Happy Monday everyone! We hope you had a great weekend.

As always we are helping ease you back into the working week with a round-up of last week’s main event industry news, including any interesting stories and insights that can help you improve yourself, your company, or your events.

Enjoy!

EVENT NEWS

These Award Winning Events Reveal Their Secrets to Success [Eventbrite Blog]

The results of The UK Event Awards have been announced, celebrating the very best corporate, brand and consumer events staged by UK-based organisers in 2016 and 2015.

We took a closer look at some of the award-winning events and examine how they exceeded expectations.

 MARKETING

How the Brain Processes Different Types of Content [Hubspot]

Did you know that the human brain processes videos 60,000 times faster than text? This is just one of the many fascinating facts you’ll learn about in this infographic from Hubspot.

How to Use Paid Social Media to Beat Your Competition [Eventbrite Blog]

We all know that phrase ‘You’ve got to spend money to make money,’ and it’s not always true. But more often than not when it comes to social media promotion, you do have to pay to play.

That’s not great news for everyone, but if you’ve got some budget, and you’re willing to take the time to spend it wisely, then it’s great news. We’ve compiled this guide on how to use paid social media that will give you an advantage over your competition.

TECHNOLOGY

This Unbelievable App Is Like Shazam for Faces [Inc.]

Augmented reality app Blippar already has a huge database of everyday objects and images that it can recognise. But now, the app is also learning to recognise faces as well. Facial recognition is nothing new of course–you may already be using it to unlock your smartphone. And searchable databases of images are not all that new either.

But put the two together, and you have something that could be incredibly useful, albeit a little invasive.

Coffee from a chatbot: Starbucks unveils ‘My Starbucks Barista’ AI technology for mobile orders [GeekWire]

Coffee giant Starbucks will join the growing wave of companies using artificial intelligence and chatbots to supplement human employees, releasing what it calls an “innovative conversational ordering system” for its mobile app called “My Starbucks Barista.”

PRODUCTIVITY

10 Entrepreneurs Share Their Secrets to Staying Focused [Entrepreneur]

In a world filled with distractions – social media, email, candy crush – staying focused can be very difficult. Find out how these 10 successful entrepreneurs stay focused.

10 Tips to Speed Up Your Event’s Website [Eventbrite Blog]

As an independent events professional looking to increase your ticket sales, your website plays a huge role in your business, from branding to lead generation. Whether it’s a blog, brochure style website or the core of your business, increasing the speed of your website will do wonders for your conversion rate, bounce rate and balance sheet. Check out this article to find out some of the things you can work on to increase your website’s loading speed to get ahead of the competition.

IN OTHER NEWS…

This is Amazon’s grocery store of the future: no cashiers, no registers, and no lines [Business Insider]

If you ever wondered what the future of shopping is, Amazon has given us a view of what’s to come! Instead of using physical money to make purchases in Amazon’s store, Amazon Go, shoppers will use an app, also called Amazon Go, to automatically add the products they plan to buy to a digital shopping cart; they can then walk out of the building without waiting in a checkout line.