Conference News: What I learned this week – August 2, 2019
New Wonder Women Breakfast: After more than 20 years Multichannel News is extending the MCN Wonder Women award series beyond cable and telecommunications into the over-the-top video industry. Wonder Women in Streaming is a new marquee awards breakfast taking place on September 5, 2019 at the Loews Santa Monica Beach Hotel. This gathering will acknowledge a group of extraordinary women in streaming for “their commitment to enhancing the business, challenging the status quo and being an example for young leadership around the world.” The event will be followed by the second annual Broadcasting & Cable/Multichannel News OTT & Video Distribution Summit.
Ocean Views: Sea-side views seem to be a popular trend among the organizers of creative conferences. XRDC, self-described as the premier conference for AR & VR innovation of all kinds, recently announced that it would be moving its 2019 conference to Fort Mason Festival Pavilion in San Francisco, CA. And Boston’s HubWeek, a weeklong festival that brings together the most creative and inventive minds making an impact in art, science and technology, will be held in venues around the Seaport district this fall.
New Name, New Stage: The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) has changed the name of its Diversity & Inclusion Conference to: Inclusion 2019: Shifting Workplace Culture. The reason for the rebrand? According to the organizers, “workplace diversity remains important, but inclusive cultures must exist for diversity efforts to have an impact, so we’ve put it front and center.” Also, for the first time at this event, SHRM is offering fast-paced, 18-minute sessions on the new Smart Stage, an open platform format covering topics or demonstrations with key, tangible takeaways.
Speaking Opportunity: IWCE, formerly known by its full name, International Wireless Communications Expo, connects the critical communications ecosystem, “in which critical information — data, voice, video – travels over networks to command centers/decision makers.” The conference’s 7,000 attendees come from state, local and federal government, public safety organizations, critical infrastructure and various types of enterprises. If you have insights, research, trends or educational topics that will still be relevant when the event takes place from 30 March – 3 April 2020 submit them via their online CFP before the 21 August deadline!
Lunchtime Learning: RISE just wrapped up its fifth year in Hong Kong inviting more than 16,000 attendees from 114 countries to the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre. More than 385 speakers presented fresh ideas, debated controversial topics and participated in engaging fireside discussions across 13 tracks. Enjoy conference sessions here, featuring speakers such as Elie Seidman, CEO of Tinder, Ray O’Farrell, CTO of VMware, Annie Tao, co-founder and COO of Horizon Robotics, Thuan Pham, CTO of Uber, and Cecilia Qvist, Global head of markets at Spotify.
Coming Up Next Week: Black Hat celebrates 22 years of its US annual conference when the event gets underway 3 August in Las Vegas. New micro summits here will offer attendees specially curated content in topics like insurance security and bug bounty programs. Traction Conference – created to deliver actionable strategies and tactics for supercharging growth – takes place 7-8 August in Vancouver, drawing a mix of 1,000 founders, product developers/managers, developers, and marketers as well as investors. Last up, DEFCON begins 8 August in Las Vegas, but don’t mistake this for another infosec event. The focus at DEFCON is not the enterprise but rather “the joy of discovery, irreverence, and novel if impractical approaches” that enable the hacker mindset.