TECH SPEC
O ne of the oddities of the meetings business is that so many people seem willing to believe that this or that technology is new. Most of Just imagine Event tech veteran Ken Clayton on why you can’t rely on tech alone to save your events
fortune to hire, weighed a ton, literally, and we had to leave its keeper on his own overnight to set it up.
the tech that’s available today has been around for years. Perhaps the secret is that many of the people in the business today weren’t even born when the tech was rst introduced. Take virtual meetings as an example. e past year has brought them to the fore but evangelists have been claiming that they’re sounding the death-knell of face-to-face meetings since at least the mid-nineties. en we have hybrid events. Back in 2014 they were being described as an important part of the meetings industry’s future, but even then they weren’t new. e rst hybrid event that I organised was in 1980. e one thing that can be said about the tech is that it’s getting easier to use and cheaper to acquire. Data projection is a prime example: when I rst used a data projector in a show in 1977 (although we thought of them as video projectors at that time) it cost a small
Today you can buy kit to do the same job for less than it cost to hire the Eidophor. It can be carried into a meeting, switched on and be ready to go in minutes. In reality there is nothing that’s truly new in meetings industry tech. It’s a bit like the motor industry. When I started driving in the 1960s pretty much anybody could maintain a car. Today’s cars are a di erent matter but the basic principles of the internal combustion engineare the same. As with cars, so with meetings tech: pretty much all of it has been around for decades. What has changed is the sophistication of the tech. So hybrid events, for example, are easier to organise because
It’s perfectly possible to produce a turkey using themost sophisticated tech available.”
56 MAY 2021 mitmagazine.co.uk
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