The boardroom windows at ON24 look out over San Francisco’s Moscone Center, the city’s largest convention complex. Every year, Moscone is home to giant events like Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference, Oracle OpenWorld, Salesforce.com’s Dreamforce, and the MacWorld Expo; in fiscal year 2009-2010, more than 919,000 registered event attendees visited the complex.

But as busy as Moscone is, the number of business people who travel to trade shows and conventions is actually dropping. Moscone’s 2009-2010 attendance was down almost 20 percent compared to 2007-2008 levels. The economy is partly to blame, of course—but so is technology. In 2009, Cisco Systems canceled two San Francisco events and said it would hold digital conferences instead, saving $50 million. And in the growing movement to replace big, expensive physical events with cheaper virtual ones—where the booths are made from bits and attendees let their mice and keyboards do the walking—ON24 wants to take the lead.

ON24 CEO Sharat Sharan

After surviving a brush with death back in 2002, ON24 emerged as one of the country’s leading providers of webcasting technology, which allows companies to stage live online presentations and webinars for employees, trainees, or sales prospects. On the strength of that business, which brings in at least $25 million in revenues every year, the 275-employee company became profitable back in 2009, and is still growing at 25 to 30 percent per year, according to CEO Sharat Sharan.

But whereas a webcast might last 45 minutes, a virtual event can go on for a day, a week, a month, or forever—providing many more opportunities for the host to collect leads that might turn into sales down the road. So ON24 is aggressively pushing its newer “Virtual Show” and “Virtual Briefing Center” technologies, which are both built on a newly overhauled back-end called Platform 10.

This month ON24 is gearing up for VUE2011, a virtual show about virtual shows. Slated for November 17, VUE2011 will be emceed by the San Francisco Giants’ shaggy-bearded relief pitcher Brian Wilson and will be set amidst 3D simulations of San Francisco landmarks such as the Golden Gate Bridge and the Chinatown Gate on Grant Street (see the video on page 3 of this story). In Wilson’s honor, the conference’s tagline will be “Fear the beard, not the technology.” (Of course, after the Giants’ lackluster 2011 season, the beard has lost a bit of its fearsomeness.)

“What we do better than anybody else in the world is live virtual events,” says Sharan. Webcasts are still “the foundation” of the business, he says, but ON24 is growing into a “one-stop shop for webcasting, virtual events, virtual briefing centers, demand generation, corporate communications, and training.” If the flying avatars, corporate islands, and virtual stores of Second Life represented a wild, uncontrolled experiment in virtual commerce and communication, ON24 is the company coming along behind with a broom, civilizing and detoxifying the virtual-spaces concept for business users and serious marketers.

But to someone from the dot-com boom years, when ON24 was founded, the current company would be unrecognizable. It started out in 1998 as a distribution hub for … Next Page »

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On the third official day of Mass Mobile Month, we’re extremely pleased to unveil the official Mass Mobile Month iPhone app. Created by Swift Mobile of Cambridge, MA, and available at no cost through Apple’s iTunes App Store, the app includes the full list of Mass Mobile Month events, as well as a map guiding you to the events, along with information about transportation options and local businesses around the event venues.

There’s even a built-in social media client that lets you post updates about the events to your Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn accounts, with hash tags pre-supplied. If you’ve got an iPhone or an iPod Touch, I urge you to download the app, try it out, and tell your friends about it.

Swift Mobile founder and CEO Kathleen Gilroy demonstrated the Mass Mobile Month app at Monday’s meeting of the Web Innovators Group at the Royal Sonesta Hotel in Cambridge. The gatekeepers at Apple finally approved the app yesterday.

Last week I talked at length Gilroy and got the inside story about Swift Mobile—which is out to change the way smartphone owners experience large conferences and events.

The company’s main business is to work with convention centers to produce mobile apps featuring interior and exterior maps, local transportation routes and schedules, and guides to nearby restaurants and businesses. It’s already created apps for the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center and the Hynes Convention Center, and it’s working on a dedicated app for the next national meeting of the Direct Marketing Association, which will be held in October at the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco.

Gilroy says she started Swift Mobile in 2007 after more than 20 years in the events and learning technology and podcasting businesses, working with organizations like Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and MIT’s Sloan School of Management. When Apple allowed third-party apps onto the iPhone and opened the App Store, “It was obvious to me that it was going to be a huge opportunity,” she says.

“With a smartphone, you can create a smart meeting,” she continues. “You have this computer in your hand that can access navigational information and do social networking, and you don’t have to lug around your laptop. It’s a perfect fit in terms of making a meeting a more valuable experience for everyone involved.”

The self-funded startup sold its first project to the Massachusetts Convention Center Authority, which used the Boston Convention Center app for the first time during the American Library Association meeting in January. The app’s information about MBTA routes and nearby businesses proved particularly popular with conference-goers, Gilroy says. “People were saying, … Next Page »

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Pacific-Northwest Armani Exchange it isn’t, but it is totally the height of Geek Chic. Penny Arcade Expo (PAX) has become the ultimate destination for gaming fans.

Since 1995, every gamer has dreamed of being able to sneak into E3: the video game industry’s annual closed-to-the-public trade convention, where new games and products are introduced and sneak peeked. PAX has become E3 for the public. While Gabe and Tycho just wanted to throw a party about the joy of gaming and hanging out with other gamers, they have helped to level the playing field for the promotion and distribution of games by giving individuals and small companies the opportunity to promote their games directly to consumers in a cost effective method. Traditional tiered systems, typified by trade-only conventions such as E3, mean that consumers receive their information about games via others such as the press and retailers. But with today’s distribution becoming increasingly direct to consumer via download, the need exists to promote directly to consumers as well. PAX can play a large part in helping game publishers of all sizes do so.

But PAX is not a trade show that is open to the public, it is a festival of all things geek: with seminars as varied as “The art of the Dungeon Master” to “How the iPhone has Changed Portable Gaming”; tournaments as varied as “Settlers of Catan” to “Halo 3”; and a Saturday evening concert featuring geek musicians. Of course, there is a little geek in all of us, or a lot of geek in my case, and since the conventions founders Mike “Gabe” Krahulik and Jerry “Tycho” Holkins love tabletop games to casual games to hard core first person shooters, their convention embraces this diversity as well, meaning that the audience is as broad a demographic slice as you could imagine.

The largest Internet gaming segment, women over 30, was well represented and interested in all the new “casual” games from PopCap, Big Fish, and the like. Younger kids flocked to the new Nintendo DS games and Nanovor (had to throw in a plug somewhere). Tabletop gamers had plenty to do with Privateer Press’s skirmish game WarMachine and Well’s Expeditions new mass action miniature game Arcane Legions. Card players competed in Hasbro’s Magic the Gathering and laughed all night with endless Munchkin games from Steve Jackson Games. Of course, the majority of the show reverberated with sounds of either machine guns or wailing guitars as the seemingly endless variety of first person shooters and music-based games continued to entertain the console core demographic of 18-to-35 males in huge numbers.

You can imagine that a festival started by guys who love gaming, but also make their living by humorously skewering both games and gamers in their enormously popular online comic penny-arcade.com, the show featured both planned and unplanned humor and provided a venue for other critics of geek culture such as Mega64 and RedvsBlue.

Gaming of all types has always been and will always be a social activity, and PAX embraces that in its very essence, providing a great experience for gamers of all types and a terrific opportunity for consumers to directly engage with creators.

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Everyone knows the gaming industry is huge in Seattle. Well, this weekend it will get even huger. Today marks the start of the 5th annual Penny Arcade Expo (PAX) at the Washington State Convention & Trade Center in downtown Seattle. Since 2007, when the E3 convention in Los Angeles was majorly downsized, PAX has become North America’s biggest trade show for computer and video games. It draws tens of thousands of people for a weekend of game exhibitions, demos, panel discussions, free-play areas, gaming tournaments, parties, and concerts (this year’s lineup of bands includes the OneUps, Freezepop, and Jonathan Coulton).

The weekend is billed as a festival of gaming technology and culture, and the entry fee is pretty low ($45 if you pre-registered). Besides the promise of meeting lots of interesting folks in the industry, I spotted some talks and panels having to do with gaming, business, and society. So, for anyone who isn’t too busy fighting the traffic on I-5 this weekend, here are a few sessions to watch:

—Game Developer Parents: Raising Our Kids On Games (Sat, 10:30 am). This is an obvious topic: how to manage your kids’ development and activities in an age of ubiquitous gaming. The panel, which includes people from Maynard, MA-based 38 Studios (which we’ve written about here and here) and San Francisco, CA-based social game network Zynga, is billed as “refreshingly pro-gaming.” I wonder if they’ll tackle any difficult issues, or just have a lovefest about the educational and social benefits of gaming.

—PC Hardware and Gaming Technology (Sat, 11:30 am). How will Moore’s Law affect gaming? How will games push the state of the art in computing technologies? This panel, which includes Jeff Kalles of Penny Arcade and Chris Melissinos of Sun Microsystems (who knew that Sun had a chief gaming officer?), will tackle the tech questions of next-generation games and consoles.

—Is Casual Killing Core Games? (Sat, 6:00 pm) From the talks at the Casual Connect gaming conference last month, I’d guess the answer is no—there seems to be a lot more overlap between the “casual” and “core” gaming markets than most people thought. But maybe the core game developers have something to say about that. Rob Gruhl of Microsoft’s game platform strategy team moderates a panel of industry experts.

—Sex in Videogames: A Comparative Study (Sat, 7:30 pm). Not sure what this is about, but I bet there was a lot of research done. Pink Godzilla, a Seattle-based video game store, will be part of a panel that discusses cultural differences between the U.S. and Japan when it comes to sex in video games. Interesting that the session is on a typical date night. (There’s also a session the next morning called “How to get your girlfriend into gaming.” I’m not making this up.)

—Cambridge, MA-based Harmonix Music Systems is doing a panel on the company’s history (“The Rockening,” Sat, 1:00 pm), from its early days as an MIT spinoff to its success with Guitar Hero, Rock Band, and the $175 million acquisition by MTV Networks. Offline, I plan to get the scoop on Rock Band 2 and other gossip from Harmonix senior developer Dan Schmidt, who [full disclosure] happens to play in this awesome band with me.

There are several other sessions that might be of particular interest to startups and entrepreneurs: Pitch Your Game Idea (Sat, 5:30 pm); Engaging Online Communities (Fri, 6:30 pm); Advertising and PR: The Endless Struggle (Sat, 10 am); MMO and Virtual World Business Models (Sun, 12 pm).

It says something about the gaming community that the convention doesn’t start until 2 pm today and runs through Sunday of Labor Day weekend. It’s not work—gamers and game developers eat, drink, and breathe this stuff. I think the website of Bellevue, WA-based Valve, creator of game franchises Half-Life and Counter-Strike, says it best: “Members of the Valve staff…collectively define sunlight as ‘that which makes a computer monitor difficult to see’ and free time as ‘when we get to play games instead of make them.’”

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