CES was more online than off this year, as nearly 200,000 people dwindled down to 45,000 in the physical world. One CEO told me he spent most of his time in a hotel suite doing Zoom calls. Exuberant dinner parties gave way to room service hamburgers. To be sure, there are many bright spots in this dismal constellation of events. But the trend of atoms becoming bits continues.
Channel 1 of CES 2022, powered by Summit Engine
For just the 6th time in the last 35 years, I stayed home during CES, as did most of my friends and colleagues. I tried to keep up using both the CES app and web site, which are supplied by Web Summit, a company which stages the eponymous tech conferences. Paddy Cosgrove, the co-founder and CEO of Web Summit, says he created Summit Engine for his own business, a project he started ten years ago. There are now more than fifty engineers working on the project. I strongly recommend you take a look at this product. It’s the first thing CES has to show you, and that says something right there. Like all great technology, I’ll bet you didn’t even notice it.
Following the outbreak of Covid-19, Web Summit moved all of its events onto its proprietary online software platform, which has been developed in-house for over a decade. In December, 2020, 104,000 people attended Web Summit online, so the company felt ready to support CES, the world’s largest technology event.
Co-founder and CEO of Web Summit, Paddy Cosgrove, using the app's Mingle feature.
Summit Engine has several notable features. To recreate the serendipity of a real world event, Summit Engine has a Mingle feature, which allows attendees to network in a chat roulette-style video conference. Mingle places attendees in a new room with someone chosen through Summit Engine’s matching algorithm every three minutes. I spun through five interesting, articulate executives and entrepreneurs in the blink of an eye. People I could be friends with. This is the kind of serendipity people travel around the world for.
The app has an exceptionally good and useful searchable directory, which includes both individuals and companies. I found it interesting that the CES app is listed under “social media” in the iOS app store. It made me wonder if these large scale conferences that encompass everything will develop into persistent communities in the metaverse.
The CES app's scheduling tool.
CES is the second global organization to license Summit Engine, after the United Nations hosted a UN Development Programme event on the platform in March 2021. Summit Engine was used at Web Summit’s first in-person event in two years, in Lisbon November 1-4, 2021.
“We’re delighted to be chosen by CTA as their digital platform provider for CES, and we understand what large-scale, complex events like these demand,” said Paddy Cosgrave, co-founder and CEO at Web Summit. “We’ve been quietly building our software, Summit Engine, for nearly a decade to augment our physical events, so moving them fully online during the pandemic was easy for us. Now we can use this software to run every element of an event, whether it’s for 100 or 100,000 people, in-person, online or both.” Jean Foster, senior vice president of marketing and communications for CES said. “Working with Web Summit allows CES to, once again, reimagine how we convene and collaborate as an industry.”
Summit Engine has plenty of competition, notably Hopin, which we used at the VRARA Global Summit in 2021. The private company’s most recent round of funding set a valuation of $7.95 billion. According to Marketwatch, the online conferencing category is estimated to be worth US$ 4.21 billion, doubling by 2027. Factors such globalization and mass adoption of remote work will drive market expansion.
