🚀 go-pugleaf

This conference is held twice a year, in the fall in San Francisco
and in the spring in NY.  More recently, they've started to run it
in other cities too (e.g., LA).  I went to the conference last fall
and found it very interesting.  They charge a lot for attendance (something
like $350 just to attend), but it is a good introduction to problems,
products, and research in multimedia.  The conference consists of
tutorials on specific topics (e.g., Using Hypercard to produce a multimedia
course, etc.), sessions on more general topics (e.g., video walls, 
high speed networking, hypermedia authoring systems, etc.), and a
moderate-sized exhibition.  Since the multimedia market is rather eclectic,
the vendors that show up run from the usual computer vendors (e.g., IBM,
HP, etc.) to innovative companies doing interesting things (e.g., AVID
Technology's video editing system, Supermac Technology showed a video
board for the mac and a disk interface with built-in compression, etc.).

Generally speaking, if you're familiar with multimedia products, you
probably won't learn a lot.  If you're new to the field, this conference
is well worth the visit.  I doubt that I'll go again next year, but I
learned a lot last fall.