could look across the room and see who to talk to. (First Tuesday did something like this in 1999, with different colored badges.)

This might just be that I’m an introvert asking for a machine to manage human connections for me (and I am), but there is also clearly an opportunity to scale the networking that happens around events in ways that don’t rely on random chance and alcohol tolerance. A long time ago Twitter took some of that role, and the explosion of online dating also shows how changing the way you think about pools and sample sets changes outcomes. In 2017, 40% of new relationships in the USA started online. Next, before lockdown, you would often have planned to schedule a non-urgent meeting with a partner or client or connection ‘when we’re in the same city’. That might be at some specific event, but it might also just be for some ad hoc trip – ‘next time I’m in the Bay Area’ or ‘next time you’re in New York’. In January most people would never actually have thought of making that a video call, but today every meeting is a video call, so all of those meetings can be a video call too, and can happen this week rather than ‘next time I fly to that city’ – or ‘at CES/NAB/MIPCOM’. In the last few months video calls have broken through that habit. I wonder what happens if we accelerate all of those meetings in that way.

On the unbundling of events, and how networking might be done better.

College of Extraordinary Experiences

COEE is at minimum 3 things: a College, an Extraordinary Experience, and a Community. First, it’s a full-fledged College: a place for higher education and intellectual discourse, offering hands-on, real-world crash courses on Experience Design. Following 3 guiding principles — Rapid Prototyping, Co-Creation, and Flexible Focus — this intense 5-day event has the flavor of an “unconference.” There are a few loosely structured activities, as the core of the program is a co-created and co-designed immersive learning space. Information, ideas and practices flow among participants through facilitated group discussions, thought-provoking workshops (where PowerPoint presentations are adamantly banned), and impromptu conversations. One wishes all learning was as enjoyable, and all enjoyment as profound. Second, like a nested Russian matryoshka doll, COEE is itself an Extraordinay Experience, self-reflectively focusing on Extraordinary Experiences. It’s like Hogwarts meets Disneyland, thoroughly spiced with Burning Man ethos and costuming. For 5 intense days and nights, you live in a real medieval castle, nestled in gorgeous natural surroundings of breathtaking beauty. Spectacular things happen in this unusual, immersive environment, stimulated by a parade of colorful and wild activities, and playful mind-bending events. You are quickly advised to come to terms with the FOMO syndrome: there is so much going on, you can’t get to, or even see, all of it. You’ll never know when and where the next thing will happen. Whatever is in store for you, however, will certainly deserve the term “extraordinary.”

Bushwick Night Market

You should come hungry to Happy Family Night Market. The 1-day Bushwick festival promises to be a vibrant celebration of Asian-American culture through food, film, discussions and more.

Let’s start with just some of the menu; so far there’ll be chicken choila with aachar and puffed rice and a vegetarian momo from While in Kathmandu. Bunker Vietnamese will serve Smallhold mushroom tempura, red wattle pork skewer, grilled corn with scallion oil and a coconut peanut topping. Randwiches will bring adobo pulled pork sliders, Shikampur-style lamb meatballs in a rich gravy, and potato-croquette-style balls with Maggi ketchup from Taj Mah Balls. Honey’s will be putting on a specialty cocktail made with umeboshi plums from Ozuké.