Canceled and Rescheduled Conferences in 2020

As of March 2020, the cancellation of high-profile events in the world of technology has caused losses of $ 1 billion.

Geniusee have found out what events were supposed to take place in the near future, which of them we will not see at all and which of them we can watch online.

F8 developer conference. An annual conference for software developers from Facebook. Here, entrepreneurs and programmers who develop and sell their products on the Facebook platform discuss how to further improve and develop the social network.

The fact that it will not be "live", reported back in February. F8 planned to be held May 5 and 6 in San Jose. Instead, the event will be held locally. But the organizers promise to upload various videos and do online broadcasts.

I / O. Google’s annual developer conference was due May 12-14 in Mountain View, California. At the conference, Google talks about their new and old products, new versions of Chrome and Android (this year Android 11 and the Google Pixel 4A smartphone were supposed to be introduced). The organizers promised to return the full price of tickets until March 13.

Google Cloud Next ’20: Digital Connect. Another conference that went online. It will be held April 6-8 with the help of online streams, digital sessions "ask an expert" and interactive lectures. The theme of the event is cloud storage, artificial intelligence, their interaction with applications and work with data arrays.

MVP Global Summit. The event from Microsoft, which takes place at the company's headquarters this year, was scheduled for March 16-19. The conference gathers specialists who are involved in the development of MVP (minimum viable product - Ed.) and regional directors who can communicate with developers of Microsoft products.

Due to the coronavirus, the company decided to cancel the live conference and conduct only the online broadcast. Microsoft has scheduled a conference for Build developers to be held in May. It has not yet been cancelled, but on the official website it is reported that they are monitoring the situation with coronavirus in the world and, if the situation gets extreme, will take the necessary measures.

GTC 2020. The annual event from NVIDIA was also moved online. The GTC will be held March 22-26 in San Jose, California. The conference discusses various graphics processors, artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Global Marketing Summit. The conference was to be held March 9-12 in San Francisco. It was expected that the event would be attended by 5 thousand people, but because of the outbreak of the coronavirus, Facebook cancelled its holding.

Cisco Live Melbourne. The annual event from Cisco Systems Corporation (CSCO) for customers and partners, which was to be held March 3-6 in the Australian city of Melbourne. About 8.5 thousand participants were expected. For obvious reasons, it was also cancelled.

Mobile World Congress. The largest global exhibition of mobile technologies, which has been held in Barcelona since 2006. Here, companies present the latest models of their phones and discuss innovation.

The exhibition was to be visited by about 100 thousand people, of which 28 thousand were participants per se. It was supposed to go through February 24-27, but due to the outbreak of coronavirus, some companies, including Nokia, Vodafone, AT&T, Sprint, Cisco, Facebook, Intel, Sony, Amazon, LG, Vivo, Ericsson and Nvidia, refused to participate.

For some events, organizers simply postponed the date, but for others nothing has changed, despite the fact that some eminent participants still decided not to take risks and not come to crowded places.

Game Developers Conference. The annual large-scale conference for video game developers, which was to be held in San Francisco on March 16-20. Sony, Microsoft, Facebook, Kojima Productions, Amazon, Unity, and Epic Games. On February 29, the organizers announced that it was decided to reschedule the event and hold it in the summer.

Collision. Collision Technical Conference, an annual event held in Toronto, where industry leaders and startups take part, is scheduled for June 22–25 and was supposed to attract 30,000 people. The organizers of the event recently announced that Collision will be cancelled due to problems with the coronavirus. "Given the uncertainty faced by a large number of public events around the world due to the development of COVID-19, we made a very difficult decision to postpone Collision until June 2021," said the organizer of the event.

RSA Conference. The international conference on information security, which was held February 24-28 in San Francisco and will be held July 14-16 in Singapore. The conference can be monitored online on the official website. Usually it gathers more than 40 thousand visitors. However, IBM, Verizon, and AT&T Cybersecurity declined to participate.

Electronic Entertainment Expo. The largest gaming event of the year E3 2020 (Electronic Entertainment Expo) was also cancelled due to concerns about the coronavirus pandemic. Every year at this exhibition, many gaming companies show their main announcements for the next year. Among them there are such iconic AAA projects as Cyberpunk 2077 alongside indie studios games. Last year, Microsoft at E3 announced a number of major games as well as improvements to the Xbox Live service - a Game Pass Ultimate subscription and support for games from older Xbox gaming platforms. In the summer of 2020, the E3 will be held online without a traditional exhibition.

Black Hat Asia 2020. The event for software developers, for hackers and security systems was to be held from March 31 to April 3 in Singapore. But it was postponed to September 29 - October 2.

All these measures have been taken to protect people from coronavirus infection. The ban covers all public events, including concerts, exhibitions, conferences - any events at which it was planned to bring together more than 500 people.

Read also: The coronavirus crisis impact on startup financing and Covid-19. How to save your business from crisis.