Shifting to virtual events over the last many months has taught everyone in the events industry countless lessons. When COVID-19 hit, the overwhelming sentiment was to try and mimic the in-person event experience as much as possible. The industry didn’t want to let go of what we knew best, and what we thought was best.

The last several months have forced us to evolve in our thinking. We made a decision very early in 2020 to steer clear of skeuomorphic ideas; starting with the very conscious decision to not adapt our existing technology to meet the needs of virtual events. For example, choosing not to morph our event app into a virtual event tool like many event tech companies have, and instead opting to build brand new portals and technology for the virtual event world so that we don’t carry the baggage from the past.

Make no mistake, though, we’re working aggressively behind the scenes on new on-site and hybrid event technology which we will reveal in 2021.

Networking is one of the most critical aspects of a virtual event experience. Although we got many aspects of it very right, including the super flexible PheedLoop Meet system, presence tracking, real-time location-aware chat, and more, one thing we didn’t get perfectly right was one-on-one chatting.

Why? It was a remnant of the past. We brought in the text chat experience on-site attendees expected, but it just didn’t work well in the fast-paced, multi-tasking environment attendees find themselves in when attending a virtual event. Our one-on-one text and video chat system used to require task switching. You’d have to leave what you were doing to communicate one-on-one with another attendee.

We’re proud to say that this has now changed. We modeled our new text chat and video call system off popular social media apps you likely already know and love. You can now chat with attendees over text, audio, and video from anywhere in the whole virtual event portal. No longer do you have to choose between different ways to engage, you can just do it all at the same time! It’s 100% real-time, synced with browser and desktop-based push notifications, and ready to use immediately.

Although countless events use and enjoy the full PheedLoop virtual event experience, we know this was something many of you were really looking for in PheedLoop - which only became apparent as we all began to realize how differently attendees behave virtually versus on-site. At PheedLoop, we're engineers and problem solvers. We look forward to seeing how we can further grow with you and your events as times change. Thank you to the thousands of events and event planners who trust and use PheedLoop.