Power

What happens when coronavirus cancels all the tech conferences?

There's been a wave of cancellations, and more are probably on the way.

Attendees at Facebook F8

Facebook's F8 conference was one of many canceled in the last day over coronavirus fears.

Photo: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Your backup plan is surely in effect by now. Because coronavirus is coming for tech conferences left and right. Hopefully the plane tickets were refundable.

In the last day alone we lost F8, the Google News Initiative Global Summit, as well as an internal Google marketing conference, IDC's Directions and Shopify Unite. The Game Developers Conference next month seems bound to follow, as Facebook, Microsoft, Sony and several other gaming-related companies have already pulled out. (Update at 4:15 p.m.:Follow it did. OnFriday afternoon, the organizers of GDC announced that the conference is officially postponed.)

Get what matters in tech, in your inbox every morning. Sign up for Source Code.

Those cancellations are being felt acutely by conference attendees, especially developers who were betting on F8 for meetings with Facebook employees to score additional funding for their projects.

"Without F8, you might not have another opportunity like this — another six to eight months at least," said Tima Anoshechkin, CEO and co-founder of the Sydney, Australia-based VR startup Alta VR, which is developing a VR title for multiple platforms.

Doesn't it feel inevitable? If coronavirus continues to spread, it seems almost certain that many if not most of the major upcoming tech conferences this spring will be canceled.

When Mobile World Congress was canceled last month, it felt like a fluke — like things would surely get better. But as we head out of winter into the spring events season, concerns that COVID-19 could turn into a pandemic have only increased. More and more event organizers are taking the precaution of canceling their events for the safety of attendees.

Anoshechkin, who had planned on flying in for F8, is now nervous as he looks toward GDC, the most important conference of the year for his startup of 12 employees. Although GDC said in a statement published on its website on Friday that the show would go on, organizers added they were "closely monitoring the COVID-19 (coronavirus) situation" and would update their "assessment if the situation changes."

Still, Anoshechkin says at least 30% of his meetings at GDC have been canceled already, including funding meetings that could have helped Alta VR raise money for its crucial seed round.

Related:

"Everybody who's everybody has pulled out [from GDC]," Anoshechkin said. "That has a massive impact on a company like ours if you can't pitch people."

So what happens when your tech conference gets canceled?

Facebook told Protocol it is still exploring ways to organize an "F8-inspired experience," although it's unclear what that experience could look like.

A source at a major tech company told Protocol that virtual conferences were the most obvious solution to all these conference cancellations. Likewise, several tech conference attendees we spoke to said they expected to see a sharp uptick in virtual conferences this year as more conferences cancel. Yes, conference-goers will lose out on some of the magic of being on the floor, but in the short term, it solves the real challenge for tech companies.

"My hope is that is that these cancellations really light the fire under this idea of virtual conferences and that Facebook puts some money behind that, either by buying an interest in somebody who's working on that type of project or developing that project themselves," said John Westra, virtual innovation officer for Vuturus, an AR and VR firm with offices in Colorado and Michigan. He said he had planned on attending F8. "Sure, there's less serendipity involved, but virtual conferences would also allow more people to attend, particularly people in the industry from all over the world for whom flying to the San Francisco Bay Area is not in their budget."

Many of the biggest and most well-known conferences from Google, Microsoft and Apple have yet to announce their fates, which says nothing of the dozens of smaller conferences and events attended by thousands of people.

In an emailed statement, Sarah Porter, CEO of InspiredMinds, which produces tech events including the World Summit AI next month, said, "I have been in the tech events industry for almost 30 years. In my experience, the events industry are well equipped to deal with situations like this." She added, "Of course, as [organizers] we are evaluating the risk on a daily basis based on outbreaks per region, geography of attendees and so on. However, the risk to the general public remains low in most areas. Those most at risk are those who are elderly or already ill; the profile of the attendees to World Summit AI are not within this category"

While Google has canceled a few events, it hasn't made a call on its important Google I/O and Google Cloud Next events. It plans on monitoring developments around COVID-19, according to a spokesperson. News broke on Friday that a Google employee was officially diagnosed with COVID-19, so odds feel like they're tipping toward Google I/O not going on as planned — at least in its current form.

Get in touch with us: Share information securely with Protocol via encrypted Signal or WhatsApp message, at 415-214-4715 or through our anonymous SecureDrop.

That would be a big disappointment for Joshua Ostrom, a Mishawaka, Indiana-based senior software engineer for Simpli.fi, a company focused on localized digital advertising. Ostrom, who won an internal company raffle for one of two Google I/O tickets, looks to the conference as a way to network with some of the best engineering talent in the world.

"It's really just a chance to be around a lot of bright minds," said Westra, whose wife simply refers to Google I/O as "nerdchella." "It makes you excited about your career field and makes it fun to be a programmer."

Fintech

Judge Zia Faruqui is trying to teach you crypto, one ‘SNL’ reference at a time

His decisions on major cryptocurrency cases have quoted "The Big Lebowski," "SNL," and "Dr. Strangelove." That’s because he wants you — yes, you — to read them.

The ways Zia Faruqui (right) has weighed on cases that have come before him can give lawyers clues as to what legal frameworks will pass muster.

Photo: Carolyn Van Houten/The Washington Post via Getty Images

“Cryptocurrency and related software analytics tools are ‘The wave of the future, Dude. One hundred percent electronic.’”

That’s not a quote from "The Big Lebowski" — at least, not directly. It’s a quote from a Washington, D.C., district court memorandum opinion on the role cryptocurrency analytics tools can play in government investigations. The author is Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui.

Keep ReadingShow less
Veronica Irwin

Veronica Irwin (@vronirwin) is a San Francisco-based reporter at Protocol covering fintech. Previously she was at the San Francisco Examiner, covering tech from a hyper-local angle. Before that, her byline was featured in SF Weekly, The Nation, Techworker, Ms. Magazine and The Frisc.

The financial technology transformation is driving competition, creating consumer choice, and shaping the future of finance. Hear from seven fintech leaders who are reshaping the future of finance, and join the inaugural Financial Technology Association Fintech Summit to learn more.

Keep ReadingShow less
FTA
The Financial Technology Association (FTA) represents industry leaders shaping the future of finance. We champion the power of technology-centered financial services and advocate for the modernization of financial regulation to support inclusion and responsible innovation.
Enterprise

AWS CEO: The cloud isn’t just about technology

As AWS preps for its annual re:Invent conference, Adam Selipsky talks product strategy, support for hybrid environments, and the value of the cloud in uncertain economic times.

Photo: Noah Berger/Getty Images for Amazon Web Services

AWS is gearing up for re:Invent, its annual cloud computing conference where announcements this year are expected to focus on its end-to-end data strategy and delivering new industry-specific services.

It will be the second re:Invent with CEO Adam Selipsky as leader of the industry’s largest cloud provider after his return last year to AWS from data visualization company Tableau Software.

Keep ReadingShow less
Donna Goodison

Donna Goodison (@dgoodison) is Protocol's senior reporter focusing on enterprise infrastructure technology, from the 'Big 3' cloud computing providers to data centers. She previously covered the public cloud at CRN after 15 years as a business reporter for the Boston Herald. Based in Massachusetts, she also has worked as a Boston Globe freelancer, business reporter at the Boston Business Journal and real estate reporter at Banker & Tradesman after toiling at weekly newspapers.

Image: Protocol

We launched Protocol in February 2020 to cover the evolving power center of tech. It is with deep sadness that just under three years later, we are winding down the publication.

As of today, we will not publish any more stories. All of our newsletters, apart from our flagship, Source Code, will no longer be sent. Source Code will be published and sent for the next few weeks, but it will also close down in December.

Keep ReadingShow less
Bennett Richardson

Bennett Richardson ( @bennettrich) is the president of Protocol. Prior to joining Protocol in 2019, Bennett was executive director of global strategic partnerships at POLITICO, where he led strategic growth efforts including POLITICO's European expansion in Brussels and POLITICO's creative agency POLITICO Focus during his six years with the company. Prior to POLITICO, Bennett was co-founder and CMO of Hinge, the mobile dating company recently acquired by Match Group. Bennett began his career in digital and social brand marketing working with major brands across tech, energy, and health care at leading marketing and communications agencies including Edelman and GMMB. Bennett is originally from Portland, Maine, and received his bachelor's degree from Colgate University.

Enterprise

Why large enterprises struggle to find suitable platforms for MLops

As companies expand their use of AI beyond running just a few machine learning models, and as larger enterprises go from deploying hundreds of models to thousands and even millions of models, ML practitioners say that they have yet to find what they need from prepackaged MLops systems.

As companies expand their use of AI beyond running just a few machine learning models, ML practitioners say that they have yet to find what they need from prepackaged MLops systems.

Photo: artpartner-images via Getty Images

On any given day, Lily AI runs hundreds of machine learning models using computer vision and natural language processing that are customized for its retail and ecommerce clients to make website product recommendations, forecast demand, and plan merchandising. But this spring when the company was in the market for a machine learning operations platform to manage its expanding model roster, it wasn’t easy to find a suitable off-the-shelf system that could handle such a large number of models in deployment while also meeting other criteria.

Some MLops platforms are not well-suited for maintaining even more than 10 machine learning models when it comes to keeping track of data, navigating their user interfaces, or reporting capabilities, Matthew Nokleby, machine learning manager for Lily AI’s product intelligence team, told Protocol earlier this year. “The duct tape starts to show,” he said.

Keep ReadingShow less
Kate Kaye

Kate Kaye is an award-winning multimedia reporter digging deep and telling print, digital and audio stories. She covers AI and data for Protocol. Her reporting on AI and tech ethics issues has been published in OneZero, Fast Company, MIT Technology Review, CityLab, Ad Age and Digiday and heard on NPR. Kate is the creator of RedTailMedia.org and is the author of "Campaign '08: A Turning Point for Digital Media," a book about how the 2008 presidential campaigns used digital media and data.

Latest Stories
Bulletins