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.

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.