IBTM World Virtual crowns winner of TechWatch programme

IBTM World Virtual crowned the winner of its TechWatch programme, which sees a series of event tech startups pitching to a panel of judges. The finalists were narrowed down to five, with CLIPR being picked as the eventual winner. CLIPR uses machine learning to analyse lengthy videos of recorded event content, breaking it down into more easily consumable chunks. It also creates ‘meeting recaps’ to allow delegates without lots of time to catch up quickly. CLIPR beat out four others to the top spot: ConsensIQ, Pubshere Exhibits, Socio and Troop. ConsensIQ is a tool for live polling inside virtual or live events. It allows presenters and hosts to create realtime polls, with delegates given 100 ‘points’ to assign to each answer. Pubshere Exhibits, meanwhile, is a Canadian company which has created a proximity alarm called ‘EGID’ designed to assist social distancing at trade shows. Socio is a virtual event platform with live chat, Q&A and polling. It was pitched as an “all in one” solution, with a clean interface that allows event organisers to quickly put together virtual and hybrid events. Troop is a platform that ranks meeting and event destinations based on a variety of factors, such as sustainability, pricing, ease of acquiring travel visas, and more. These ranks are then aggregated and presented to meeting and event organisers. CLIPR, however, was named as the winner. The judges said it addressed the issue of ‘Zoom fatigue’ which had become common in 2020. CEO and Cofounder Humphrey Chen commented: “Meeting fatigue is real. There are 55 million meetings per day in the world. In 2020 the pandemic moved much of this activity online, where it could be recorded. This gave us an idea. What if we could get out lives back? What if we could build an AI that would quickly prioritise the moments that matter most? What if we could search for what we needed from these meetings, rather than attend?” Dahlia El Gazzar, tech evangelist and chief collaborator for IBTM World TechWatch Live 2020, said: “We are super excited to crown Clipr as the winner of the TechWatch Awards 2020. The way they can help event professionals use their content for better curation purposes, monetization, and as snackable content to prolong the life engagement with stakeholders, is going to a critical factor in events, branding, and storytelling going forward.”