The first streetcar arrived in Milwaukee's Intermodel station yesterday. The name is 'The Hop' presented by Potawatomi Hotel & Casino, with $10 million in naming rights, they are providing free rides for everyone the first 12 months of operation.  The streetcar should be operational Fall of 2018. The initial route can be found here

This is a great video from Discover Wisconsin on the 10 reasons to love the Madison area.  
​Watch the video here 

The trend in hotels has been to make their lobby space like your living room, some hotels have even used that term for their space, making guests feel welcomed with a space to hang out or work.   Guests that have booked the hotel have been complaining they can't get to those fun spaces because they are occupied by evening or weekend leisure 'no stay' guests.   That has challenged hotels to reinvent the concierge style private access space for guests only.   Some guests are willing to pay for a private 'guest access only' space, more like a private social club.   Hotels around the country have been creative with defining what the space looks like.   Read the article on this trend for your attendees or VIP's.   

 According to a recent article in ETouches, the protection of registration information is crucial to an event.   Your responsibility as a company or association is to protect your members data and keep their information private.   Just think about the information you are collecting from your members:  home information, phone number, flight reservations and more.  
A few tips from the article were:
-Encryption - make sure the data is encrypted, so hackers cannot easily gain access to your data.  
-The company's website has an SSL (Secure Sockets Layer)
-Encrypted wifi vs. not encrypted - make sure you require a password to sign in for your attendees while at the conference.   A reminder that everyone should know, never to do banking information over a public network.   
Also consider when you register attendees on-site, making sure no one can access your system while at the registration desk or after hours. 
Your IT staff is keeping up to date on the security, but you as an event planner should also make sure steps have been taken to protect your attendees data. 
You can read the entire article here  

If you are looking for something fun to do and want to sample different brews in Milwaukee, here is a list of beer events happening around town.  The list is courtesy of Milwaukee Magazine, and might feature some of your popular spots or consider trying out new brewing company.  Enjoy!  

List of events here

This article was so appropriate today, as I get ready to attend MPI's NEXT '18 event in Chicago on Thursday, I received an invite to download the conference app.   As a meeting professional and attendee at industry events, we have all experienced good conference apps and bad conference apps.   This one I have to say is really intuitive and will be well used.   Some apps that I have used in the past were hard to maneuver and didn't include a lot of information for attendees during the conference.  

This article provides seven reasons why you should always download the conference app.   As a meeting professional it's so nice to see (and share with your sponsors) how often the site was accessed and how long the attendees stayed on certain aspects of the mobile app.   One of the reasons the article listed:  If you attend a conference with  a lot of staff, you can divide and conquer many sessions, which is helpful and allows you to cover a lot of ground during the conference.  
You can read the entire article here 

Wisconsinites appreciate how vibrant, accessible and what a foodie town Madison is, but did you know it is also a great destination for meetings?   A recent list from Discover Wisconsin provides 10 reasons to love the Madison area and some interesting items you may not have known about the State Capitol of Wisconsin.   Read the article here.  
​#VisitMadison