Bizzabo Acquires Whalebone to Humanize Digital Events

Announcing our latest move to help the world’s top brands create shared experiences by bringing the energy of a live audience to virtual & hybrid events.

Powering tens of thousands of virtual events over the past year, we realized that by not seeing or hearing the crowd, event organizers and speakers were struggling to understand and connect with their audience and vice versa.

That’s where Whalebone comes in.

I’m thrilled to announce Bizzabo’s acquisition of Whalebone’s Crowd technology, which enhances the audience, organizer, and speaker experience and humanizes digital interactions. 

This is Bizzabo’s first acquisition, marking an exciting milestone in our company’s history. This move solidifies Bizzabo’s commitment to elevating event experiences by creating shared moments between stakeholders at all events – in-person, virtual, or hybrid. Whalebone’s technology brings the virtual audience to life and makes events feel more interactive, exciting, and human.

Live audiences produce energy and shared moments that amplify emotional involvement and human interactions of attendees and everyone involved at events. Without those magical shared moments, many event participants tell us they get bored, experience ‘FOMO,’ or feel unheard and uninfluential.

With this acquisition, we will fill that void by adding the ‘human’ element we’re all craving. With Whalebone’s technology, speakers and attendees can feel the energy we seek from in-person events, through the screen, resulting in a shared, connected, and more meaningful experience.

Whalebone’s Technology

Whalebone’s cutting-edge technology simulates the live audience by making it possible to hear and visualize the online crowd, bridging the gap between virtual and in-person. Whalebone uses deep learning, sensors, and interaction analysis to interpret the audience’s activity in real-time and generate highly responsible sounds as well as immersive visualizations. 

With Whalebone, we have the power to create holistic events that ensure virtual attendees have a unique visual and audio-like experience. Beyond crowd noise and visualizations, Whalebone’s cutting-edge crowd technology will be used to close the feedback loop between speakers and their audiences, thus visualizing real-time engagement at virtual events.

There are two aspects of this new technology: crowd amplification and crowd visualization.

The crowd amplification generates hyper-realistic sounds like clapping, cheering, and buzz to give speakers real-time feedback and enable them and the organizer to better understand the audience sentiment. Attendees can show their support the same way they would in-person and share their excitement with the entire audience, creating a more human and connected experience while driving engagement. The crowd visualization creates a vivid birds-eye view of the audience in real-time, simulating a natural crowd and delivering an intimate and connected experience. 

Driving the Future of Events

The Whalebone acquisition reinforces Bizzabo’s mission to elevate the experiences of virtual and hybrid events. We are excited and humbled to be partnering with the Whalebone team and to bring their cutting-edge crowd technology and expertise to our customers.

Whalebone’s Co-Founder and CEO, Edward Cederlund, echoed our excitement, telling us “Bizzabo is committed to bringing people together and making events rewarding for everyone involved – organizers, speakers, sponsors, and attendees. Plus, their customer-centric approach has helped them to keep their offering scalable and agile in the rapidly evolving industry of events.”

He expressed that they were equally as passionate about our mission, “We at Whalebone have a similar calling and approach, which is why we’re excited to join Bizzabo’s team to reimagine event experiences.” which makes us all the more confident in our partnership together. 

The Whalebone crowd technology acquisition is just one of many ways we are creating truly integrated experiences. We intend to live up to our title of being “a Leader,” as Forrester named Bizzabo in The Forrester Wave™: B2B Marketing Events Management Solutions, Q1 2021 report by continuously investing in the hybrid future of events.