Online event marketing agency bXb Online is creating a hub for virtual meetings content. The platform will be available to any organization that produces virtual meetings and will serve as a way of distributing content to members of participating organizations as well as a broader audience. The concept has the early support of three meetings industry associations. Read more.

Last week, thousands of meeting professionals took over San Diego to network, feast, boogie, and stuff their minds full of new ideas and strategies to make their meetings and events more effective and productive. Check out this photo gallery of some of the people, places, and events that had the town buzzing.

Many people consider TED, the conference Richard Saul Wurman founded, to be innovative and groundbreaking. But Wurman himself, in a wide-ranging speech at the Professional Convention Management Association’s 2012 Convening Leaders conference, offered a different assessment. “I invented the TED Conference by subtraction,” he said. He just got rid of the things he didn’t like about meetings—like panel discussions, lecterns … even neckties. Here’s more from the iconoclastic conference entrepreneur’s PCMA talk, including news of the new event he’s launching in September.

Ever wonder what the people who didn’t qualify for your incentive trip are thinking? That’s the focus of the first installation of a recent survey by the Site Foundation and the Incentive Travel Council. The research is unique among industry surveys because it focuses on what’s motivational and meaningful from the perspective of 1,003 incentive program participants—including those who didn’t win.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has proposed building a 3.8 million-square-foot convention center in Queens and redeveloping the valuable midtown-Manhattan riverfront site of the 850,000-square-foot Jacob K. Javits Convention Center. Here’s what’s proposed.

The Professional Convention Management Association’s 2012 Convening Leaders conference last week in San Diego was a kaleidoscope of experiences: Colorful, chaotic at times, with networking, learning, and fun so jumbled together that at times it was hard to tell where one left off and another began. I’ve said in the past that PCMA’s annual conference was my pick for the premier meetings industry event; after this year, I find it hard to imagine how anything else could come close. (How’s that for throwing down the gauntlet, MPI?)

Here are a few of the sessions that really stood out:

• If you’ve ever considered holding a product theater on your trade show floor, you’ll find these tips useful.


• In the session on what exhibitors really want, I jotted down the advice of panelists from a couple of little companies named Cisco and Microsoft on how to make them want to exhibit at your show.


• What’s on medical meeting professionals’ minds in these dark days of regulation, smaller budgets, and shrinking grant funding? I got to sit in on a session where some top medical meeting planners shared all.

In the hours leading up to the 2012 Convening Leaders conference in San Diego, the word on the street was that the Professional Convention Management Association had made a gutsy decision to blow up its opening general session and rebuild it from the ground up. The word on the street didn’t lie … More.