(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.

Sometimes, I have ideas that work (yay CMEpalooza! 🙂 ).

Sometimes, I have ideas that don’t work (poor CMEpalooza Spotlight 😦 ).

Sometimes, I have ideas that work…until I get an email telling me it’s been copyrighted and if I want to keep doing it, I need to do A, B, C, and D (and D = $$$).

Yes, the PechaKucha police finally caught up to Scott and I — the Bonnie and Clyde of CME (Scott’s Bonnie, of course) — and have put an end to our scofflaw ways. CME PechaKucha is no more.

I’m being a bit dramatic. We received a very friendly email from someone with the PechaKucha organization (I didn’t know there was an organization) telling us that “PechaKucha” is, in fact, copyrighted (I didn’t know it was copyrighted) and that we could continue to call it a PechaKucha if we changed a few things and gave a donation to the organization. I’m sure it’s a very nice organization, but neither Scott nor I saw much point in the donation and we weren’t big fans of their changes, either. Ultimately, we decided to put an end to CME PechaKucha. We had a good run (cue a rousing version of “Danny Boy”).

In place of CME PechaKucha, I’d like to introduce our newest idea — CME Puntua Lortu! Yes, we’re very excited about CME Puntua Lortu and we think you will be, too. I’ve included a quick little FAQ to help introduce it.

How is CME Puntua Lortu different than CME PechaKucha? Well, we are using the words “Puntua Lortu” — which are not copyrighted — in place of the words “PechaKucha” — which are copyrighted. Other than that, it’s pretty much the same.

What the heck does “Puntua Lortu” mean? When I was a boy, my Spanish grandfather used to set me on his knee and ask me what I had learned that day in school. I would go on and on and on, telling him about my day with extremely long-winded stories. He would look at me, and with his thick Basque accent say, “Derekimo! Puntua Lortu! (Get to the point!)” I thought it was an apt phrase for a presentation style that is all about getting to the point.

(OK, I made that story up. I thought it sounded better than the real story, which is that I put “get to the point” in Google Translate and checked different languages until I found one that sounded cool. Basque won.)

Who will be presenting during CME Puntua Lortu? We have a great group of folks lined up. The title of their presentations may change between now and CMEpalooza Spring, but this is what we have for now:

Designing Information with Impact
Bhaval Shah, PhD, infograph-ed, LLC.

Walking the Talk
Don Harting, Harting Communications LLC

The Fallacy Fallacy in Medical Literature
Bonny P. McClain, Data & Donuts

A Pecha Kucha Approach to CME Project Management
Venkata (Raja) Akunuru, CHCP, PMP, DLC Solutions and EthosCE LMS

7 Minutes in CPD Heaven – A Sprint through the 2016 ACEHP Annual Meeting
Ted Singer, PVI, PeerView Institute for Medical Education 

For those of you who are waiting to see what else is on our Spring agenda, it’s coming soon. Promise.

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.