Covid-19 impact: Start-ups take digital route to facilitate seminars, events    

The past few weeks have seen one major event after another get cancelled, from trade shows and sporting events to seminars and conferences.
Image for representation only
Image for representation only

With the battle against the COVID-19 pandemic leading to massive lockdowns across the world, the bustling international event management sector has taken a huge hit.

The past few weeks have seen one major event after another get cancelled, from trade shows and sporting events to seminars and conferences.

This has led to start-ups involved in the facilitation of trade shows, meetings, conferences and summits in the country, and across the world, coming up with new solutions to get things going again: primarily by conducting the events, meetings, and trade shows virtually.

“It is true that adversity is the mother of all innovations," said Atul Todi, CEO and co-founder, 10Times, a platform facilitating conferences, meetings and summits. “New formats are now emerging without being involved physically.

Traditional conferences were the first to test the virtual format. We are seeing meetings going virtual way now. Companies are doing their corporate events online," he added.

With more than 2,233 events either postponed or cancelled on 10Times since February 1, 2020 with the outbreak of the pandemic, Todi says the company was forced to launch solutions that can be availed virtually in the time of crisis.

“We are providing end-to-end solutions to manage virtual events, providing integrations with broadcasting and streaming solutions. If a business wants to postpone and re-schedule its events or conferences to the second half of the year, we are helping with the research too,” he claimed. 

With the launch of new solutions, over 40,000 event planners have begun using the organiser panel and are exploring alternate routes to keep their contacts engaged, he said. Sharing a similar view, Pankaj Gupta, CEO and founder, EnableX, a communication-platform-as-a-service (CPaaS) start-up, said that virtual meetings and conferences have become the need of the hour.

“The COVID-19 pandemic is both a healthcare and an economic challenge. Taking the world by storm, it has had an adverse impact on every business. The government has urged companies to implement work from home policy for their staff. Here virtual meetings and conferences play an important role,” Gupta said.

Virtual solutions send information quickly and cost-effectively to people working remotely, Gupta said, pointing out that businesses must ensure that the solution is engineered for security and scalability with minimum downtime when volume spikes.

“This is important primarily so that productivity isn’t compromised,” he said.“We are offering free use of EnableX video meeting and other collaboration solutions to enterprises in India and across Asia,” Gupta said.
 

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