In Case You Missed It
TSNN’s editors recently offered an inside look at Lenovo’s keynote at the Sphere during last month’s CES. The evening event showcased an impressive lineup of tech industry bigwigs and flashy product launches. Read the full story here, plus our recap on CES 2026, the Consumer Technology Association’s annual trade show that drew 148,000 attendees in its strongest post-pandemic showing yet, here.
Event Technology We’re Excited About This Month
To help attendees navigate complex event footprints
Map Your Show has launched a new Attendee Floor Plan designed to make large, multi-location events easier to explore, navigate, and plan in real time. The upgraded solution features a refreshed design and location-aware functionality that brings sessions, exhibitors, and key amenities directly into the map experience, allowing attendees to search, browse, and get point-to-point directions across an entire event campus—from individual halls to surrounding buildings and city context—while giving organizers richer insight into onsite engagement.
“Map Your Show is already known for the best floor plans. Our all-new attendee version sets the bar even higher,” said Don Kline, CEO of Map Your Show. “The new Attendee Floor Plan puts more information in front of attendees when they need it by placing critical event details and session information directly within the map. Attendees can now spend less time looking for what they need and more time engaging with the event.”
Map Your Show has launched a new Attendee Floor Plan designed to make large, multi-location events easier to explore, navigate, and plan in real time. Image: MapYourShow
To turn event education into measurable engagement
eShow and NoteAffect have announced a strategic partnership aimed at helping event organizers use education as a core engagement and revenue strategy. By integrating NoteAffect’s interactive learning and AI-powered content tools into the eShow event app, the partnership allows organizers to record sessions, support live note-taking and multilingual captions, capture attendee questions, and generate chaptered replays with AI summaries. The goal is to give planners clearer insight into what content resonates—so they can program, repurpose, promote, and monetize education more effectively before, during, and after the event.
“Even in a world of economic and geopolitical uncertainty, education is a variable that events can actually control and use to their advantage as a top reason to attend, extend their reach, and generate new revenue,” said Jay Tokosch, CEO and founder of NoteAffect. Added eShow CEO and founder, Raju Patel: “eShow makes it easy for organizers to manage their entire event in one place where the data and attendee experience pairs seamlessly with NoteAffect through the eShow event app to maximize engagement before, during, and after the event.”
By integrating NoteAffect’s interactive learning and AI-powered content tools into the eShow event app, the partnership allows organizers to record sessions, support live note-taking and multilingual captions, capture attendee questions, and generate chaptered replays with AI summaries. Image: NoteAffect
To speed up trade show booth design without sacrificing quality
ExpoBooth.ai has launched a new AI-powered trade show booth design service aimed at helping booth builders, agencies, and exhibitors create high-impact concepts in seconds rather than hours. Built specifically for the realities of exhibition timelines, the service uses proprietary AI models, structured workflows, and human oversight to rapidly generate booth concepts, pitch-ready renders, cinematic 3D videos, immersive walkthroughs, and technical visuals—allowing teams to explore more creative directions, reduce early-stage design costs, and move faster from idea to approval while maintaining brand accuracy.
“Exhibition teams shouldn’t have to choose between speed and quality,” said the CEO and co-founder of ExpoBooth.ai in a statement. “ExpoBooth.ai helps creative and commercial teams move faster, generating compelling booth concepts and visual assets quickly, then refining them with human oversight so the final output stays on-brand and pitch-ready.”
To simplify how exhibitors source and compare booth builders
Exhibitorly has launched a U.S.-focused platform designed to help trade show exhibitors more easily compare and source exhibit builders ahead of major events. Addressing a long-standing lack of transparency in exhibit sourcing, the platform allows teams to identify relevant builders for specific shows, request quotes, and evaluate options in one centralized place—rather than relying on referrals, legacy relationships, or last-minute outreach. Built for corporate marketing teams and event managers across industries, Exhibitorly aims to reduce risk, improve decision-making, and bring more structure and accountability to one of the most costly and complex parts of exhibiting.
To give event teams automated support across planning, on-site, and follow-up
RainFocus has introduced RainFocus Nexus, a new AI-driven collaboration framework designed to act as a team of specialized AI agents that support event marketers, planners, and sales teams throughout the event lifecycle. Built as a secure, cloud-agnostic system, RainFocus Nexus shifts event technology from manual configuration to goal-based execution—allowing users to set objectives while AI agents handle complex setup, attendee guidance, on-site decision-making, and data flow across existing martech and revops stacks, all with human-in-the-loop governance and enterprise-grade interoperability.
“We’re charting the evolution from a static ‘system of record’ to a dynamic ‘system of context,’” said Marius Milcher, vice president of platform strategy and AI at RainFocus. “Central to this vision is the architecture of a dedicated Context Layer designed to understand and support the ‘messy middle’ involved in events marketing orchestration. By laying this foundation, we enable agents to become intuitive teammates for your planners, marketers, and sales reps — proactively anticipating the next best action to turn your event into a responsive growth engine.”
To manage events entirely inside Salesforce, without friction
Blackthorn has outlined a new platform vision focused on making Salesforce-native event management easier, more flexible, and more accessible for modern event teams. The vision centers on uniting event and business data directly in Salesforce as a single source of truth, while introducing a more intuitive planning experience, branded event design tools, and an AI-powered intelligence layer to help teams measure impact in real time. Together, these updates aim to help organizations manage everything from webinars to large-scale conferences without relying on disconnected tools or deep Salesforce expertise.
“Event teams are being asked to do more than ever—deliver exceptional experiences, prove business impact, and operate seamlessly within Salesforce,” said Chris Federspiel, CEO of Blackthorn. “Our new platform vision is about removing friction for planners, elevating attendee experiences, and unlocking the full value of Salesforce-native event data, without forcing teams to compromise on scale, flexibility, or insight.”
To help stand builders create booth designs and quotes faster—without adding headcount
Boothly is a new AI-powered design platform launching at the end of February 2026 with a clear goal: helping exhibition stand builders get high-quality concepts and quotes out the door fast enough to win business. Built specifically for the realities of the exhibition industry, Boothly allows builders to input stand size, budget, layout, and brand assets, then generate professional 3D booth concepts with itemized costs in minutes—not days. The platform is designed to reflect real-world constraints like traffic flow, modular systems, and build economics, enabling teams to explore unlimited design variations under their own branding while making smaller projects more viable and scaling capacity during busy periods.
“We’re not replacing designers,” said Joe Everley, founder of Boothly. “We’re eliminating the bottleneck. A builder handling 150 quotes annually could potentially handle 500. Or they focus on high-value projects while still serving smaller clients profitably. It’s about having the capacity to say yes more often.”
Boothly is a new AI-powered design platform launching at the end of February 2026 with a clear goal: helping exhibition stand builders get high-quality concepts and quotes out the door fast enough to win business. Image: Boothly
The Latest Tech Briefs, Promotions, Funding, and Merger News
SITE has selected Cvent as its Official Event Technology Partner through 2028, formalizing a three-year collaboration across SITE’s global event portfolio. The partnership will see Cvent powering registration, mobile apps, on-site check-in, engagement, and analytics to help SITE deliver more connected, data-informed, and attendee-centric incentive travel events worldwide.
GoLucid has launched the Certified EventTech Classification Initiative (CECI), a new industry-led framework designed to bring clearer language, structure, and standards to the fragmented event technology landscape. Built with input from vendors and industry experts, CECI aims to help buyers more easily understand and compare event tech solutions while giving providers clearer positioning and shared definitions as the sector continues to grow.
Automation expert Zak Homuth has joined creative agency Pie Factory to help transform its Tradeshow Impact Manager (TIM) into an AI-driven sustainability tool that lets exhibitors measure their booth’s carbon footprint using only a smartphone. The next-generation TIM will automate emissions mapping at scale—using camera-based analysis and a network of AI tools—to give brands faster, more accessible insight into the environmental impact of trade show builds.
