(Trumpets blare)

Hear ye, hear ye!

By the order of King Scott and Derek, our Court Jester (congratulations on your recent promotion from Fool), I am proud to announce that the official agenda for CMEpalooza Spring (Wednesday, April 6) is now available on our Spring tab. No need to register or provide us with your email address — simply click on the link and voila!, there it is.

It’s another stellar agenda (if we do say so ourselves) with a nice combination of CMEpalooza newcomers and veterans who will be stepping to the plate. We were able to fit the six top vote getters from our crowdsourcing efforts into the agenda, along with our Puntua Lortu session that Derek wrote about yesterday. You’ll be hearing much more about all of our session in the run up to our Spring broadcasts.

You may notice that the agenda starts at 10 a.m. ET instead of our usual 9 a.m. start time. That’s because we’re still holding open our kickoff slot in case a second Gold sponsor comes forward to snag it (Genentech is sponsoring the lunchtime session), so if your organization is interested, please let us know. Otherwise, extra sleep for me, so it’s really a win-win either way.

Voting for CMEpalooza Spring sessions is officially over. More than 700 votes were cast this year, which means that our crack interns are going to be doing lots of counting with their fingers and toes to determine the winning selections. Thanks to everyone who voted.

For those of you who submitted an abstract, we’ll be in touch within the next 24 hours to let you know if your session is going to be included in our Spring event. We’ll then schedule each selected session and get the official agenda up on our website.

One additional note: We are holding open the 9 a.m. ET kickoff slot for a second Gold sponsor, so if your organization is interested in working with us on this exclusive opportunity, please let us know ASAP. There is nothing quite like working with Derek and I, believe you me.

Oh, one more note: We will also be contacting those of you who submitted a Pecha Kucha abstract — which will probably no longer be called “Pecha Kucha” — but that’s another story for another time.

I realize that Derek and I put on a brave face, and because of it, many of you are probably under the illusion that CMEpalooza headquarters is all balloons, video games, and cotton candy. It’s not – we don’t like cotton candy.

And in reality, most of our growing staff is busy with the usual drudgery of managing our global media appearances, making sure our luxury corporate jet is stocked with Evian water, and answering fan mail. It sucks, believe me.

That said, there are a few things that happen during the day that make us put down the Wall Street Journal (Derek is still looking for the funny pages) and smile. Such as:

1. A compliment on our sense of humor. From a recent fan: “This is the most hilarious post I’ve read in months….on any blog.” She’s right, you know.
2. A well-crafted abstract for CMEpalooza Spring. Don’t forget to check them all out on our Poll page this week and vote, people!
3. New sponsors. We’ve got two so far, with a few others coming soon (promise).
4. Repeat sponsors. There are 10 of those, which hopefully means we’ve done something right in the past that people think we’ll repeat again this year.

You can see listings and descriptions of all of our sponsors on our newly-launched Sponsor tab. Here is the current rundown:

Gold Sponsor: Genentech

Silver Sponsors: PlatformQ Health Education, Global Academy for Medical Education, LLC, and ASiM

Bronze Sponsors: Vivacity Consulting, Vindico Medical Education, RMEI Medical Education, infograph-ed, Impact Education, LLC, Educational Measures, CMEology, Clinical Care Options, and Academy for Continued Healthcare Learning

We’re humbled and grateful to all of them for their support. In return, we have a few impromptu things planned this year to bring some extra attention to our sponsors (just you wait and see). Certainly, we encourage you to learn about the various services and specialties of all of our sponsors – I’ve collaborated personally with many of these folks over the years on projects of varying shapes and sizes, and they really are among the best of the best in our profession.

Of course, it’s far from too late for other interested parties to join in the fun. In fact, we’ll be adding in some additional new sponsors in the next few days. We often get new sponsors coming aboard right up until the day of our Spring event in April, so if you want to see all of the value a sponsorship brings, please take a look at our 2016 Prospectus. Derek and I are happy to answer any questions you might have as well – we have a crack team of interns who are constantly crunching numbers and doing research on our behalf. I believe Derek posted images of them hard at work in the past.