E3 was an annual trade event for the video game industry organized and presented by the Entertainment Software Association (ESA). It was held principally in Los Angeles from 1995 to 2019, with its final iteration held virtually in 2021. The event hosted developers, publishers, hardware manufacturers, and other industry professionals who used the occasion to introduce and advertise upcoming games, hardware, and merchandise to the press. During its existence, E3 was the world's largest and most prestigious annual gaming expo.
A meeting is when two or more people come together to discuss one or more topics, often in a formal or business setting, but meetings also occur in a variety of other environments. Meetings can be used as form of group decision-making.
A conference is a meeting, often lasting a few days, which is organized on a particular subject, or to bring together people who have a common interest. Conferences can be used as a form of group decision-making, although discussion, not always decisions, is the primary purpose of conferences. The term derives from the word confer.
The Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) is an information technology conference held annually by Apple Inc. The conference is usually held at Apple Park in California. The event is usually used to showcase new software and technologies in the macOS, iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, tvOS, and visionOS families as well as other Apple software; new hardware products are sometimes announced as well. WWDC is also an event hosted for third-party software developers that work on apps for iPhones, iPads, Macs, and other Apple devices. Attendees can participate in hands-on labs with Apple engineers and attend in-depth sessions covering a wide variety of topics.
The Game Developers Conference (GDC) is an annual conference for video game developers. The event includes an expo, networking events, and awards shows like the Game Developers Choice Awards and Independent Games Festival, and a variety of tutorials, lectures, and roundtables by industry professionals on game-related topics covering programming, design, audio, production, business and management, and visual arts.
Dragon Con is a North American multigenre convention, founded in 1987, which takes place annually over the Labor Day weekend in Atlanta, Georgia. As of 2017, the convention draws attendance of over 80,000, features hundreds of guests, encompasses five hotels in the Peachtree Center neighborhood of downtown Atlanta near Centennial Olympic Park, and runs thousands of hours of programming for fans of science fiction, fantasy, comic books, and other elements of fan culture. It is owned and operated by a private for-profit corporation, with the help of a 1,500-member volunteer staff. Dragon Con has hosted the 1990 Origins Game Fair and the 1995 North American Science Fiction Convention (NASFiC).
The Hackers on Planet Earth (HOPE) conference series is a hacker convention sponsored by the security hacker magazine 2600: The Hacker Quarterly that until 2020 was typically held at Hotel Pennsylvania, in Manhattan, New York City.
Webex by Cisco is an American company that develops and sells web conferencing, videoconferencing and contact center as a service applications. It was founded as WebEx in 1995 and taken over by Cisco Systems in 2007. Its headquarters are in San Jose, California.
Web conferencing is used as an umbrella term for various types of online conferencing and collaborative services including webinars, webcasts, and web meetings. Sometimes it may be used also in the more narrow sense of the peer-level web meeting context, in an attempt to disambiguate it from the other types known as collaborative sessions. The terminology related to these technologies is exact and agreed relying on the standards for web conferencing but specific organizations practices in usage exist to provide also term usage reference.
An academic conference or scientific conference is an event for researchers to present and discuss their scholarly work. Together with academic or scientific journals and preprint archives, conferences provide an important channel for exchange of information between researchers. Further benefits of participating in academic conferences include learning effects in terms of presentation skills and "academic habitus", receiving feedback from peers for one's own research, the possibility to engage in informal communication with peers about work opportunities and collaborations, and getting an overview of current research in one or more disciplines.
BarCamp is an international network of user-generated conferences primarily focused on technology and the web. They are open, participatory workshop-events, the content of which is provided by participants. The first BarCamps focused on early stage web applications, and were related to open-source technologies, social software, and open data formats.
An unconference is a participant-driven meeting. The term "unconference" has been applied, or self-applied, to a wide range of gatherings that try to avoid hierarchical aspects of a conventional conference, such as sponsored presentations and top-down organization.
Fantasia Fair is a week-long conference for cross-dressers, transgender and gender questioning people held every October in Provincetown, Massachusetts, a small Portuguese fishing village and largely gay and lesbian tourist village on the very tip of Cape Cod. This annual event is the longest-running transgender conference in the United States and it provides a week for attendees to experiment with gender-role identities and presentations in a safe and affirming community. The goal of the conference is to create a safe space in which crossdressers, transgender and transsexual people, and nonbinary-gendered people are accepted without judgement, can interact with their peers, and can advocate for their rights. In November, 1980 the event was featured in an article by D. Keith Mano in Playboy magazine and has in ensuing years has continued to generate publicity.
A virtual tradeshow is a virtual event run in an online environment hosted online for a limited period. It can be considered the online equivalent of a traditional tradeshow or exhibition, but exhibitors and visitors connect on the web rather than in person.
A virtual event is an online event that involves people interacting in a virtual environment on the web, rather than meeting in a physical location. Virtual events are typically multi-session online events that often feature webinars and webcasts. They are highly interactive, often aiming to create as similar an experience as possible to their physical counterparts.
A TeachMeet is an informal meeting, organised by teacher for teachers to share good practice, practical innovations and personal insights on teaching in a convivial atmosphere. TeachMeet events are open to all, do not charge an entry fee, and take place in a social setting. These events are often organised to coincide with other educational events like the Scottish Learning Festival and the British Educational Technology and Training Show BETT.
SpaceUp is an open-attendance space exploration unconference, where participants decide the topics, schedule, and structure of the event. SpaceUps have been held on both West and East coasts, and in Houston. Common features of SpaceUps are an unconference/barcamp style schedule, Ignite talks, and a moonpie eating contest.
RootsTech is a family history and technology conference and trade show held annually in the Salt Palace Convention Center, Salt Lake City, Utah. It first debuted in 2011 having been created from the ground up by a team at FamilySearch. The conference claims to be the world's largest family-history technology conference. Over the years, RootsTech has welcomed a number of celebrities, television personalities, and actors as keynote speakers.
Magna Publications, Inc., also referred to as Magna, is a communications company that publishes higher education newsletters and manages onsite and online higher education seminars, workshops and conferences.
Security BSides is a series of loosely affiliated information security conferences. It was co-founded by Mike Dahn, Jack Daniel, and Chris Nickerson in 2009. Due to an overwhelming number of presentation submissions to Black Hat USA in 2009, the rejected presentations were presented to a smaller group of individuals. The event was named after the "B-side" of a vinyl record.
