Meeting News - March 23, 2009 - (Page 13)

Minot NORTH DAKOTA Bismarck Grand Forks MINNESOTA Grand Rapids Duluth Sault Ste. Marie Fargo SOUTH DAKOTA Spearfish Sturgis Rapid City Pierre St. Cloud Aberdeen St. Paul Bloomington Rochester Sioux Falls WISCONSIN Eau Claire Sturgeon Bay Green Bay Fox Cities La Crosse Wisconsin Dells Brookfield MICHIGAN Mackinaw City Minneapolis Traverse City Midland IOWA Sioux City Sioux City Scottsbluff Perry Des Moines Omaha Lincoln Davenport Dubuque Cedar Rapids Madison Milwaukee Delavan Lake Geneva Lake Bluff Schaumburg Rosemont Chicago Oak Brook Grand Rapids Lansing Detroit Ann Arbor South Bend Toledo Cleveland Youngstown Akron Canton NEBRASKA North Platte St. Charles ILLINOIS Bloomington INDIANA Indianapolis Nashville OHIO Dayton MISSOURI St. Joseph Champaign/Urbana Springfield Bloomington Columbus Marietta Cincinnati Covington Frankfort Louisville Lexington KANSAS Topeka Overland Park Kansas City Lawrence Lake Ozark Jefferson City St. Louis E. St. Louis Dodge City Wichita Springfield Branson Bowling Green KENTUCKY www.MeetingNews.com MARCH 23, 2009 midamerica ence Center has begun offering a green meetings program. Not only will delegates enjoy 700 hands-on exhibits—the Omnimax Theater, Boeing Space Station, and planetarium—the center will also donate 5 percent of its meetings proceeds to carbon-neutral programming through Carbonfund.org. Even smaller facilities are catching green fever. The Discovery Center of Springfield, MO, is the first building in southwestern Missouri to attain LEED Gold certification. With an auditorium seating up to 200, a pair of modern classrooms, an immersion cinema theater, and a full kitchen and tables for up to 75, the facility even offers videoconferencing services that can connect the Ozarks to the world—and cut carbon-emitting travel. Chicago offers a wide range of green meetings venues–including the new McCormick Place West, the largest new-construction building in the country to continued on page 24 Venues of All Sorts Go Green Facilities across the region make eco-friendly changes the first center to receive silverlevel certification under the U.S. Green Building Council's Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design for Existing Buildings (LEED - EB) rating system. By purchasing 1.1 million kilowatt-hours of wind energy, the facility eliminated more than 2.4 million tons of carbon-dioxide emissions and the need for 410 tons of coal. In 2009, nearly half of Monona Terrace’s total energy usage will be windderived. Monona Catering, the building’s in-house caterer, which serves 450,000 people per year, uses many recyclables, including plastic cups at water stations, box lunch packaging, copy paper, and toner cartridges. Recognizing today’s hard times, leftover food is donated to local pantries. In St. Louis, the 260,000-sf SciMadison, WI’s Monona Center is LEED Silvercertified. By Michael Goldstein Meeting planners looking for an environmentally solid meetings alternative will find great green choices in the Midwest. From meetings venues, to hotels, to a brand-new airport, green is in throughout the Heartland. In Madison, WI, the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed and 250,000-sf Monona Terrace Convention Center (www.mononaterrace.com) is Midwest Meetings 2.0 The Heartland’s venues stay relevant with high-tech tools, rather than toys By Matt Alderton The Midwest looks nothing like Silicon Valley. Yet, Midwestern meeting venues are on the cutting edge when it comes to technology. As proof, one need only look at a handful of venues, such as McCormick Place in Chicago; the Edward Jones Dome at America’s Center in St. Louis; the Oshkosh Convention Center in Oshkosh, WI; and the Quad-Cities Waterfront Convention Center in Bettendorf, IA. Popular destinations for plugged-in meetwww.meetingnews.com ings and events, they’ve demonstrated firsthand that what’s cornfed is also connected. Take, for instance, wireless Internet access. When it comes to meetings technology, nothing is more basic. At Chicago’s McCormick Place, however, Wi-Fi is anything but, according to CIO Ellen Barry. That’s because the 2.6-million-sf convention center boasts approximately 500 Wi-Fi access points that can accommodate approximately 8,000 concurrent Internet users. What’s more, the facility sports approximately 700 miles of fiberoptic cabling, which can transmit more data at faster speeds than traditional copper wire. For meeting organizers, that means they can do more than check their e-mail wirelessly. It means they can set up private networks and utilize highbandwidth technology such as video and VoIP. Even the Internet itself is hightech at McCormick Place, which Barry said is one of only a handful of convention centers across the country offering access to Internet2, an ultra-high-speed network that research universities use for developing and testing advanced Internet applications. Especially “Technology is about customer service for us. ” —Ellen Barry, CIO, McCormick Place, Chicago attractive for medical meetings, Internet2 is used by companies like IBM, Siemens, and GM Medical, Barry said, to demonstrate new technologies like haptics, whereby surgeons can perform medical procedures over the Internet by communicating remotely with robotic implements. Elsewhere in the Midwest, concontinued on page 25 MeetingNews 13 March 23, 2009 http://www.MeetingNews.com http://www.Carbonfund.org http://www.mononaterrace.com http://www.meetingnews.com

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Meeting News - March 23, 2009 Contents What’s Up @ MeetingNews.com Meetings Mean Business As 'Meeting Matter' Marriott Unveils Promo Columbus, OH, Addresses Convention Hotel Issues People Making News Orlando Strives for Cost Transparency Is Biz-Class Air Travel Dead? Greenest Planner Awards Mid America Insider Report: Conference Centers Destination Insider: Mississippi Gulf Coast Las Vegas Destination Insider: Cleveland Ad Index Live from the Forum

Meeting News - March 23, 2009

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