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GBAC, IAEE offer infection education for events professionals – REMI Network – Real Estate Management Industry Network
GBAC, IAEE offer infection education for events professionals REMI Network – Real Estate Management Industry Network
Hopin: virtual events start-up struggles as real gatherings return
In November 2020, with the pandemic in full force, British virtual events start-up Hopin declared that a new era of digital gatherings had begun.
Virtual events were “here to stay”, said founder Johnny Boufarhat, as he bragged that there were “more than 15,000 monthly events” available on Hopin’s “Explore” platform. Today, there are fewer than 500 listed.
Boufarhat’s vision made Hopin a pandemic sensation and Europe’s fastest growing start-up ever. Launched in 2019, his company rocketed to fame after Covid hit with a conferencing product that seemed tailor-made for lockdowns.
The 27-year-old raised more than a billion dollars for Hopin in little over a year, reaching a $7.8bn private market valuation that made him Britain’s youngest self-made billionaire on paper.
As top-tier venture capital firms like IVP, Andreessen Horowitz and Tiger Global clamoured to invest, Boufarhat sold $195mn worth of his own shares, according to a Financial Times analysis.
With Covid beginning to recede and publicly traded technology stocks being dumped by investors, Boufarhat now faces a moment of truth as he tries to build a sustainable business that lives up to the lofty expectations it set during the pandemic.
“The landscape will look very different going forward. People can now meet,” noted one events industry executive. They dismissed the pandemic-driven online events boom as “a bit of an artificial bubble”.
The slump in listings on Hopin Explore, envisaged as an “events marketplace” for virtual and hybrid gatherings but considered a “flop” by one former employee, is just one sign that Hopin faces harder days ahead.
In February, the company laid off 12 per cent of its staff, or about 138 people. Hopin has a fully remote workforce and no offices. At the time, Hopin said it was “reorganising to align with our goals for greater efficiency and sustainable growth”
The market price for Hopin shares fell 41 per cent during the first quarter on Zanbato, which operates a private secondary trading market, according to the company’s data. A broader index maintained by Zanbato fell 1 per cent during the same period.
Hopin softened the blow of the redundancies with generous severance packages, but the effort was undermined by comments Boufarhat made at a subsequent company-wide virtual meeting, according to people familiar with the matter.
One person briefed on the comments said Boufarhat had joked about the number of people present, saying: “I guess we got rid of more than I thought.”
Hopin said Boufarhat “immediately regretted his choice of words and apologised to the team”. It said that hybrid events remained a big area of opportunity for the company, adding: “As 79 per cent of event marketers in the EMEA are planning to host hybrid events in 2022, we’re currently executing on our vision to offer the most seamless, hybrid solution on one platform.”
Explore was launched to publicise events that were open for anyone to attend, but much of Hopin’s focus has now shifted to running invitation-only corporate events, such as sales meetings or employee get-togethers. It is also developing a broader range of tools, including for physical events.
The company said Hopin Explore was “a nice tool that we will likely dedicate more time and attention to in the future but it is not currently an area of focus.”
Hopin crossed $100mn in annual revenues last year and has not needed to spend much of the money it has raised, said one person familiar with the company’s finances
Boufarhat, who was born in Australia and later studied at University of Manchester, was a little-known UK-based budding entrepreneur who had raised only a seed round of funding for Hopin when the pandemic struck.
He has said the idea for Hopin originated in a bout of illness in 2015 that left him immunocompromised and at times confined at home. The experience got him thinking about networking online.
Boufarhat’s other ventures have included a curated written content discovery platform called Readory, and an online speed dating company called Quiin. Some of the code for Quiin was wrapped into Hopin, according to people familiar with the matter.
He blogged as well as coded. In one piece posted in 2016, he railed against “globalists”; another was titled “How Hillary Clinton Tried to Rig the Elections”. Hopin noted Boufarhat was 22 at the time, adding: “His views have evolved and he would not publish them today.”
When Covid arrived, Hopin rose as event organisers scrambled to move online to avoid cancelling events outright. Hopin offered more functionality for large gatherings and conferences than companies like Zoom. “The Covid situation helped the company jump really quickly,” said a second former employee.
As customers flocked to the company, so too did major investors and the extraordinary demand allowed Boufarhat to sell $195mn of his own shares, or about a fifth of his stake. He now owns just under 40 per cent of Hopin but retains voting control.
In a podcast last year, Boufarhat was candid about the leverage he has had with Hopin’s backers, saying that while he was always transparent with investors about the performance of the business, he disliked giving them contractual rights to information.
“I don’t want you over looking, over controlling, being able to ask for information whenever you want it, bothering our VP of Finance who is busy with an acquisition and three other things while we’re scaling at super fast speed,” he said on the Twenty Minute VC podcast.
Some of that rapid growth has come through acquisitions, most significantly in December 2020 when the company acquired live streaming site StreamYard for $250mn The move effectively doubled Hopin’s annual recurring revenue to $65mn at the time.
One venture capitalist who passed on investing in Hopin last year said they viewed the valuation as too high at the time because the business had been boosted by the StreamYard deal and Covid. They recalled Boufarhat arguing in response that Hopin was growing faster than its competitors.
Hopin said a StreamYard product for business customers launched last year had attracted customers like Amazon and Microsoft, and was “exceeding its goals”.
“Our investors believe in our vision to bring the world closer together, and we are in a strong financial position,” the company said. “We will continue to invest in our growth and building an impactful company.”
Additional reporting by Max Harlow and Tim Bradshaw
Three times when real events challenged The Oscars
Occasionally, though, world events have cast such a large shadow that they can’t be ignored. And while the Hollywood maxim is that the show must go on, in a few instances real-world concerns have intruded upon the ceremony in a way that forced organizers to alter its schedule, including last year’s delay due to a global pandemic.
The war in Ukraine has dominated news cycles and prompted statements of solidarity from members of the film and TV industry in the run-up to the Oscars. Through the years, politics and the Oscars have gone hand in hand, and war has frequently been part of the backdrop, from World War II — when the actual statuettes were made of plaster due to metal shortages — to Vietnam, a tumultuous period that on various occasions spilled into the broadcast.
Still, during the televised era three events particularly stand out: The assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, the assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan in 1981, and the onset of the Iraq war in 2003.
In the first two instances, the awards were postponed briefly, and there was discussion of doing so in 2003. (The Oscars were delayed one other time because of flooding in 1938.)
A look back at each of those events, and the effect they had on the ceremony.
1968: The King assassination
The killing of the civil-rights icon on April 4 came days before the ceremony, with several of those slated to perform or appear — including Sidney Poitier, Louis Armstrong and Diahann Carroll — planning to attend King’s funeral on April 9, the day after the broadcast. (Poitier starred in two of that year’s best-picture nominees, “In the Heat of the Night” and “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.”)
Because there was no way for them to make it there in time, the Academy pushed back the ceremony from April 8 to April 10 and canceled its Governors Ball. The organization’s then-president, Gregory Peck, began the telecast by paying tribute to King.
1981: Reagan is shot
Reagan was actually scheduled to open the ceremony with a segment taped in the White House about the worldwide reach of the Oscars and movies. Many of those attending the awards were particularly shaken, having known Reagan from his time as an actor and president of the Screen Actors Guild.
Producers scrambled and ultimately opted to postpone the awards by one day (Johnny Carson was that year’s host), with veteran writer Buzz Kohan, who worked on the show, recalling 25 years later to the Hollywood Reporter, “Oddly enough, it was Reagan himself who set the tone by saying to the doctors in the operating room, ‘Please tell me you’re all Republican.’ We figured if the man who was shot can make a joke about it, he had given us permission to do the same.”
“That old adage ‘The show must go on’ seemed relatively unimportant,” Carson said in opening the telecast, saying that the president was in “excellent condition” and that it was his “expressed wishes” that the producers use his taped introduction, which they did.
“Film is forever,” Reagan said, echoing the show’s theme that year, adding to laughs, “I’ve been trapped in some film forever myself.”
2003: The Iraq invasion
The US invaded Iraq days before the broadcast, fueling discussion about whether the awards should be postponed. On the eve of the awards, Oscar producer Gil Cates told the Los Angeles Times, “Of the 11 shows I’ve produced, it’s the most difficult I’ve done.”
The Times described the days leading up to the awards as “one of the strangest and most stressful weeks in Oscar history.” The show proceeded, but the red carpet was eliminated along with the temporary bleachers for fans to watch the star arrivals.
Additional controversy occurred during the show when Michael Moore accepted his best documentary Oscar for “Bowling for Columbine.” Moore denounced the war — calling President George W. Bush “a fictitious president,” and saying, “Shame on you, Mr. Bush,” which triggered boos from the crowd and resulted in the filmmaker being hurried off the stage.
Fifteen years later, receiving a lifetime achievement honor at the Critics’ Choice Documentary Awards, Moore took the opportunity to finish his speech, which closed with him encouraging people to “pick up a camera and fight the power, make your voice heard and stop this senseless war.”
7 Times Downton Abbey Depicted Real Historical Events
Years after its final episode, Downton Abbey continues to captivate TV fans and history buffs alike for its panoramic depiction of early twentieth-century England. The period drama remains the most popular series in the history of British television, with more than 120 million viewers worldwide. The show spawned a movie in 2019, which grossed nearly $200 million, and a follow-up film is slated for release in US theaters in May of 2022.
Downton Abbey follows the lives of the aristocratic Crawley family and the servants at their Yorkshire estate from 1912 to 1925. Although many of the show’s events are fabricated, the series often aims to depict a realistic portrayal of the dawning of the modern era. In doing so, it touches on some of the most famous moments in twentieth-century history.
7 The Sinking of the Titanic
The pilot episode of Downton Abbey begins with the delivery of a telegram and with it the news that the world’s largest ship, the RMS Titanic, has sunk. Both the upstairs and downstairs characters respond with shock and grief to the loss of more than 1,500 lives in one of the worst disasters in maritime history.
Since the luxury liner carried some of the wealthiest people in the world (a first-class ticket cost up to $2,560 — roughly $72,000 in 2022), the disaster greatly affected the British aristocracy, including the Crawley family. James Crawley, Lord Grantham’s (Hugh Bonneville) cousin and heir to the entire Downton Abbey estate, was onboard the liner. The question of who will inherit Downton Abbey propels the show’s first season.
6 World War One
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The first season of Downton Abbey starts with a telegram delivering history-shattering news, and it ends similarly. Rumors of a looming war in Europe begin to stir among the characters after Archduke Franz Ferdinand is assassinated. Lord Grantham receives a hand-delivered telegram announcing that Great Britain has declared war on Germany at a garden party. The date is August 4, 1914.
Season 2 begins with a title card reading “The Somme, 1916.” The Somme was one of the most significant battles in WWI — on that day alone, more than one million troops were killed, including nearly 125,000 British men. Matthew Crawley is depicted fighting on the Western Front. Many British aristocrats served during the war, including future King Edward VIII. Back at the Abbey, altruistic Lady Sybil (Jessica Brown Findlay) convinces Robert (Hugh Bonneville) and Cora (Elizabeth McGovern) to turn the estate into a convalescent home. During WWI, many country houses did open their doors to wounded soldiers.
5 The Spanish Flu
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The penultimate episode of Downton’s second season centers around the 1918-19 Spanish Flu pandemic, which infected more than 500 million people (one-third of the world’s population at the time) and took more than 50 million lives. It’s no stretch, then, that several of the characters become gravely ill, including the Crawley matriarch Cora and Matthew’s fiance, Lavinia Swire (Zoe Boyle).
Cora is at death’s door, but Lavinia’s illness seems minor, and she is calm and coherent as she discusses her future with Matthew. In a matter of hours, Cora recovers, but Lavinia takes a turn for the worse and succumbs to the disease. The show accurately depicts the surprising speed with which the Spanish Flu claimed its victims. It also makes sense that Cora survived the virus while Lavinia didn’t. Mortality was highest in healthy young people, with the median age of death being in the mid-twenties.
4 Married Love by Marie Stopes
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Marie Stopes and her bestselling book Married Love are mentioned several times throughout the series, but it is never made explicit who exactly Stopes is and why she matters to the women of Downton. Married Love is first mentioned in season 4, episode 4, when Mrs. Hughes (Elsie Carson) says that Edna Braithwaite (Myanna Burring) cannot be pregnant because she owns a copy of the book. It is brought up again in season 5, when Lady Mary (Michelle Dockery) asks her maid Anna (Joanne Froggat), to use the book to help her prevent an “unwanted epilogue” from her affair with Lord Gillingham (Tom Cullen).
It doesn’t take too many detective skills to determine that Married Love pertains to contraception. Marie Stopes (1880 – 1958) was a campaigner for women’s rights who founded the first birth control clinic in Britain. Married Love, which she published in 1918, was one of the first books to discuss family planning openly. Although Lady Mary gives Anna a copy of the book to Anna in order for her to procure birth control, this is anachronistic. It wasn’t until Stopes’ second book, Wise Parenthood (1922), she openly discussed contraception methods, including cervical caps — presumably the device that Anna buys for Lady Mary.
3 The Teapot Dome Scandal
Season 4, Episode 7 begins with news that Cora’s playboy brother, Harold (Paul Giamatti), has gotten himself in hot water and wants Robert to travel to America to help bail him out. Few details of the incident are given, apart from Cora saying it involves “a Senator Fall.”
The affair in question is the Teapot Dome Scandal, which took place from 1921 to 1923. The Secretary of the Interior, Albert Bacon Fall, was bribed into leasing Navy oil reserves at Teapot Dome, Wyoming, to private oil companies. This led to Senate investigations, criminal convictions, and Fall’s eventual imprisonment. The Teapot Dome Scandal is considered one of the most sensational scandals in the history of American political scandals, so it’s no wonder why Downton Abbey would include it in the show.
2 The Beer Hall Putsch
The disappearance of Edith’s (Laura Carmichael) beau, Michael Gregson (Charles Edwards), is one of the most heart-breaking plotlines of the series. After traveling to Germany as part of a plan to Marry Edith, Gregson vanishes into thin air. Eventually, Edith receives news via Robert that he was involved in an altercation with “a group of thugs … who wear brown shirts and go around bullying people.” In season 5, episode 6, a telegram arrives at the Abbey, revealing Gregson’s fate.
The “Brownshirts,” as they are known colloquially, are Sturmabteilung — the first Nazis. The event that killed Gregson is known as the Beer Hall Putsch. On November 8, 1923, Hitler and a group of Brownshirts forced their way into a political meeting at a beer hall in Munich, attempting to stage a coup. Although the coup failed, 16 people were killed, and Hitler, who was mostly unknown at the time, made front-page headlines. Hitler went to prison, but the press he received from the Beer Hall Putsch helped him gain power upon his release.
1 The King’s First Speech on the Radio
Throughout Downton Abbey, characters are mystified by the advent of technologies that we now take for granted — the telephone, refrigerator, and hairdryer, to name a few. But perhaps the most captivating invention of all comes in the form of the radio, which the curmudgeonly Robert refuses to buy: “That people should waste hours huddled around a wooden book while listening to someone talking at them, burbling inanities from somewhere else… It’s a fad. It won’t last!”
Ultimately, Robert’s love of the monarchy makes him cave when he learns that King George V will be making a broadcast. The whole family and staff gather around a rented radio to listen to the king’s speech. The king did make his first radio broadcast on April 23, 1924, to open the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley. Around 10 million people tuned in to hear the king’s voice for the very first time.
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Travis Scott Announces Project HEAL To Help Provide ‘Real Solutions’ In Making Events The ‘Safest Spaces They Can Be’
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Travis Scott has announced a new organization to “make all events the safest spaces they can possibly be.”
In the aftermath of the Astroworld tragedy in 2021 which killed 10 people as a crowd crush occurred, the rapper reflected on taking “actionable change.”
“Over the past few months I’ve been taking the time and space to grieve, reflect and do my part to heal my community. Most importantly, I want to use my resources and platform moving forward towards actionable change. This will be a lifelong journey for me and my family,” Scott wrote on Instagram.
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Scott said he wants to be a “leader in my community” as it is “easy for corporations and institutions to stay in the shadows.”
“My team and I created Project HEAL to take much needed action towards supporting real solutions that make all events the safest spaces they can possibly be. I will always honour the victims of the Astroworld tragedy who remain in my heart forever,” he wrote.
Scott added, “Giving back and creating opportunities for the youth is something I’ve always done and will continue to do as long as I have the chance. This program will be a catalyst to real change and I can’t wait to introduce the rest of the technology and ideas we’ve been working on.”
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The official description of Project HEAL is a “multi-tier initiative dedicated to addressing challenges facing today’s youth, especially those from marginalized and at-risk communities.”
Project HEAL and the Cactus Jack Foundation will provide free mental health resources, scholarships and the “first-ever, tech-driven solution for event safety.”
According to TMZ, Scott is donating $5 million to the causes.
Connecting stories to real events helps audience to lean forward: ‘Upload’ creator Greg Daniels
Mumbai, Mar 7 (PTI) It is more interesting to thread an original needle with comic stories than preach people about real-life problems, says award-winning American writer Greg Daniels.
The man behind shows such as the American version of “The Office”, “Parks and Recreation” and “Upload”, Daniels credits his writing experience of working in popular animated sitcoms “The Simpsons” and “King of the Hill” for sharpening his satire skills.
The Emmy Award winner, who started his career in sketch comedy with a show called “Not Necessarily the News”, a remake of “Not the Nine O’Clock News”, in the late 1980s, got his next job at late night sketch show “Saturday Night Live” in the next decade.
“I have worked on ‘The Simpsons’, which was full of satire writers with similar backgrounds and was intentionally satiric of American culture. By the time I was creating and running ‘King of the Hill’, I felt that connecting television stories to real events and problems in society that people can relate to causes the audience to lean forward, wondering what you are going to say about society. It gives more interest to the comic stories if you can thread an original needle and not lecture people,” Daniels told PTI in a Zoom interview.
The 56-year-old writer-filmmaker is looking forward to the premiere of the sophomore season of his Amazon Prime Video sitcom “Upload”, featuring Robbie Amell and Andy Allo.
The series takes place in the near future, where people who are near death can be “uploaded” into a virtual afterlife called Lakeview of their choice.
The new chapter, which is set in the year 2034, pokes fun at real-life technology advancements.
“There is a lot of anxiety in contemplating what could happen in the future. When you think about what’s happening now in the world of tech and how big companies are using it to surveil people and there are a lot of changes that are happening in the society. Some of them will be great, some are not great. The point about the show is to look at them, laugh about them rather than to preview them and think about them in a fun way,” he added.
The sci-fi comedy series is set in a technologically advanced future where hologram phones, 3D food printers and automated grocery stores are the norm. Most uniquely, humans can choose to be “uploaded” into a virtual afterlife.
In season two, Nathan (Amell) is at a crossroads in his after life, his girlfriend Ingrid (Allegra Edwards) has unexpectedly arrived to Lakeview hoping to strengthen their relationship, but his heart still secretly yearns for his customer service angel Nora (Allo). Meanwhile Nora is off the grid and involved with the anti-tech rebel group “The Ludds”.
According to the makers, the upcoming season is packed with new near-future concepts, including Lakeview’s newest in-app digital baby programme called, “prototykes,” and other satirical glimpses of the technological advances and headaches to come.
Amell, known for shows like “The Flash” and film “The Duff”, said he views the progression in the field of technology positively.
“A lot of things in the show are subjective and a lot of people will love or hate them and how technology works in our lives today. There is some anxiety about the world we live in and the metaverse and how much people have been online for the last two years. As somebody who had a baby at the beginning of COVID-19, if there was a digital afterlife, I would probably look at it in a more positive way than negative way,” he added.
There are both pros and cons of having the latest technology, asserted Allo.
“Technology allows us to access a lot of different things at our fingertips and connect with each other but there is also a dependence on it where we can become disconnected from each other.
“It is (about) a fine balance of relying on it, using it, having the ease of connecting with each other on FaceTime or doing Zoom interviews which is amazing but also having that balance of taking a step back and enjoying human connection in person and not letting go of that part of humanity,” Allo, whose acting credits include “Pitch Perfect 3”, said.
The seven-episode series is executive-produced by Daniels and his producing partner Howard Klein. “Upload” premieres on March 11 on Prime Video. PTI KKP RDS RDS BK BK
This report is auto-generated from PTI news service. ThePrint holds no responsibility for its content.
