Conference News: Retail in the Desert; Web Summit Changes Tracks; GDC CFP
Crossing the Desert: Since its inception in 2018, The Retail Summit (hosted each year by World Retail Insights in Dubai) has been focused on delivering hard-hitting content from industry titans and creating immersive, fun networking experiences. Now the group plans to expand with a new conference in Saudi Arabia next year. The (new) Retail Summit (TRS) Saudi will gather the global retail community in Riyadh from 27 -29 January. According to the announcement, the event will “explore the boundless growth and investment opportunities throughout the region, forge lasting partnerships, and shape the future agenda.”
Staying on the Right Track: The conference team behind the Web Summit events has rebranded their tracks to make them more obvious and understandable. For example, FullStk is now the Developer Summit and PandaConf is now simply known as the Marketing Summit. The conference team expects to maintain this nomenclature across its other global gatherings. Check out all 15 of the track names and descriptions here.
Submission Opportunity: The Game Developers Conference (GDC) will be back in San Francisco in March next year and the call for submissions to present lectures, panels, and roundtables for their Core Concepts is now open! If you are a game developer that can address the topics outlined in one of this year’s tracks (Advocacy, Audio, Business & Marketing, Design, Production & Team Leadership, Programming, and Visual Arts), submit your idea by 8 August here. Before you begin, please review the conference committee’s guidelines as GDC requests much more comprehensive submissions than other events in this space.
Lunchtime Learning: And if you are thinking about suggesting a topic for the 2025 Game Developers Conference (17 – 21 March in San Francisco) it may be helpful to peruse a few of the sessions from previous years. The GDC Vault offers free content from the past several shows, include talks on Asgards Wrath 2′: How We Built VR’s Largest Open-World RPG (Presented by Meta); Hogwarts Legacy’: Evolving Your Design into AAA (Avalanche Software); Minecraft’ Players at the Center of the Universe of Big Data (Presented by Microsoft); and 20 Years of Game Testing: Life in the Trenches, What We’ve Learned and How We’ve Improved Our Craft (Presented by TransPerfect Gaming Solutions).
Coming Up Next Week: The Digital Hollywood AI Summer Summit runs virtually 22-24 July, designed to offer a defining outlook on the future of entertainment, media, and technology and how they are leveraging and adapting to ubiquitous AI. Jobs for the Future/JFF, a nonprofit organization founded in 1986 whose mission is to drive change in the American workforce and education systems to achieve economic advancement for all, holds its flagship Horizons Summit from 22-23 July in Washington, DC. On 23 July, Parks Associates holds another edition of its virtual Smart Energy series, this agenda focused on “Unlocking Energy Efficiency through Smart Home Platforms.” And lastly, PRSA’s Sun District holds its annual chapter event – PRSA SunCon – from 25-26 July in Orlando, exploring under the theme of “Once Upon a Strategy” the importance of strategic storytelling in developing and implementing effective public relations campaigns and beyond.