Ultimate Recession (Proof) Company - Virtual Events...

In a recent blog post by John Furrier, he summed up an interesting conversation with ON24 CEO Sharat Sharan. "Trade shows and conference are the areas that companies cut during a recession and having a viable (virtual) platform like ON24 makes sense. To me the big upshot is the trend in social networks where trust and communications are now being established. This will lead to a viable model for virtual collaboration or better yet virtual events. Although the product isn’t what I had hoped, it delivers the basics and it is state of the art."

Nothing new here really, most of the VE platforms and service providers are doing well but what he mentioned later--"(the) challenge is to make the user experience truly social instead of some vendor speak “spam party" is very interesting and gets to the question of how vendors can really differentiate themselves from one another on the virtual event platforms and create a unique, personal experience that helps to build the relationship and not treat attendees as simply "leads to be captured".

The first "sound bit" comment John mentioned was that Sharat commented "Second Life is inappropriate for business." That comment really intrigued us so before we talk with Sharat, we'll be talking with some folks whose business is doing B2B events using SL as a platform. Look for the story on the Virtualis Center in the Virtual Edge Blog.