TRADE SHOWS AND LARGE CONFERENCES NEED TO EVOLVE

The con­se­quences of the dis­rup­tion caused by the pan­dem­ic are of par­tic­u­lar con­cern to orga­niz­ers of large con­fer­ences and trade shows.

Start­ing with the Mobile World Con­gress in Barcelona, almost all events have been can­celed or post­poned, all over the world until the Fall.

Large cor­po­rate tech con­fer­ences, such as VMworld (both US and Euro­pean), Ama­zon’s Euro­pean Sum­mit, and Apple’s WWDC, have been con­vert­ed into online-only events. Google I/O, the pop­u­lar devel­op­er con­fer­ence for all things Google, will not hap­pen in any capac­i­ty this year, and the GSMA already announced the can­cel­la­tion of Mobile World Con­gress Shang­hai. 

Col­li­sion, the Toron­to-based com­pan­ion event of Lis­bon’s Web Sum­mit, has been renamed Col­li­sion From Home, and orga­niz­ers expect over 30,000 peo­ple to attend online, pay­ing $79 for over 100 hours of talks.

MWC Los Ange­les, sched­uled for Octo­ber, has­n’t been can­celled yet, but no speak­ers have been announced, and the orga­ni­za­tion is not pro­vid­ing any more details of the show.