Irish tech-focused conferences rescheduled due to coronavirus

A number of tech-focused conferences due to take place in Dublin in the coming months have been postponed due to the spread of the coronavirus that leads to Covid-19.

FutureScope, the annual one-day event run by Dublin BIC, was due to take place on April 1st at the Convention Centre Dublin. It has been postponed until the fourth quarter, although no exact date has been confirmed.

"Monitoring the trends and the growing crisis over the past week led us to determine that rescheduling is the responsible decision and in this regard we considered it important to provide clarity for all our stakeholders at an early stage," said Michael Culligan, chief executive of Dublin Bic.

“We are of course disappointed. Each year FutureScope, developed with your help to become Ireland’s the number one innovation event, goes from strength to strength,” he added.

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Dublin Tech Summit, a two-day event scheduled to take place on April 22nd and 23rd, has been postponed until September 9th and 10th.

The event, which takes place at the RDS typically attracts up to 10,000 attendees.

“Based on the information provided by leading health organisations and the outlook on Covid-19, we have made the decision to reschedule Dublin Tech Summit from our planned April date,” a spokeswoman said.

A third Irish event, Future Human, which was due to be held in May has now been moved to October. The organisers of the event, whose predecessor, Inspirefest welcomed people from over 52 countries, said it would be “inappropriate to push ahead and ask people to travel” given the spread of the coronavirus.

The cancellations come as E3, the premier trade event for the video game industry, was also pulled. The event, which was due to run early next month, is held annually in Los Angeles.

The organisers of the Web Summit last week said its sister conference Collision, which was to be held in Toronto in June, will now be an online-only event due to the spread of the coronavirus.

A spate of events have been cancelled over the last few weeks on the back of the virus, which has led to about 116,558 infections and over 4,000 fatalities.

Separately, Grid Finance, one of the State’s largest providers of peer-to-peer loans, has introduced a payment break for customers to reduce the impact of the coronavirus.

In a statement issued on Wednesday, the company said it was waiving all repayments for six weeks for new customers and will also waive personal guarantees for loans up to €50,000. In addition, employees of the company are to work remotely for the next six weeks, it said.