VIRTUAL EVENTS GROUP
Hot List
OCTOBER 2021
What's Hot in Platforms and Tools
Event Platforms
If you’re looking for a shortcut to platform selection, here’s a place to start. The VEG Hot List contains those platforms that we feel excel at a specific mission, arranged in alphabetical order. This is based on an unscientific amalgam of personal experience, published reviews, and feedback from end users like you. The whole online platform landscape is changing rapidly, which is why we frequently update this list by adding and removing candidates, so be sure to check back frequently as you search for the best solution for your events.
Bizzabo is the Swiss Army knife of event platforms. It has plenty of features to measure, manage, and scale events, but its power lies in its ability to integrate with more than 1,900 other apps and services to create the ideal platform for your event. And they offer complete production services themselves from design to implementation.
One of early video conferencing platforms, BlueJeans was acquired by Verizon in 2020. The company has expanded into telehealth services. It has also partnered with MootUp to create immersive, metaverse environments for meetings, and Poly (formerly Plantronics and Polycom) for audio and video hardware.
Thinking BIG? You might want to think about BuzzCast. It is designed to scale, handling multi-day, multi-track events for hundreds of thousands of attendees, while providing excellent security and reliability. And it has features that encourage participant engagement including individual and group networking opportunities.
HopIn
Relative newcomer (founded in 2019) recently closed a $400m financing round for a $5.7B valuation. The company has been on a buying spree, purchasing Streamyard, Streamable, and Jamm.
Hubilo provides one-stop shopping for virtual events, starting with registrations right through to analytics that show participant engagement in detail. It also provides features to encourage participant interaction, such as breakout rooms, quizzes, polls, and chats.
ExpoPlatform
This full-featured platform has hosted events serving nearly a half million participants so far. Its Digital Transformation World Series was recently recognized as the “Best Digital Conference” at the inaugural Digital Events Awards in March 2021.
From a company that also offers a wide range of enterprise-level services, the Notified virtual events platform offers all the features required for large-scale conferences and exhibitions. Among its clients is the Red Hat Summit that drew 82,000 registrations and more than 56,000 attendees.
This platform does it all and has done it for just about everybody. A recent agreement with Informa will use Swapcard for major exhibitions, trade shows, and other events worldwide. This is in addition to major wins for SXSW 2021 and the IMEX America digital experience running from May to September 2021.
vFairs specializes in delivering online job fairs, trade shows and conferences. Users can provide fully branded experiences with custom event landing pages, registration forms, virtual booth templates, webinars, live webinars, digital content management, networking tools Q&As and polls. The company recently added integration with HubSpot for CRM and Cvent for registration support.
Virbela
Not just for conferences and trade shows, the virtual worlds can be used for education and training, as well as always-on office spaces where remote workers can interact and collaborate.
Zoom has taken advantage of the big boost it received as a result of the pandemic and continues to grow its services. No longer just a video meeting and webinar platform, it is expanding by acquiring Five9, a cloud contact center, and by adding video and phone conferencing features for enterprise customers. And it has added its own Events platform with hubs, ticketing, and registration features.
Hot VEG Tools
These days, we are all struggling with TL;DW (Too Long; Didn’t Watch). We are presented with hours of relevant video content daily, but where do you get the time to watch it all? CLIPr uses AI to reach inside video libraries to extract that content that is most important to you. You can then share these extracts with others. From recaps, to searchable recordings, to complete transcripts, you can get at the content you need faster and more efficiently.
Makes video editing as simple as editing a transcript. It automatically creates a speech-to-text transcript, and then if you delete a section of text, the video is cut to match.
This virtual watercooler app makes it easier to make connections with coworkers and others in a virtual space.
A quick and easy way to set up ticket and merch sales for your event; you can even collect donations.
This service lets you create QR codes for print and online use – including email – to allow people to access your content for download using their smartphone.
VRJAM is a set of tools to allow creators to develop their own animated content and immersive interactive graphics. Currently in beta, it supports the Oculus Quest 2 and Rift S on a Windows PC.