Skift MeetingsIQ: Glasgow Trends, St. Louis and Baltimore CEOs, Microsoft HoloLens

The Skift MeetingsIQ newsletter defines the future of meetings and events with an emphasis on disruptive strategies that improve knowledge sharing.

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The Future of Meetings

How Glasgow is Attracting Record Convention Business: Glasgow Convention Bureau’s number one meetings development strategy for 2016 is working more closely with local industry ambassadors, who liaise with visiting meeting planners interested in specific business sectors.

In 2015, over 50% of the contracted conference business in Glasgow was sourced with the assistance of local experts, who now total more than 1,700 business and academic leaders. That’s a big jump over 2014 when 35% of conferences were secured with the help of ambassadors. Read more at Skift

Social Quote of the Day

“23 Leading Events Professionals Reveal The Most Important Ingredient Going Into a Successful Event pcma.co/1UAjTsp” — @pcmahq on Twitter

Destinations

St. Louis and Baltimore Tourism CEOs on How Their Cities Responded to Riots: Explore St. Louis and Visit Baltimore helped stabilize their communities following the social unrest in Ferguson and West Baltimore by being trusted sources for accurate information amid all of the confusion.

Over the long term, the tourism bureaus are participating in collaborative civic platforms designed to build stronger communities by connecting people across all economic classes. Potentially, especially in St. Louis, those community portals could become models for other cities with disadvantaged neighborhoods across America. Read more at Skift

DMAI Publishes its Top 10 Trending Tourism Bureau Stories in 2015: Destination Marketing Association International posted its 10 “most trending” stories this year about the future of convention and visitors bureaus. Six of them are Skift stories that illustrate how smart destination organizations are engaging customers today. Read more at DMAI

What A CVB Alliance Really Means For Meeting Planners: According to BestCities, a global alliance of 12 convention bureaus, the best bureaus that possess the skills to elevate the meeting planning process also tend to be able to elevate the impact of the conferences and conventions they host. Read more at PCMA

The Future of Smart Cities, Business Events and the Sharing Economy: Lots of mind-bending insight here into how the mashup of future urban connectivity technologies will impact events and the destination user experience. Read more at Catapult Future Cities

Event Trends

Microsoft’s New HoloLens Tech is the Future of Augmented Reality: Microsoft is positioning its new HoloLens headset as the next generation of wearable augmented reality, which it’s calling “Mixed Reality.” You’ve seen something like this conceptualized before in the movies, many of them with Tom Cruise or Iron Man. Read more at Skift

Designing Convening Leaders 2016: PCMA’s planner-in-chief Kelly Peacy offers a detailed guide about what to expect at this year’s annual meeting in Vancouver in January, and the motivations that informed its meeting design. Read more at Convene

German Convention Bureau Forecasts Future Meeting Tech: In a new report from Germany, the future of meetings includes a lot of ambitious tech innovations ranging from physical telepresence to Wi-Fi balloons. Read more at Successful Meetings

Manchester: European City of Science: The EuroScience Open Forum 2016 conference in Manchester in July 2016 will include discussions on artificial intelligence and the future interface of humans and machines. Read more at Manchester City Region Magazine

BizBash’s 25 Most Popular Stories of 2015: Events like TED in Vancouver, South by Southwest in Austin, and Coachella in an alternate universe headline some of BizBash’s top stories this year. Read more at BizBash

2016 Preview: Event Tech Trends for the Coming Year: Facial and gesture tracking, expanded use of virtual reality, and a focus on creating frictionless user experiences are some of the topics that will impact events next year. Read more at BizBash

Video: Forget Wi-Fi. Meet The New Li-Fi Internet: What if we could use existing technologies to provide Internet access to the more than four billion people living in places where the infrastructure can’t support it? Watch at TED Talks

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Skift MeetingsIQ is curated by Skift senior editor Greg Oates [go@skift.com]. The newsletter is emailed every Wednesday.

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