I’ve been doing a lot of work with the IBTM team at Reed Exhibitions. In total the team’s 6 annual events bring together 5,000 suppliers from 100 countries, 17,000 meeting planners who collectively organise 100,000+ pre-scheduled on-site appointments with each other.
My first direct involvement with the team was speaking at their EIBTM (“European Incentive and Business Travel Meetings”) event in Barcelona late last year. I delivered one of the keynotes for their CEO Summit and had a fantastic time. I was talking about the growth of mobile and the implications (as I saw them) for this particular segment of the travel industry. The resulting discussion with the 100+ CEOs in attendance was highly stimulating.
Since then I’ve participated at GIBTM (in Abu Dhabi), AIBTM (in Baltimore, just recently) and in September I’ll be speaking in Beijing at their CIBTM event.
But at the end of the month I’m rather excited to head out to Eastern Europe to Gdansk (Poland) and then Belgrade (Serbia) to participate in the EIBTM Future of Meetings series. I’m one of an array of speakers who’ll be discussing the future technology implications on the business meetings industry. You can find out more about the Belgrade event here: http://www.inside2012.eu/programme/
(For the geeks reading, I’ll be including some (high level) references to a lot of Qualcomm’s technology, in particular their AllJoyn peer-to-peer stuff, which has the potential to seriously complicate matters for meetings organisers in a few years.)
I’ll be in both cities for a few days each during the last week of August so if you’ve any recommendations for people or companies I should be meeting and profiling here on Mobile Industry Review, please drop me a note! I’m ewan@mobileindustryreview.com.
