First Ever 3D Virtual World Trade Show

Welcome to The Spend Advantage™ Podcast by Varisource, the competitive advantage for your spend. Get access to discounts, rebates, benchmark and renewal savings for 100+ spend categories automatically for your company

We interview amazing people, companies, and solutions, that will help you 10X your bottom line savings and top line growth for your business --- https://www.varisource.com

Welcome to the Spend Advantage podcast by Varisource. Spend advantage is the competitive advantage for your spend across 100 plus vendor categories. This podcast is all about interviewing amazing people, company,

and solutions that will help you ten x your top line

growth as well as

bottom line savings for your business. 1.9s

Hello everyone. This is Victor with Varisource. Welcome to another episode of the Spend Advantage podcast. Today I'm super excited to have one of our strategic and exclusive partners called nowhere with Us. We have John Morris, who's the CEO and co-founder, uh, with us today. And nowhere is a 3D world in your browser and you don't need any VR glasses or anything. It's truly amazing. So much to talk about. Welcome to the show, John. 1.1s

Thank you so much, Victor. It's great to be here.

Yeah. It's, um. Yeah, there are so many things, uh, and I think surprising, you know, and game changing things that we are partnering up on. Super excited to get into it. But if you don't mind, maybe give the audience a little bit of, um, you know, kind of your founder's story and background. Uh, because honestly, what you guys created is truly, you know, a truly a differentiator.

So. 1.3s Yeah, absolutely. Thanks so much. Um, it's been a journey, let me tell you. Uh, to get to nowhere, as you can imagine, uh, I, I say my, you know, it's the greatest title of my life. The CEO of nowhere. 1.2s And, um, it it started my career, started as an actor. I was a clown at Cirque du Soleil and a performer in giant spectacle shows like For zebra, and toured the world as a performer. And then I got obsessed with trying to bring that magic beyond the walls of theater and into unexpected places. So I started a company called The Windmill Factory, and for the last 15 years, we've done everything from design shows for Nine Inch Nails and Metric and Phantom to Giant Spectacles for AWS and Google. But what we got really, really good at was bringing people together, um, through cultural events and art experiences. And when the pandemic hit, it really drove us all online, you know, and shut down every part of our business. And we were looking at how could we bring what we do best into the digital sphere, which was bringing people together. And there weren't really great tools at the time, because what we wanted to do was essentially create a video game where you could have the play and adventure of virtual worlds, but you could have the immediate access of feeling like you're face to face with other people. So, you know, that's how we ended up with nowhere, which is a platform that does exactly that. It brings people together in video chat so you can be live face to face with each other, but you have the ability to create virtual worlds in a game engine, so you can create any type of experience right on the browser that feels more close to real life. Um, both in design, aesthetic, and feeling like you have a place that comforts you and and sets the stage of, of where you can meet and where you can be, um, but with, you know, like you said, instant access, right on a browser with no VR headset or no download, you know, just instant drop in like a, like a off a calendar link.

Yeah, I, uh yeah. First of all, if anybody have kids or are into video games, right, you have like Fortnite, you have Roblox. And obviously, you know, these technology in the past wasn't possible for a lot of reasons. Uh, connectivity and data centers and cloud and all these things. And it was lagging. Right. Imagine you try to play this super heavy graphic and movement and there's lags. And, you know, it's just not a good user experience. And I think things obviously have improved. But the first question is really, you know, fascinating. Um, you know, obviously people heard of, again, the Roblox, the Fortnite, and they're playing these games online like a virtual world. Really. Right. And, uh, but you guys are really replicating that for, you know, really business use cases and really that virtual world. And then on top of that is VR, virtual reality. Facebook was trying to make it big, right, with, uh, with their VR never really took off because you have to wear these, you know, you know, big machines and big wear on your head. And it's like it's not efficient, it's super expensive. And so that whole virtual world concept just never took off, I think. Why do you think that is? And how were you guys able to create, uh, this kind of virtual world that runs so smoothly? 2.9s

Um, yeah. It's a great it's it's really time. And we're building on the backs of giants. You know, we're building in a time when you can have a full game engine right on the browser, you know, that we can build on top of. We're built on top of Babylon. JS it's an open source game engine that's backed by Microsoft. You know, we're we're built on, you know, many, many protocols over the web of 3D web, um, on, on so many other platforms and so many engineers who have put in work that makes this thing function, you know, um, to the point where, you know, now, just now, I think we're getting to the point where we can any website can be a full game that you can, you know, interact in and have full video chat in and have full co-presence anywhere in the world. Um, but now the technology is fast enough with most people, you know, we say with nowhere, um, you know, it's best on a device within the last five years, and then with a pretty stable internet connection, and then anybody can access it from a mobile phone or a desktop computer. Um, and that's, you know, a testament to all the technologists who have come before us, you know, and a lot through video games, you know, like you're talking about Fortnite and Roblox and video gamers and video game designers have really helped push this 3D technology forward. And I think in the next few years, we'll start to see more and more how these spatial technologies start to infiltrate our normal everyday life, like into meetings and into um, HR initiatives and into live events. Um, as these technologies become more ubiquitous and more people adopt into the spatial community computing

future. Yeah, I think, uh, since Covid, I think obviously during Covid, everybody thought that was like going to be the world moving forward. Like we're never going back to physical, uh, interaction and seeing other human beings in an office. And so I think through that time, there was a lot of companies trying to, right, build virtual offices and, and, you know, this virtual world that they thought was going to be, uh, the future. And a lot of it was still 2D. Right. And I know we're going to utilize this podcast to announce a strategic partnership that is truly, uh, game changing. And I'm super excited to talk to you about that. Announce that in a second, but can you give maybe the audience a couple use cases? Obviously not in what you and I are going to announce, but outside of that, what are some use cases, uh, that people can use these virtual, um, virtual world for? Because right now when people think of virtual meeting, they think of zoom, right? They think of teams, they think of like a conference call that's virtual, which is literally static. Um, and you see a picture of the person or whatever. But yeah, like give me, give us a couple of use cases that, uh, how companies are benefiting from

this. Yeah. 2.6s Yeah, I think it's important to start with that with, you know, the differences in the technology. So right now, you know, virtual meetings are primarily hosted on, you know, Zoom or Teams or Google Meet. And that's very efficient at delivering information from one person, delivering information to a lot of people. Um, what nowhere does is then, you know, take that grid interface that we're so used to and then imagine that dropping into a virtual environment. So let's call it a we're in a forest. And, you know, each of those video squares in the, um, typical video chat conferencing platform now become vehicles that you can drive around and move anywhere in that forest that you want to move. And with spatial audio, the audio is only you're only hearing what's closest to your vehicle as you drive around that forest. And so you can drive up to different conversations and you can have different conversations with different people throughout that environment. And so what that enables is much more close to a real life meeting. So say you go to a board room room for the meeting, and you're walking down the hall and you run into a couple of different people. Um, you have short conversations with them, you catch up with them, and then there's a lot of mingling that happens between, you know, more individual nodes before the larger meeting. And there's a presentation. And so that often happens before and after meetings. And that is what creates most of the belonging within an institution, how people are, you know, the camaraderie of like interactions, both social and business wise, that happened before and after the meeting within nowhere with the spatial audio and being in an environment that you choose for your meeting, you can have, um, those mingling sessions happen and the serendipity of the watercooler conversation or running somebody in the hallway. You can have all of that happen on either side of the focused attention meeting with the where your screen sharing or or presenting or live streaming, um, you can have those interactions. And that's really where the platform shines for most people in their use cases today. So we see a lot of all hands or weekly team meetings where it allows teams to drop in, have about 15 minutes to mingle around and talk to each other, or ten minutes at the beginning. And then they bring everybody together for the collective moment where different people present, you know, where their teams are, what their teams are doing for the week. And, um, and then there's a little bit of social time at the end for a brainstorm where you can divide up into however many, you know, groups that you want or, or grab someone and be like, hey, Victor, I want to talk to you about that. You know, new integration we're working on. And then you pull away from the rest of the crowd and you have that conversation. So it's a much more fluid way to have that meeting within virtual environment. And the other added layer is that, you know, we met in a forest. I have now a memory that that my brain can wrap itself around an environment, which is what we're used to. That helps me remember what we talked about that day, um, based on the environment. So, um, team meetings, you know, conferences, you know, where you have networking, where people, you know, large events where people can mingle around and talk to different people, make connections that they wouldn't normally. Um, and then training is another big one, too. So setting up a virtual environment where you're moving down a pathway and that pathway is delivering different information as you're moving down, let's say a yellow brick road and the yellow brick road is is basically like a pitch deck that you're, you know, moving down between. And each crossroad is a different slide, if you will. Um, so those are three kind of main use cases

for, uh, you know, first of all, when I first met you, I just loved your energy, passion. And we obviously we met in this one of the virtual worlds. And in the back of my mind when I see these transformational technology, I'm always thinking, well, first of all, it was. The experience overall was like, wow, there was no lagging. It was it was smooth and it was really like I was immersed in a virtual environment where it's very different than a zoom, right? Whereas more 2D and static. And so I thought the technology was amazing, but I thought to myself like, yeah, I see some use cases for it, but, you know, team meetings and things like that. But where could that game changing use case really be? And then it hit me and I think that's when we started, you know, really discussing what, what um, you know, I want to announce now, uh, to the audience because I know they're all anxiously waiting to hear what we have created. And, uh, and this is what you and I are calling kind of the virtual world of tradeshow events, right? 2.9s And, you know, obviously this trade show, this trade show, the reason why this thing is such a game changer is because if you think about where and how people go to events, first of all, you know, obviously I've been to a lot of events, hosted events and, uh, go to trade shows all the time, and you can only have so many of them a year, right? One, two, three. And it costs a lot of money to fly around. It cost a lot of time to have to travel, hotels and all those things, and you're still going to need that. You're still going to need that human interaction and human or human networking. However, what if you could replicate that experience and that that world, but hundreds of times a year through a virtual environment? And that to me has never been done before, never seen before, uh, truly in a, you know, 3D kind of world. And but what's kind of your, your thoughts on that? 5s

Yeah. I mean, I think I remember we met in the office, uh, when we first met, and we were jamming on different things, and I was sharing the technology with you. And you, you were like, oh, man, this would be great for trade shows. And I was like, oh, man. It kind of blew my mind open a little bit. And I was like, that is a that is a use case we've always wanted to explore, and it's actually perfect for our technology because, you know, at trade shows, it's all about the people. You know, you're meeting people and you're exploring new, you know, what they have to offer. But it's about the relationships that you make there that then leads to use case and partnerships and deals and everything. So they're extremely valuable for people. And people spend all this money to create them all around the world because they're huge relationship builders, because they bring people together. And so now with with the nowhere tech, you know, you can have live and video, but then you can have these virtual environments that recreate exactly the trade show experience, where you're able to see and and learn about different companies, but also meet with the people face to face. And that's what I think I'm the most excited about, is just to see all the partnerships and the deals that can come when you don't have to, you know, you can save so much time without flying across the world and save so much expenses without having to set up real tradeshow booths. You can set them up virtually and then be able to adjust that at any time and host as many trade shows as you want. Like you're saying, without the financial burden or the, you know, climate burden, either without, you know, travel and, you know, um, building these booths that eventually end up in the trash or, you know, maybe get reused, but it, it, it shows a potential future of where this industry could expand. And, you know, I think trade shows will always take place in person. I'm, you know, I don't think either one of us think we're replacing trade shows, you know, but it just offers a massive opportunity to expand your trade show to a digital, you know, environment that could be open and live for a whole, you know, 24 over seven for sales or, you know, focus events that you would bring people together. Yeah. No, I mean, obviously, you know, we work with a lot of suppliers. Uh, but then we also work with a lot of customers and then obviously a lot of events, right? Customers go to events, suppliers go to events because suppliers wants to showcase what they have to offer to be able to solve customer's problems.

And they spend a lot of money on these, you know, trade show booths. And uh, customer also go to a lot of these events

to learn to gain knowledge. Um, but again, these are once a year, you know, twice a year. And because they're expensive, they're just take so much time to set up. And, um, those are still going to be around. But I think we're this virtual world is the perfect marriage or the perfect, um, you know, uh, kind of in between a, a physical trade show and then a zoom, because either one has its benefits, right? You get the network and all those things, but there's there's still space and value in both of those things. And they're going to continue however how but each of them are missing something. Right. And I think this virtual world that we've replicated of trade show, which again, part of the amazing technology you guys have built is that companies that are going to want to partner with us and work with you and I on on creating this virtual world, utilizing this virtual world, they can also customize it in the future on how they want to do different ratio, because it's a virtual world, right? Like for example, if you go to a, a, a, you know, physical trade show, you can't change it all the time. I mean, it's like it's a lot of money, right? You have the booths and you have all these things. You can't easily change things.

But in the virtual world we can, you know, customize and create a private room. Right? We can we can do a lot of things that just do it on the fly in a way. And so I think it's all about creating value and engagement, uh, for customers and then also for suppliers now. And I understand that, you know, talking through this, uh, we're kind of getting people excited about the potential, but, uh, we're also going to utilize this opportunity to, um, you know, do a second recording where we're going to be doing the recording in the virtual world to show them the virtual, uh, booth. But can you kind of give the audience a little, uh, background possibilities on how they might be able to customize it? What are some of the things they can customize if they want to even create their own virtual tradeshows? 6.6s

Absolutely. Uh, I think it'll be best to just kind of start with a visual walkthrough. Like if people can just imagine if they will, you know, um, think of an expo center in a major metropolis. You know, what we've built is very similar to an expo center, you know, like, uh, in New York City, where we're from, it's the Javits Center, you know? And so it's a it's a beautiful, large structure, um, of architecture. It's got a garden outside. And as you enter, you know, you can put your sponsors up on the wall. And that's totally swappable with what we call custom frames, which we use in the platform to be able to swap out JPEGs, GIFs, PNGs, audio files or YouTube videos. So you can drop any of those into these custom frames throughout the environment. And as you move into the lobby, you see like a info desk where you can station someone to talk to people, or they can just, you know, click on the link and then, um, give them a guide right there. Um, and then as you move in to the Expo Center, you have a main hall, which is it allows you to screen, share or live stream. Um, or you can amplify and take a mic so you can talk to a large audience. It's got a little stage area there, and that's for larger presentations or educational, um, um, uh, moments. And then as you, you know, move into the next room, the real trade show floor. 1s You have several premium booths that have 3D object uploads where you're able to upload 3D objects, whether you want it to be a logo or whether you want it to be some sort of, um, 3D representation of your product. And then you have a lot of posters, just like you would at a real trade show, that you can swap in and out on the fly with those custom frames that I was talking about. So then you have a lot of other smaller booths that are around the exterior of that that you can move around and explore. And then as people would host these trade shows, they might station their, you know, information person there that you can talk face to face with and then with the spatial audio as you move between the booths, you are only talking to the people representing that company at their booth. And then, like Victor said, if if you go like, oh, you know, we need to talk in private, um, then you just go right through a portal to their private world, um, that they have set up on nowhere. And then you can have a private conversation with them, or you can book a meeting right from a meeting link, right from one of the posters. Um, or you can read the white paper based on their company and gain much more information. So you can do essentially what you can do at a real trade show, which is go booth to booth within the virtual environment and be looking at the posters, be clicking on links, be saving them on your on your desktop or your mobile phone. Um, and then also as you're moving through the space, you have the opportunity to meet other people who are also interested in what your what the trade show is about. So, you know, if it's um, you know, I video generation, for example, and the whole trade show is on that you may run into a partner that might not have a booth there, but you may run into somebody you want to collaborate with, or you may want to bring into your team, um, because you're both interested in that subject matter. And that's the real magic of these of these trade shows is, you know, if you get the humans together and let them, you know, give them freedom to move wherever they want to move and talk to whoever. Yeah,

talk to you. And, uh, and I want to provide some

cool experiences, some of my thoughts and experiences with trade shows, too, because I've been to those as a customer. I've been there as a partner, I've been there as a supplier, you know, in the booths and, um, you know, first of all, I know, you know, the one thing that these virtual worlds are not going to have is, is alcohol, right? Uh, like a lot of people enjoy these trade shows, so it's more of a bring your own alcohol world. Yeah, yeah. Bring your own beer. Yes, but, uh. But, you know, honestly, I want to break down and give a couple examples of different use cases. Right. So, uh, one is, you know, potentially companies actually events companies, right, that are running these trade shows, uh, which is great. Right? They do, you know, a few a year and it's good money and, and all of those things. But imagine now you can also run virtual trade shows hundreds of times a year. So you have both. You have the ability to ability to increase your revenue, increase your coverage, because there's only just so many spaces and locations in time that you can get everybody together. But what if now you have this virtual world that as a separate product that you can actually sell, right, if you're running events, right. So that's that's kind of one example for event specific companies now too, is, you know, suppliers, right. Vendors. Let's say you're a software company. You are a telecom supplier company. Uh, and you want to create an event to invite some of your customers to learn about your newest products, about your newest features, or, you know, just have a virtual learning session, uh, you know, and so, again, doing a zoom is, you know, not as exciting, right? And there's not a lot of engagement. And then, uh, obviously, you know, most suppliers don't have the time and money to, you know, run a whole event, uh, trade show by themselves. And how many customers are going to come to that? You spend all this money building a trade show and then ten customers show up? Probably doesn't justify the ROI. Right? So. So what do you do? So there is something missing in this market for this virtual this ability to have a virtual, uh, even a sales hub. As John, you and I talked about a sales hub that customers can go in and learn about your product, your services, and, uh, really engage in a virtual world. And the last maybe example is on the, you know, from a customer perspective, um, meaning you're the end customer. You may want to, uh, you now imagine you have more ability to attend, more, uh, you know, lessons and learnings and technology events or all of these things that you want to learn. You want to get information, you want to find new suppliers, all those things you love about, uh, trade shows,

you can only go to so many. And right now, with the budget tightening, a lot of companies just don't even have the budget to go to these trade shows and events. Imagine more companies being able to do that, right. You have the ability to say, hey, uh, supplier, we really want to learn about this, but you guys should run a virtual event and it's very cost effective. It's a fraction of the cost of, you know, uh, a traditional kind of, uh, you know, building a full event. So there's just so many use cases. Yeah. Go ahead. John. 4.3s

Mhm. 3.4s I was just going to say, yeah. And it also opens up so many new types of channels too, because, you know, like you can since all of nowhere is built on the web, you can embed your tradeshow world into your website. 1.6s And that means also if you want to create your own booth. You know, and and have that booth live on as a sales mechanism within your website, you can you can do that as well. Um, there's also all kinds of different API integrations that you can get into where if you wanted to start to integrate this into your normal sales flow, um, and have a virtual world that was your, you know, trade show or your kind of internal trade show, if you will, where you could have a sales person drop in and meet people that were interested. You could have that live on, um, in perpetuity on the web. So, you know, and then the I think the key is that you can also have a real live trade. You could digital twin that trade show and then have people be joining that from anywhere in the world who might not have been able to fly to the, to the real life trade show, but you could have a digital twin of that real life, um, trade show as well, within nowhere. Um,

I want you to kind of, if you could, John, talk a little bit about the spatial audio, because I don't think most people maybe know or what kind of have experienced that. And kind of when I kind of saw it, it was amazing because it's really again, imagine it's really replicating the experience you have when you're in a real, you know, physical world, which is as you get closer to somebody, you hear louder and more. As you walk away further, you hear less because you're farther away from the person. And but that's actually, uh, you know, being being done in this virtual world. Can you kind of talk about

how that works? 1.8s Uh, yeah. And let's just imagine where the trade show, you know, and and we're at one booth and Victor or you and I are hanging out at this one booth talking about, you know, very source and nowhere in our partnership. And then, uh, we, we go, oh, let's go see what that company across the way is. And we can kind of hear them in the distance, you know, and that's, that's essentially what happens in nowhere, just like in real life, if somebody was about 30ft away from you, you'd kind of hear them in the distance and you'd go, you'd see their poster and you'd go, oh, let's move in that direction. So as we move in the platform over towards their booth, we will start to hear them more and more. And then as we get right up, um, near them within the platform, we will hear them at full volume. So and then it works the same way if you pull away, you know, moving backwards, if you turn in a circle, it's directional with spatial audio. So whichever direction your your voice is facing and your, your video is facing, it will project further in the platform in that way. So and I think, you know, it's important to, to let people know it's it's not hard to move in these environments either. It's just using your arrow keys. And then you're you're essentially just moving up, down and left and right. And then you move through the environment. So it's really an easy, easy way to get people to adopt to these 3D, 3D worlds. Um, and then with the spatial audio, then, you know, you can design environments, you can design, you know, full spaces that have, you know, essentially the equivalent of breakout rooms, but you just move to, you know, zone, you know, B or move to Booth B and move to Booth A, and then those will be isolated audio zones where you won't hear anything except the people that are in that area.

John, I feel like, uh, what you've created, what we're creating is a business video game. That might be 1.2s that might be another way to describe it. And, uh, you know, it's all about creating engagement, you know, doing something different. Again. Everybody's doing the same tactics and ads, and everybody go to everybody's website. It's all the same. There's no differentiator. There's no, uh, right. And so I think this there's just so many use cases, obviously, you know, we're partnering on this trade show, which I think is just such a perfect fit. But the idea is to showcase the, the technology, this virtual world, because the virtual world can be anything if you, you know, it could be for marketing, it could be for internal meetings, it could be for anything. And I think, um, that's the once people see it and experience it. Um, that's uh, that's I think people are really going to understand the power of it. Um, so maybe as a follow up, you know, uh, questions. So, you know, how does how obviously AI is kind of intertwined with everything now, um, how do you see I, uh, being a part of this, this know where journey or kind of, uh, this overall 3D world

technology. 2.3s I think they're so aligned. Hand in hand. Where this all goes in the future, you know, because one of the biggest, um, obstacles at building these type of platforms is in the 3D environment design. Because when you build in 3D, it's, you know, 15 times harder than if you were building in 2D, you know, just because you're having to deal with depth and, you know, there's amazing engines, you know, from, you know, that that are focused just on building these 3D worlds. Our game, um, our world builders on blender. It's an open source, very powerful VFX software, and they're already starting to explore how I can build 3D worlds just from a text integration. Um, and we have already incorporated within nowhere the ability to change the skybox, which is a 360 visual image that wraps every world. So you can imagine if if you could right now, wherever you're sitting, transform the exterior sky around you and change that to be the Swiss Alps or a mushroom forest or, you know, a beautiful New York City skyline. And that's all possible, right in nowhere right now with AI. So you can text to transform the entire feeling and mood of the environment with just a text prompt. Um, and that is the beginning of what will become building out full 3D world. So you can imagine in, in, you know, fairly soon we'll be able to say, oh, you want to do a trade show on, you know, um, let's say air goals and initiatives and best practices for 2024. And then you put that in, you click it, and then it basically auto populates this trade show world. And then it might show you the. Who? Who? The who. The clients that might want to be presenting within that are. And you know. And then generate an email list of outreach to them. So and then they could pop into that environment and be like oh cool. Yeah. We'll we'll do it. We'll buy a premium booth wins the event. Let's do it. Um, and it will have all, you know, basically auto filled out all of that information within the, within the platform. So a lot of that will the AI and the and the creation of 3D worlds and 3D technology. That's one direction where this goes. The other is where you see a lot of, of um, integration with sales right now, which is, which is within delivery of information through chat bots and real time communication. Um, and as we move, you know, into the future and you want to set up these sales mechanisms as, say you want to, you know, 24 over seven tradeshow that's open at all time for anybody to drop in. And then you have sales executives who are trained in your, you know, um, tech stack or your product, and they can be there to greet people 24 over seven anytime, you know, kind of like online, you know, what? We have very rudimentary right now, which is, you know, chat and you know, and and some, you know, human to I, you know, conversational um, that'll, that'll expand in these 3D worlds to real life feeling and able to communicate, um, uh, virtual assistants and, um, sales executives that then can, you know, take you one step further and then get you connected with the right humans to, to

lead you on. Yeah, I think that I mean, those are all things I, I see it, I can visualize it and I can imagine it, and I don't think it's too far away and. It's amazing. I mean, uh, you know, so when, when John and I, you know, thought about this partnership, we said there must be somebody doing something like this out there. And then we searched Google. And, you know, I would recommend everyone may be trying to search Google on virtual trade shows. And what they find is mainly, you know, a lot of 2D, uh, type of things. And, uh, it's just very static. It's like a glorified zoom with a, you know, they have rooms and, and, and all of these things, but it's 2D, so it's just like a little bit glorified, uh, like I said, zoom call. And so it doesn't give you that engagement. Uh, imagine really walking into a 3D world but without. Right, the, the virtual reality glasses and all those things. Um, so I would summarize maybe, you know, this, this partnership and this new game changing virtual world of trade shows. Um, you know, I think the benefits I would summarize into a couple of things, right? One is a huge differentiator for any company, uh, that is looking to, to have their product and services or company and brand, right. Differentiate it, uh, to a scale. You know, when we talk about scale, it's all about, again, how many trade show physical trade shows can you run? Uh, you know, and, uh, you know, not many, right? In a year, but in a virtual environment, the scale is it could be hundreds. It could be thousands, right. And however many you can do it daily, you could do it hourly. You could do it set up one and leave it for 24 hours and not do anything. And then the last thing I would say, um, is lead generation, which uh, which, you know, for a lot of suppliers and everyone is super important, meaning now more people are going to be able to see your products, see your services, and be able to schedule meetings. We're going to have scheduling meetings. Uh, you're able to input your, you know, uh, meeting links. So it's all about lead generation. And

that's the ROI, an

ROI that's 24 seven. It's always there, right? Once you leave the trade show, that's it. You take whatever lead you got. This is imagine that ability. But 24/7, 365 anytime, anywhere. And the customer can access at any time. They don't have to wait for, you know, July of 2024 to find out about your service. Right? Because they're waiting for the trade show. Is there anything else you would add

to that, John? 5.8s I think you did a great job summarizing that up, I think. What I'm really excited about is to see how others will take these, you know, and start to create their own trade shows and start to create their own environments. You know, which is something we haven't really touched on is like, you know, once we launch this partnership and get up and running, you know, there's I imagine people are going to want to build their own expo centers, you know, to have running 24 over seven, like you're saying, on their own websites and their own services. And I think that's where this is going to get really interesting, seeing all the worlds that are developed. You know, when you don't have to play by the rules of, of gravity and, and with, um, with traditional, you know, trade show environments, you know, where will that where would that lead us in the future for connecting people in these sales leads? Um, when people have the, the ability to design any environment. No, I love

it. Um, so as we wrap up here, you know, the last question we always ask every guest is, um, you've seen a lot. You've done a lot. First, I didn't know about the working in the circus, uh, background, which is that. That is amazing. That's why you're so creative, I guess. But, uh, but you've seen a lot. Done a lot. If you have to give one personal and or business advice that you're passionate about, I guess. What what what do you think that advice would

be? 11.8s Man. That's hard to boil it down to one, huh? Um. 4.7s I think that for me, um, you know, there's a saying that, uh, that always haunts me and in particular in the US, which is, uh, um, it's business. It's not personal. 1.2s And I think that that gets us into a lot of trouble. And I think for me. And why I love working with you, Victor. Is it, you know, we're we're two humans meeting that have a shared vision and a shared excitement and our goals aligned. And, you know, it's about human connection, business, you know, so the moment you remove it from being about human connection is when people start taking advantages of those relationships. And I think that, you know, all businesses personal. And that's how I like to, to conduct, you know, the companies that I've created and the, the, the type of culture that we like to, to curate and cultivate and nowhere. And my previous company, Windmill Factory, is that treating everybody with respect and, you know, communicating clearly and treating every relationship as a personal relationship because then you can grow, I think, stronger and, and have a much better culture and putting much better, um, products and, and creative into the world, you know, because the more brains the better. Yeah. No, I love that. Um, you know, to me, obviously businesses are created to some degree to solve problems, right. Uh, but at the same time, I think, you know, what we try to do. And I think that's why we love, love working with you is, yes, we want to help customers solve problems, make things better. But at the same time, we're also trying to help make their lives like the personal life better. Right. And, uh, so, so no, we're doing it through technology. And again, super excited to, uh, partner with you guys to create this really first ever, truly first ever, uh, you know, virtual world for, for tradeshow

events. And I'm super excited to, uh, sync up again and record that, uh, record the follow up in the virtual

world. 2.5s Excellent. We're super excited too. Can't wait.

Thanks. Thanks for joining us, John. 2.4s

That was an amazing episode of the Spend Advantage podcast, where we show you how we can help you ten x your bottom line savings and top line growth for your

business. Hope you enjoy the

conversation and if you want to get the best deals from the guest today, make sure to send us a message at sales@varisource.com.

Spend Advantage Podcast

First Ever 3D Virtual World Trade Show

Listen to this podcast on