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Hybrid & Virtual Events Will Not Lose Their Significance Post Covid: Siddharth Shah & Gautam Seth

Focused on immersive and functional features, Dreamcast has evolved as a full-scale virtual event suite consisting of various products to match the digital needs of the current times. In the past year, it  has serviced leading IPs, events & conference organisers across the country.

In an interview with BW Applause & Everything Experiential, Siddharth Shah and Gautam Seth, Co-Founders Dreamcast spoke about rising relevance of virtual events, their recent events, upcoming trends and more.

Excerpts:

How has the impact of the pandemic been on the events industry? What worked well for the events space?

As we all know, virtual events have gained rapid popularity since 2020 and are obviously increasing exponentially with each passing day. As Covid-19 came into the frame, restrictions were imposed on public gatherings and travelling to ensure public safety which still is a very relevant concern.  However, this resulted in the cancellation of various events planned for the upcoming months and year.

We sensed a great opportunity and also a gap in the industry and so took a step and moved the physical events online with our virtual event platform. It helped us to keep growing even in the time of global crisis and the businesses to connect with the audience remotely. Many organisations we have now worked with had never thought about hosting virtual events but today are leveraging virtual event solutions via our platform. 

Well, we do understand that in-person events and face-to-face interactions hold their own significance, but today our virtual event platform has closely replicated the same with giving you each minute aspect from the physical world. There are ample virtual event engagement platforms available today on the internet that offer comprehensive virtual event engagement tools & features but ours stands apart as not only we understand what is missing in the virtual world, we are quick to close the gap. Events hosted on our engaging virtual event platform helps in delivering immersive event experiences to attendees while keeping them hooked to your event and not missing out on any physical aspect. 

Dreamcast recently executed JLF 2021 on your platform. Tell us some of the other key events that you have hosted?

Some major events that went virtual on our platform were India Mobile Congress 2020 which is the biggest technology platform in Asia.  IMC wanted to go virtual and Dreamcast was humbled to provide its platform for the congress to take place virtually.  Our platform also hosted India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi who inaugurated IMC2020. Among other dignitaries were Ravi Shankar Prasad, Sanjay Dhotre, Mukesh Ambani, Chairman, Reliance Industries, Sunil Bharti Mittal, Chairman & Founder Bharti Enterprises. 

Dreamcast offered a clean & customized platform that enabled the attendees to register, easily navigate & further networking with each other. The platform enabled quick teleportation along with a massive 170 exhibition stalls to not only facilitate the exhibition but also the attendees and the exhibitor’s interactions. The features included scheduling a call, requesting a call-back, live chat, exchanging business cards, and also live video calls. We also provided a social wall showing the live tweets with the trending hashtags of the event which in this event was #IMC2020.

The stats reflected the wide reach of the event with 25k+ footfall,150 + exhibitors across the globe, 30 Hours + content, 10k + session views, 5k + resources downloaded, and more!

Another important event for which Dreamcast went all out with their use of tech was GSK’s virtual event. The client wanted to host a virtual internal annual managers meeting but for it to be more exciting. Dreamcast made sure that no aspect was missed & the virtual event had it all with the use of tech. The event was a huge success & we are proud to have put technology to the right use.

What are some of your biggest learnings of the pandemic?

Our biggest learning would come from the challenge we faced, which was the closing of physical events. This led to our biggest learning which was to think quick, adapt fast and deliver world-class work, by constantly improving our platform and adding unlimited features to it.  

What to expect from the event tech and virtual events industry in the coming times? What will be the key/dominating trends?

What we have seen is that last one year is that people have gone through behavioural change, they have got used to attending virtual meetings, not travelling and multitasking. Now people don’t have to think twice before attending any event and it’s a new trend to see events becoming global. What we see for the future is that now onwards every event would happen on-ground along with a virtual extension that will enable people to attend from anywhere in the world. The challenge would be to know and to close the gap between the two audiences and make sure no aspect is missed out or has a disconnect on the events.

What are some of your future plans and tell us about some of your upcoming events.
We are currently working on launching a virtual event suite that would comprise multiple products that enable an organiser to pick and choose the format of their event basis the requirement and the budget.

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