While Most associate summer with relaxing days at the beach or an opportunity to cash in some well-earned vacation days, we here at Meetings Focus are hardly living a life of leisure as the "dog days" settle in on the calendar.
First off, we're busy at work putting out the annual Meetings Focus Guide—look for it riding along with your September issue—and our various summer regional supplements, covering Hawaii, Texas and California.
The travel schedule seems to pick up around this time of year, too, with an alphabet soup of industry associations—MPI, AIBTM, DMAI, HSMAI and ASAE—holding major events—along with our roster of Meetings Focus Live! hosted-buyer educational programs.
Heck, I even just got off a plane from South Korea a little over a week before writing this.
Getting back to Meetings Focus Live!, we've got some great shows left on the calendar: Portland, Ore., Aug. 18-20 at the Hilton Portland; Miramar Beach, Fla., Sept. 15-17 at the Sandestin Resort; Hershey, Pa., Oct. 6-8 at the Hershey Lodge; and the Island of Hawaii, Nov. 3-6 at the Hilton Waikoloa Village.
I'm hoping to attend the final two, and maybe spend some of those vacation days mentioned at the beginning of this column!
New Columnist Alert!
I'm very happy to announce that we've added meetings technology guru/expert/sage/wizard Corbin Ball to our roster of venerable columnists.
Corbin will be contributing "Talking Tech" columns roughly every quarter. Personally, I think he nailed his first one, which delivers some key information about emerging meetings industry technology tools in a concise, user-friendly format.
Also, at press time we were gearing up for a trip to Vegas for MPI WEC to shoot a roundtable discussion with Corbin and fellow "techspert" James Spellos, which is set to be broadcast July 24. If you missed it, you can still watch the archived version of this Meetings Focus On Location broadcast to discover some of the top tech tools that boost the results of your planning.
Hope to see you somewhere on the meetings trail this summer!
