Welcome to 2021, Dear Reader.  We have some leftover acquisitions in the bin but they seem a pretty lame start for a new year.  So let’s instead look at some big picture surveys, starting with Deloitte’s annual Tech Trends report.   At 166 pages, you won’t digest in one sitting.  If time is tight, jump to page 141 to list the key tech for personalized experiences.

Finally, the news you really wanted to hear: events are back.  Or they will be at some point this year.  Event tech vendor Splash found that 21% of companies expect to do purely in-person events in 2021 and the rest plan to mix online and in-person activities at the same event.

If you still think that MCP stands for Male Chauvinist Pig, well, the 1970’s want their disco ball back. Today’s hep cats know that MCP stands for Model Context Protocol, a new-but-widely supported standard that lets large language models access structured data as context for their prompts. Early adopters include Salesforce and Adobe, and search platform Algolia is now using it to feed their data to customer-facing real-time AI agents.