Solving Online Events

Benedict Evans: I suspect part of the answer to this is actually that a lot of physical events will come back in some form as we emerge from lockdown. But this also makes me think that there will be new tools with much more radically new approaches, and some new behaviours and habits. Hence, it's often struck me that networking events are pretty inefficient and random. If you're going to spend an hour or two in a room with 50 or 500 people, then you could take that as a purely social occasion and enjoy yourself. But if your purpose is to have professionally useful conversations, then what proportion of the people in the room can you talk to in an hour and how likely is it that they'll be the right ones? Who's there? I sometimes suggest it would be helpful if we all wore banners, as in the image at the top, so that you could look across the room and see who to talk to. (First Tuesday did something like this in 1999, with different coloured badges.)

This might just be that I'm an introvert asking for a machine to manage human connections for me (and I am), but there is also clearly an opportunity to scale the networking that happens around events in ways that don't rely on random chance and alcohol tolerance. A long time ago Twitter took some of that role, and the explosion of online dating also shows how changing the way you think about pools and sample sets changes outcomes. In 2017, 40% of new relationships in the USA started online. Next, before lockdown, you would often have planned to schedule a non-urgent meeting with a partner or client or connection 'when we're in the same city.' That might be at some specific event, but it might also just be for some ad hoc trip -- 'next time I'm in the Bay Area' or 'next time you're in New York.' In January most people would never actually have thought of making a video call, but today every meeting is a video call, so all of those meetings can be a video call too, and can happen this week rather than 'next time I fly to that city' -- or 'at CES/NAB/MIPCOM.' In the last few months video calls have broke through that habit. I wonder what happens if we accelerate all of those meetings in that way. To argue against some of this, James Turrell has said that part of the value of Roden Crater's remoteness is that you have to really care to go there. Getting a plane and a hotel and a ticket, and taking days of time, has some of the same effect for a conference -- it gives a selection filter for people who care. There is value in aggregating people around a professional interest graph, and in doing that in a focused way, perhaps even around a particular time. (There are also, of course, exclusionary effects to this.)

The move online is shaking up the FGC

[rsilvergun]

That's "Fighting Game Community", not Florida Gateway College :).

Most fighting games are from Japanese companies. And, well, their netcode sucks. The problem if fighting game netcode has been solved though with something called "rollback netcode". But the Japanese have been slow to adopt it (to the point where they're fan patches for Street Fighter V to add it to the PC version).

As for why the Japanese don't use rollback netcode, it was developed in America. Some of it might be nationalism, but more

Re:

[The_mad_linguist]

Rollback also requires a heck of a lot more processing power by default; it's a lot of additional complication and effort, not just a turnkey solution.

False Premise

[Retired ICS]

Never used a Video Conference. Never used a Twitter. I charge US$100,000.00 per minute with a 4 hour minimum payable (and cleared) in advance to "Video Conference". I charge US$1,000,000.00 per tweet, available in packages of 100 (only) also payable (and cleared) in advance.

Are you really sure you want me to do these things for you?

The randomness is the good part of conferences

[raymorris]

Scheduled video meetings are fine and dandy for what they are. In-person conferences are good for a different purpose. At lunch time I don't know who three or four of the people at my table will be, so I get to meet people I never would have emailed and set up a meeting with. I get new and unexpected ideas and viewpoints.

At dinner, I might get together with the head of a company I do business with, and he also invited the heads of two *other* companies he knows. So I get to meet people that know the guy I know, without needing to first have a specific a planned purpose for having a meeting with them.

Here's how valuable that can be:
At one conference I went to, a customer of mine paid my way to the conference. The deal he offered was he offered to pay my way and he wanted me to introduce him to some people. Sure enough, within a few hours of arrival I was hanging out with the second-biggest CEO there and he asked if I knew where to get some weed. Yep! The guy who paid my way brought plenty of weed. A quick phone call and the dude who wanted to meet some big whigs was smoking a bowl with the big CEO. :)

Virtual Networking

[eporue]

I really like the solution provided by Remo [remo.co] , that replicates a life event with a floor plan and "tables", so you end you chatting with video with the people on that table only. Then, you can move to another "table" and talk to other people, like in a "normal" conference.