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During our trip to Silicon Valley last December, we had the chance to meet Michael Doyle from the Virtual Edge Institute, which is an international organization dedicated to advancing the development and adoption of virtual event and meeting technology and best practices for collaboration and marketing.
They organise the Virtual Edge Summit 2010, which is the only event that focuses exclusively on providing education, training and solutions for planning and producing virtual events, meetings and communities. We will be very happy to attend this event virtually next February and share our ideas for the industry in the future.
Based on the interview we gave Michael, this blog article by Frank Spinelli gives a very insightful observations and comments on our vision, considering our beginnings as physical event producers.
The main topics of the interview were our focus in the european market for 2010, our approach to real event producers in order to organise complementary hybrid events, a description of our solution and its basic pricing model and our prediction that an ecosystem of third parties will arise in order to meet the growing demand of customised virtual fairs and tradeshows worldwide.
We hope this article will help us to get more exposure in the US market, where we will be announcing our first projects really soon 
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virtual edge
IMASTE Currently Focuses on the European Market with Their Virtual Event & Virtual Job Fair Platform
IMASTE, one of Europe’s major players in the virtual event industry, began producing real world job fairs 6 years ago. Although they still produce physical events, the Spanish company saw an opportunity to break into virtual world also. Two and a half years ago, they produced their first virtual job fair, and they show no signs of letting up. They have created their own immersive, browser-based platform with which they can move beyond job fairs to any number of other events. By partnering with other European companies, IMASTE has carved out a strong presence for itself in both the physical world and the virtual.
IMASTE first dipped a toe into the virtual pool by creating a presence in Second Life. The company then made a commitment to replicate its physical world experience as closely as possible online. They began building their platform with Flash and PHP, but soon switched to Adobe Flex becoming the first company in Spain to do so. IMASTE currently keeps a foot in both worlds, producing one physical and one virtual job fair a year for its university clients. The platform boasts a high level of customization, a feature-rich user experience and a level of reporting metrics that cannot be achieved in a real world event. It offers a profile matching component, video chat and IM. It also has social networking integration. More…
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