Surprise! HLTH conference group sold to UK’s Hyve Group Limited

November 7, 2024 | by

HLTH sold one week after signature Las Vegas event. (That was fast!) The buyer is London’s Hyve Group Limited, an international event organizer across retail, marketing (POSSIBLE, acquired in July), education tech, fintech, fashion, and other manufacturing, mining, and engineering-related industries. HLTH is Hyve’s first conference in healthcare. HLTH as an organizer also encompasses HLTH Europe coming up in Amsterdam 16-19 June 2025 and for digital health, ViVE in Nashville 16-19 February 2025.

According to Hyve’s release and Trade Show News Network , HLTH is their #1 conference by revenue, with ViVE not far behind at #4. ViVE will continue to include the annual conference of CHIME, which split from HIMSS before their acquisition by Informa). It is also Hyve’s second acquisition from HLTH founder/CEO Jonathan Weiner, who sold ShopTalk to Hyve in December 2019. Weiner will remain at the helm of HLTH for the foreseeable future along with 80 employees in their New York, Dublin, and London offices. The acquisition also gives UK-based Hyve a larger footprint in the highly competitive North American and US trade show market, and introduces them to a fresh group of new contacts at major players such as Google, Meta, Johnson & Johnson, Microsoft, Amazon, and providers such as Mayo Clinic.

Acquisition terms were not disclosed. Surprisingly not covered by the healthcare business press, except for HIStalk 30 Oct to which we tip our hat. Also Trade Show Executive

Soapbox: Kicking the ‘Tweet the Meeting’ habit

July 24, 2014 | by | 4 Comments

[grow_thumb image=”https://telecareaware.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/twitterban-590×330.jpg” thumb_width=”150″ /]It’s time to go cold turkey. One of the hallmarks of being active on healthcare tech or digital health scene is Twitter. Even more than LinkedIn groups, websites and blogs, it’s how increasingly we communicate with and acknowledge each other in the field. But it has its shortcomings. It’s become a chore to follow the tweetstream in my (deliberately limited) account, because there’s all that filler. I have to scroll…and scroll…to find the ‘wanna read’ nuggets by those who post ‘the good stuff’ (and you know who you are).

The volume increases dramatically during conferences. There’s good links and photos, but increasingly it’s become a festival of incidental remarks about speakers being on (sans content links), tweets about going here and there, social pictures of lunches and dinners, selfies. Increasingly, no one puts down their phone! At sessions, instead of being riveted (or not) on the speaker, attendees are glued to their phones, furiously keyboarding and tweeting…whatever. It’s insulting to the speaker who’s trying to engage with the audience, for starters. Then there are the meetings with the tweetstream posted to the side of the stage–another distraction.  Most of all, by furiously fingering, aren’t you cheating yourself of the conference experience for which you or someone has paid dearly? Isn’t the point of being there human contact and time off the screen?

Carolyn Thomas, Canada’s own ‘Ethical Nag’ and ‘Heart Sister’, describes kicking Obsessive Live-Tweeting at Conferences far more wittily in How we got sucked into live-tweeting at conferences. An excerpt:

For too long, I’d been telling myself:

–that live-tweeting isn’t a problem for me
–that I could quit anytime
–that the tweets I send to my Twitter followers while listening to a conference speaker onstage are actually interesting, high-quality messages
–that it must be okay because everybody else in the audience is doing it, too

But now I know that it’s time to quit cold-turkey.