Are you keeping up with the times?  Juggling a laptop, iPad and iPhone?  Logging in to five social networks daily?  The Arab spring, daily deals, protests in US major cities, Twitter, Skype, Amazon tablets, Facebook, mobile boarding passes, Google+,  iPhone 5 (or is it iPhone 4S?), social, virtual meetings….whew!

Bob Dylan (http://www.lyricsfreak.com/b/bob+dylan/the+times+they+are+a+changin_20021240.html)  had it right forty years ago, but couldn’t possibly have anticipated the pace of change today.

Certain’s headquarters in San Francisco is at the epicenter of the changes driving our society, industry and daily lives.   Yammer, salesforce.com, Twitter, Open Table, Zynga, and StumbleUpon are just a few of the leading technology and internet service companies that are located within a few blocks of our building.  Drive thirty minutes down the road and Facebook, Google, Apple and countless others dot the Silicon Valley landscape.  Oh, and how about all the venture capital firms that fund innovation and change?  We love being at the crossroads of innovation and take full advantage of our location to hang out with our colleagues exploring and sharing new ideas.

The truth is all the lunches, tweets, news feeds, meet-ups and connections in San Francisco and Silicon Valley can’t compensate for the pace of change we are experiencing.  Why?

The reason is illustrated very well by the futurist and author Daniel Burrus in “Flash Foresight”, a book he wrote about seizing opportunities created by the pace of technological change.  Have you heard about Moore’s Law?   This axiom, by one of the founders of Intel,states that computing power doubles roughly every eighteen months.

So, what does that mean to each of us?

Well, back in the days when IBM was rolling out its mainframes, doubling computer power meant your airline ticket was processed significantly faster but didn’t alter the way you purchased a ticket.  In reality it wasn’t life changing.   Thirty years later, computing power has doubled multiple times and as a result we find ourselves with society, business and yes, your business planning meetings and events, being turned upside down. 

Here’s the illustration Burrus uses in his book.   Let’s say you take a penny on the first day of a thirty one day month and then double it every day for the entire month.  At the end of seven days, you will have sixty-four cents.  Big deal.   At the end of another seven days you will have eighty-one dollars and ninety-two cents.  Quite a jump.   How much do you think you will you have at the end of the month?   Let me guess…maybe three thousand dollars?   Tens of thousands?  Hundreds of thousands?



Most people are astonished that the answer is over TEN MILLION DOLLARS!!! Yes, it’s true (and fun to prove on a spreadsheet).   Add one more day and you have over twenty million dollars.   The point Burres is making is that we as a society are now at the “end of the month” in cumulative and exponential computing power.   The curve is very steep and we only have to pick up the smartphone (a camera enabled computer) to get a hint of the magnitude of change.   But what will happen on the “first day of the next month”?   In reality, we can’t fully predict and that makes it both scary and exciting.    We are approaching an era in which whatever you conceive can be created through technology. 

We’re seeing the impact every day.   Less than a year ago, Certain was the first event planning software company to offer an integrated mobile application with an attendee management platform.   Today, mobile solutions are taken for granted and your attendees expect to put their smart phone or tablet to good use at an event.   In lockstep with mobile advancement is deeper event-related social networking and more and more virtual events in hybrid or stand-alone mode.

Never mind the Arab Spring.   We’re talking about the Attendee Spring and it’s on the meeting professional’s plate to figure it all out (we’re happy to help of course).  

The good news is that rapid technology change driving connections and engagement can unlock the business value of meetings and events.   This is an opportunity for meeting professionals to establish a new, deeper level of business partnership with their clients.