Over 4,000 meeting professionals flocked to Vancouver Convention Center Jan. 10–13 for PCMA Convening Leaders, where meeting professionals of every caliber came together to learn about and discuss the newest revelations in meetings technology, event marketing, data analytics and other trends.
Tech Central, a multifunctional technology hub managed by PCMA in partnership with Dahlia+, aimed to solve technology issues and familiarize event professionals with everyday tools that can make meeting planning more efficient, data-driven and most importantly, fun.
“Our mission is to create these tech playgrounds for all conferences and meetings, bringing tech education to any meeting,” says Dahlia El Gazzar, tech evangelist and founder of Dahlia+.
Tech Central was comprised of short tutorials, longer in-depth sessions and topic-specific seminars, in addition to the DigiTech Bar, a table top that displayed gadgets for attendees to check out between sessions. Another aspect of Tech Central was the Demo Zone, which showcased more than 30 innovative tech companies’ latest solutions.
“Tech clinics are deep dive sessions, and the hot topics [at PCMA] were project management, note-taking solutions and content marketing,” El Gazzar says. Tech Central hosted a showdown that compared two note-taking apps to determine which was best for meeting planners.
The #askusanything session allowed attendees to come with their questions and ask a panel of event tech experts anything they wanted. “It was a live session where the panelists showed the solutions via browser and not a presentation deck,” El Gazzar says.
The newest addition to Tech Central—which proved to be a huge hit at the conference—was LinkedIn Corner, which allowed attendees to bring their resumes to the booth and receive a LinkedIn profile makeover from career experts.
