Articles & tools
Pre-event intelligence briefings, category-pattern essays, and free tools, built by the team behind Met.
Article · June 17, 2026
Four floors of expo, 29 tracks, 6,000 practitioners. The badges scan clean. The context behind them is what you actually lose. Here is how to work the room.
Article · June 10, 2026
Forgetting the name of someone you just met isn't a character flaw. It's a predictable outcome of divided attention, and the fix is a system, not a memory trick.
Article · June 9, 2026
This is the first ISTELive where the host organization is also a vendor's distribution channel: in February, ISTE+ASCD signed a multi-year deal to put Google's Gemini and free training in front of six million US educators. The conference floor in Orlando is where that deal, and the neutrality question it raises, gets walked in person.
Article · June 5, 2026
BIO 2026 opens with Amazon Bio Discovery weeks old, U.S. biotech rounds at a five-year low per S&P Global, and Trump's 100 percent drug import tariffs reshaping every manufacturing conversation in San Diego.
Article · June 5, 2026
Most scanners are built for the one-card office moment, not the hundred-card reception. Here are the four design failures that surface at scale, and what gets it right.
Article · June 3, 2026
Javits Center, June 17, free admission, more than 145 sessions. AWS arrives in New York having announced end-of-support for its own Amazon Q Developer coding assistant while committing up to $25B more to Anthropic and 5 gigawatts of new compute, a clear bet on owning the model-and-infrastructure layer rather than the developer tool. Last year the summit was laser-focused on AI. This year the question is who pays for it.
Article · June 3, 2026
San Antonio, June 15 to 18. Roughly 6,000 attendees and 370-plus exhibitors arrive after a year that drew more than $1B into hospitality tech and pushed 82% of hotels to expand their AI use, into a market where flat RevPAR and rising costs have turned every tool on the floor into a margin argument. The adoption debate is over. The payback debate is the one worth flying for.
Tool · June 1, 2026
Estimate how many cards you'll collect at an event, and how many hours of follow-up that buries you in by the Tuesday after.
Article · May 20, 2026
Apple Park, June 8 to 12. This is the last WWDC keynote with Tim Cook in the CEO chair before John Ternus takes over September 1. iOS 27 is the canvas. The revamped Siri is the headline. And the platform transition from the longest-tenured Apple CEO to a hardware-engineer successor is the subtext underneath every demo.
Article · May 20, 2026
Las Vegas, May 31 to June 4. Cisco walks in with two announced acquisitions pointed at AI (Galileo for observability, Astrix for agentic-workforce security), a Quantum Switch prototype the company is comparing to TCP/IP, a deepening NVIDIA stack, a record Q3, and 4,000 layoffs on the books. The product story is loud. The restructuring story underneath it is the read worth flying for.
Article · May 19, 2026
Amsterdam, June 2-4. The 2025 themes were stablecoins and instant payments. The 2026 theme announced itself in the pre-event chatter: the Agentic Age, when AI stops asking and starts moving money. The demos are ready. The European regulatory substrate underneath them is not, and that gap is the show.
Article · May 19, 2026
Build moved to San Francisco and compressed to two days. The headline wrote itself in the pre-event signal: Copilot Cowork, agents that build the app, and a multi-model stack that quietly includes Claude. The developer story is loud. The partner-channel story underneath it is the one worth flying for.
Article · May 19, 2026
Two weeks out from Baltimore, the storyline is already set: the first TechNet Cyber under Trump's new National Cyber Strategy and the $1.5T FY27 budget. The money and the doctrine arrive together. Whether they arrive resourced is the question the hallway will actually argue about.
Article · May 6, 2026
Most contact apps treat scanned cards as a flat list. The reader walks out of a conference with 47 captures and no way to tell the live-deal six from the polite-handshake forty-one. Four questions, applied in the next 72 hours, separate the pile. The follow-up half-life does the rest.
Article · May 5, 2026
The category has spent fifteen years competing on scan accuracy. The audience keeps writing the same review: the scan worked, the follow-up never went. The 72-hour window is the actual product, and the apps that optimize for OCR are losing their users to a problem they don't sell against.
Article · May 1, 2026
Every CRM in existence starts the contact's life at lead. None of them start at card. The 48 hours between meeting someone and deciding they belong in your pipeline is the moment all of them ignore, and it's the moment that decides everything that comes after.
Article · May 1, 2026
Doors open tomorrow at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center. The Corps is using its 250th anniversary to frame what comes next, the budget conversation has shifted, and the autonomy hand-off the service signaled in 2025 is showing up at specific booths this week. Here's what to walk the floor looking for.
Article · May 1, 2026
Three weeks out from Tampa, the year's storyline is already half-written. The first SOF Week under Adm. Bradley. The first since the Global SOF Foundation's $24-billion budget framing landed. And the first where the AI-integration prime fight stops being theoretical. Here's what to actually watch for.
Article · May 1, 2026
After a conference, the people you met become anonymous fast. Most contact apps focus on the moment they're scanned — not the moment you'd actually need to remember them. This is what changes when you reverse the order.
Article · May 1, 2026
Templates exist to skip the part of a follow-up that actually matters: the sentence that proves you remember the conversation. The category solved the wrong problem. Here's what the working follow-ups look like, and why they don't fit on a template page.