Last chance to register for the launch of The Westminster Collection’s new identity

There is just a few days left for event buyers to register for their place at leading venue consortium, The Westminster Collection’s glamourous launch event to unveil its re-brand including new name, website and identity.

In an innovative and exciting move for the collection, the new branding will be revealed at Central Hall Westminster on 12 December, and will create a more contemporary, engaging and intuitive event booking system that allows event professionals from around the world to access 34 unique Westminster venues at the click of a button.

The full new-look branding will be revealed exclusively to those in attendance at the launch event which will also give guests the chance to meet and network with the collection’s member venues as well as industry peers and key media.

Entertainment will be in abundance on the night with music provided by member venue St Martin-in-the-Field’s resident choir St Martin’s Voices and guests can get snap-happy with a photo booth provided by PhotoBooth Magic, a preferred supplier for the collection.

Following an introduction from The Westminster Collection’s chair Clare Arouche, Rob Chambers, collection board member and events manager at London Film Museum, will deliver an opening speech highlighting the key features of the new website, the thought-process behind the branding and plans for the collection’s future.

Those in attendance on the night will also have the chance to win one of ‘12 treats of Christmas’ as well as the ultimate ‘Westminster Way’ grand prize with everything needed for the perfect Westminster day out including two tickets to the London Transport Museum, lunch for two at One Great George Street, afternoon tea at Conrad London St James and dinner at the Lansdowne Club.

Chair of The Westminster Collection, Clare Arouche said: “We, as a collection, are thrilled to be able to reveal our re-brand and new website that offers event buyers and planners an even more efficient way of accessing a host of premium and diverse Westminster venues all in one place. A lot of work, research and development has taken place to ensure that the new website offers today’s time-poor planners all of the functionality they need to easily access, enquire and book prestigious venues in the heart of London. The news marks a dynamic time of change and development for the well-established collection.”

To pre-register for your place at The Westminster Collection’s exciting re-brand showcase contact Verity Lethbridge on [email protected] before Big Ben strikes midnight on Sunday, 11 December.

Places are strictly limited and The Westminster Collection reserve the right to qualify your event planning credentials in order to confirm your place.

Church House Westminster invests in the future!

Church House Westminster has invested a further £330,000 in state-of-the-art AV services – installing 4K dual projection in its largest room, the Assembly Hall as well as upgrading its sound system.

Installed in August, the new sound and projection system, which enables clients to choose from a range of high quality screen layouts, were used for the first time during The Art Business Conference on Thursday, 1 September. All projection is now in 16:9 widescreen format, in line with PowerPoint 2010 and beyond. The venue can also now provide 4K projection on a standard screen or up to 8k image on an ultra-wide screen. Clients can choose between a curved wide screen, an extra wide screen, a centre screen stage set or a dual screen stage set.

The new investment opens up a whole new range of opportunities for Church House Westminster’s clients to enhance their content and delegate experience by delivering high quality images and video, and by providing them with the ability to project multiple images on screen at any one time. The new stage will also allow far more versatility and flexibility for the increasing range of events that are delivered at Church House Westminster.

The venue has always invested in high specification equipment and infrastructure. Currently this includes high speed networked internet services via fibre and cat 6 cabling enabling delivery of video conferencing, and IPTV video relay. Church House Westminster also provides broadcast quality HD recording and streaming services and has an editing suite to produce professional videos.

To find out more about Church House Westminster or to make a booking enquiry click here.

The Clubhouse opens new flagship site

The Clubhouse, London’s leading business club and meeting space has opened a new flagship site on St. James’s Square, one of London’s most prestigious garden squares and one of the Capital’s most prominent businesses addresses.

The brand new building at 8 St James’s Square was designed by renowned architect Eric Parry and sits on a site that was once home to Josiah Wedgwood, founder of Wedgwood Pottery. With an interior designed to a high specification the space redefines the concept of flexible working and boasts a stylish members’ club feel. The new Clubhouse has been designed around the needs of its members and offers a unique, sophisticated and flexible meeting and work space tailored to the needs of today’s entrepreneurs and growing businesses.

Home to businesses of all shapes and sizes and across all industry sectors, The Clubhouse offers a range of individually designed meeting rooms, hot desks, lounge areas, dedicated desks, flexible meeting areas, a Club deli, event spaces and conference facilities for up to 80 delegates. In addition, The Clubhouse has launched its first innovation hub with a fully interactive video wall in partnership with MultiTaction.

For more information or to enquire about your next event click here.

Central Hall Westminster launches new virtual reality experience in China

Central Hall Westminster announced the launch of its new virtual reality (VR) experience during a week-long visit to China.

It was showcased at the IT&CM Exhibition Shanghai, the Department of Commerce in Zhejiang Province and at a meeting with the team at Alibaba HQ Hangzhou.

Central Hall’s new virtual reality technology aims to showcase the venue’s versatility and range of event spaces to both international and UK buyers. The VR experience not only enables viewers to get a 360 degree view of the event spaces on offer throughout the central London venue in a virtual show-round, but also features a variety of live events scenarios as a fully immersive viewing experience. VR live events include the BBC’s New Year’s Bryan Adam’s concert 2015, amongst other high profile events.

Paul Southern, Managing Director at Central Hall Westminster, said: “This has been an exciting development for us at Central Hall. Our ability to harness this technology and connect the venue to the most remote places in China, and indeed anywhere else in the world we take it, is an extraordinary advance within our sales process. We anticipate that this will help to strengthen our position within the Chinese market as we continue to develop relationships in this sector.”

Maria Schuett, Head of Marketing at Central Hall Westminster, added: “The objective is to support our clients to conceptualise their ideas within our flexible event spaces, not replace the physical experience. The new virtual reality package, showcasing various layouts, productions and visual settings, adds a new dimension to those earlier discussions with clients.”

The VR experience has been created by Trek Wireless, creators of interactive digital assets for the retail and hospitality industries that work seamlessly across PC, tablet, mobile and VR devices. For further information about Central Hall’s virtual reality offering please visit https://www.c-h-w.com/vr.

Cavendish Conference Centre to reveal new look at October showcase

Cavendish Conference Centre is hosting a special evening on Thursday 1st October 2015 to let you experience the venue in a light you’ll never before have seen. Corporate event bookers are invited to register now to secure your place. Email [email protected] and join the conversation on twitter via hashtag #CavShowcase15.

The Oxford Circus venue, which scooped the title ‘Best Conference Venue Customer Service’ at the recent Conference Awards 2015, has invested in new technology and updated furnishings in both The Auditorium and the Whittington Suite, which is an ideal space for product launches and AGMs for up to 250 guests. The venue has already welcomed the likes of Blackberry and the Royal Television Society within the newly refurbished spaces.

Dermot Waldron, Operations Director and partner at Cavendish Venues, spoke of the aims of the renovation project: “Our clients are our future and we invest for the future. This major financial investment into what is already a state-of-the-art venue only goes to further enhance the status and service that we provide to our clients – that’s been a winning formula for the last 20 years, which we look to continue for the next 20. It’s a very exciting time ahead for the team at Cavendish Venues. With this development showing our clients to be at the forefront of our ambitions, we make achieving their objectives smooth with the latest amenities so that every event works seamlessly.”

Discover more about Cavendish Conference Centre here.

Broadway House invests in presentation tech with 95-inch Samsung LED

EEF Venues at Broadway House in Westminster has invested in a 95-inch Samsung ME95C LED display in its Council Chamber room to enhance visual communication for meetings, conferences and training sessions. The world’s first 95-inch large format display in brilliant FHD delivers rich, dynamic and impactful content.

The advantages to delegates are many, as Amanda Sutton, venue manager for Broadway House, explains: “Unlike projected images in a darkened room, this digital signage presentation tool retains picture quality with broad colour ratios, deep blacks and sharp images, even in bright light.

“Content shown on the display screen has virtually no distortion. Images aren’t blurred when the screen is touched. The presenter isn’t dazzled by light from a projector, nor does the presenter throw a shadow on the screen. The reduced light scatter and reduced reflection make the content easier to read, increasing audience concentration and productivity. Another bonus is that the presentation area is free from machinery and cables.”

Broadway House is a six-storey Edwardian building at the heart of Westminster, making it a very popular choice for ministerial meetings and press conferences. It is directly opposite St James’s Park tube station, and a 10-minute walk from Victoria, Waterloo and Charing Cross, so it couldn’t be any more convenient for city meetings.

To enquire about holding an event at Broadway House, click here.

Central Hall to crowd-source Meet The Future conference content

Central Hall Westminster‘s next ‘Meet The Future‘ event technology conference on 9th June will feature Corbin Ball, writer and specialist with 20 years’ event technology experience, Neuroscientist Dr Beau Lotto and BBC technology journalist Kate Russell, while the rest of the day’s content line-up will be entirely crowd-sourced by delegates.

As part of the registration process, delegates must choose the topics they would most like to see covered in breakout sessions, with the most popular choices forming the basis of the agenda. The leading topics are currently audience engagement, location-based technology (iBeacons, NFC and RFID) and big data.

Maria Schuett, head of marketing at Central Hall and Meet The Future conference producer, says: “Our 2014 event was such a huge success, many felt it would be hard to follow. This year, however, we’re not only giving busy event buyers the chance to experience flash new tech as delegates, but taking the concept a step further and looking at how tech helps us to create better programmes and levels of engagement for organisers. Having Corbin involved is hugely exciting and we’ve got more than a few surprises up our sleeves for the day, so watch this space!”

A limited number of tickets for Meet The Future are available to senior event professionals by visiting www.c-h-w.com/future

Cavendish rolls out free superfast broadband

Cavendish Conference Centre is now able to offer its delegates free superfast broadband throughout its Oxford Circus site. The centre can offer synchronised upload and download speeds of 50mgb, scalable beyond that on request, with industry leading SLAs. Internally the lines are backed up with two alternative business quality ADSL lines with separate providers for full resilience.

This is an investment into the centre’s facilities, designed to improve the on-site experience for all delegates using the facilities for meetings, training events, conferences and team building. With 8 rooms available in the centre for capacities up to 250, Cavendish has something to suit every professional conference & event organiser.

World first holographic telepresence over 4G at 8 Northumberland Avenue

By Sami Badrakhan, marketing executive, 8 Northumberland Avenue

On 26th January Charles Boyd, director and owner of 8 Northumberland Avenue and Ian O’Connell, director of Musion, brought 4G holographic telepresence to 8 Northumberland Avenue‘s ballroom using the ready-installed Musion technology. They were conducting a Q&A session but only Charles was present in the venue. Ian was on the other side of London being ‘transported’ as a 3D hologram via 4G wireless technology onto the stage at 8 Northumberland Avenue.

This ability to reproduce, between different locations, the best characteristics of direct human interaction that result from face-to-face meetings has been in existence for many years.  So how is this so unique and a significant improvement to the events industry?

Telepresence normally requires an expensive fibre optic cable and a dedicated network management system operating between two venues.  It’s been no coincidence that telecoms companies were the only ones able to afford this, because they could use their own lines. This new technology, using eight 4G SIM cards in a box all working together to stabilise the signal to deliver the 3D image seen, reduces the cost enormously.

Telepresence is a well-known technology to aid a reduction in event costs and indeed carbon footprint. There’s no need to go to the expense of flying a keynote speaker over from New York and paying for their accommodation. But as Ian highlighted, using 3D holographic telepresence over 4G goes further and creates a “truly live experience, more immersive than talking to someone via a 2-dimensional screen. It enables people physically located in one meeting room to see 3D holographic images of people in another location, as if they were sitting opposite them”.

8 Northumberland Avenue has already seen the benefits of using this technology.  Speaking at the event Charles Boyd said: “We are focused on being at the forefront of technology advancements to ensure our clients receive the highest return possible on their event investment by amplifying their messages. We’ve already seen this for ourselves at the event we hosted for corporate buyers last month.  We’ve reached a far wider audience than those who just attended the event.  We’ve had an increase in social media activity with new followers,  press coverage and some great feedback.”

To find out more about how this technology can benefit your next event contact the team at 8 Northumberland Avenue.

Free webinar: The Event App Challenge

Central Hall Westminster is hosting a free webinar featuring a panel of industry experts who will debate ‘The Event App Challenge – costs, logistics & engagement’

Thursday, 5th February 2015
09.00am – 10.15am

The events industry is talking ‘apps’ but are your questions answered?

What is the service scope of event apps?

Which one is right for your events?

What is the actual cost of an event app?

What is the planning process?

… and most importantly…usage. How do you drive engagement successfully?

Central Hall Westminster’s expert panel will include 3 event app providers (servicing low, medium to high end market segments), an engagement specialist and representatives from the industry.

The session will give you a solid understanding of the opportunities/challenges involved to enhance the event experience through apps, covering practical questions, feasibility, shared best practice and more.

Join this free webinar online at 9am on Thursday 5th February and get a head start to ‘tech-proof’ your future events.

REGISTER HERE: www.c-h-w.com/webinar