Lumi, the global market leader in real-time audience engagement has sold its UK business, IML Interactive UK, to competitor Crystal Interactive - creating the largest event technology company in the UK.
Crystal Interactive pioneered delegate engagement via text based interaction while, for the last 25 years, IML has created and led the voting technology market.
Crystal Interactive Managing Director Chris Elmitt said: “The fusion of our two companies completes the audience engagement jigsaw in a way never before achieved. We’re bringing the widest range of audience response solutions together with the greatest experience and expertise in the industry.”
Rob Curtis, Head of Sales said, “We’re excited to bring our technological strength and first class event delivery experience to a company that puts collaboration and event intelligence at the heart of everything it does. Our respective clients will benefit enormously from the industry-leading expertise of both businesses.
The combined company of 35 people will be called Crystal Interactive Meetings and will continue to operate from its two existing locations in London and Hampshire. Its product and service range will span everything from dry hire and full service delivery of sophisticated voting keypads, through event apps on own device to highly interactive apps on iPads and event consultancy.
“Our specialist subject is high-touch, high-participation events, to achieve 100% engagement using technology,” added Elmitt. “We can help clients seeking ambitious event outcomes to shape the interactive content of their meetings. The scale and range of our combined products and services will be unparalleled and we’ll have strengthened resource to facilitate the collaborative process on-site - which we know results in far higher delegate engagement and improved outcomes from events.”
Crystal Interactive Meetings will continue to develop new event tech solutions and is already committed to support over 600 events in 2017.
Lumi CEO Richard Taylor said, ‘This acquisition comes as part of a wider reorganisation of the business to allow focus on Lumi’s apps as a service model in particular, Meetoo, the real-time messaging and polling app, which has seen great success over the past year, and our market-leading AGM solutions including the Lumi AGM Mobile platform, whose use at the Jimmy Choo AGM in 2016 was widely-publicised. We are confident that it will be very much business as usual for all customers, and are committed to working with Crystal Interactive Meetings to ensure that the transition period runs as smoothly as possible,”
About Lumi
For 25 years, Lumi has been driven by the idea that meetings can be transformed beyond people’s imagination with content, polling and other engagement ideas delivered on hand-held devices. Today Lumi is the global leader in real-time audience engagement technology. Operating from offices in twelve countries, the company’s core technologies and engaging mobile apps are used by hundreds of multinational corporations and their advisers to provide an unparalleled understanding of attitudes, opinion and behaviour in a dynamic and innovative way. For more information, please visit www.lumiglobal.com
About Crystal Interactive
Audience engagement specialist Crystal Interactive provides facilitation combined with interactive technology for conferences, forums and consultation processes. The company has pioneered and developed communication systems that allow delegates and participants to share ideas and provide real-time feedback and comment; enabling organisations achieve more from their meetings and events.
Crystal supports some of the world’s leading brands. Its client offering begins during the event planning and formatting stages and continues to the management of the interactive process on the day.
www.crystalinteractivemeetings.com
Media contact:
Sarah Webster, WWMC, Tel: 07950 035897; e-mail: sarah.webster@wwmc.biz