Conference News: What I learned this week – July 29
Bots at Advertising Week: The MediaPost OMMA Conferences have been a well-known component of Advertising Week for years. One of the reasons they have maintained longevity on the conference scene is due to their ability to create programming that reflects top-of-mind issues for marketers. To that end, they have developed a new OMMA Bots & Chat conference for Advertising Week 2016. This event will “explore the new marketing bot approach to customer service in and out of social messaging apps” as well as the different approaches and new technical challenges that they pose. OMMA Bots & Chat will take place on 29 September at the Metropolitan Pavilion in New York.
Retreat!: Fast Company’s annual Innovation Festival returns to New York in November, providing a “city-wide experience that brings Fast Company’s storytelling to life.” The conference highlights business innovation across several industries. The publisher recently announced that in addition to the traditional speaker interviews and company visits, a new experience will be added to the conference program – Leadership Retreats. Leadership Retreats will be curated by Fast Company specifically to help senior management teams of high-performance companies transform the way they approach specific issues and challenges that they are facing. More on this customized programming may be found here.
Match Booked: TechCrunch has announced that they will continue to use their new networking tool, CrunchMatch, which was introduced at 2016 Disrupt New York, at the Disrupt San Francisco conference this autumn. The tool asks startups and investors to fill out a questionnaire upon registration. TechCrunch uses these responses to (Crunch)match the respondents by investment profile/interest areas and helps coordinate meetings during the Disrupt conference. Disrupt San Francisco runs from 12 – 14 September.
Speaking Opportunity: The GSMA has opened the Call for Papers for its massive annual conference, Mobile World Congress. The 2017 event will bring together the mobile ecosystem from 27 February to 2 March in Barcelona. Conference organizers are accepting speaker proposals through their online form, until 16 September 2016. But don’t wait! They encourage early submissions.
Lunchtime Learning: One of the top tech gatherings in the US is Fortune Brainstorm:Tech, taking place each summer in Aspen. If you were not able to attend the event earlier this month (or were not able/willing to pay the steep, but worthwhile registration fee), you can still get a taste for the types of topics they covered here. Spend your lunch listening to Bob Iger from Disney talk turkey and find out what the CEO of Hyatt Hotels is learning from AirBnB.
Coming Up Next: On 30 July, BlackHat Conference returns to Las Vegas for its 19th annual gathering. Created by and for the information security community, the six day event offers training programs, technical briefings and workshops to more than 9,000 attendees. From 1 – 3 August, CompTIA ChannelCon will bring more than 1,000 solution providers, distributors, vendors, media and football legends (Peyton Manning is scheduled to keynote) to Hollywood, Florida. And in Washington D.C. next week banks, tech companies, government representatives, startups and investors will explore the technologies, policies and innovations influencing bitcoin and blockchain at the Blockchain Conference. This event will take place on Tuesday, 2 August.