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GPJ and Eventbase Announce Partnership on the Launch of Revolutionary Activate and MagicBadge™ Technology

by jummy84
written by jummy84

Global leader in live event technology, Eventbase, is excited to announce George P. Johnson Experience Marketing (GPJ), the world’s leading strategic experience marketing agency, has become the first agency partner certified on Eventbase Activate and MagicBadge™.

After more than a decade of partnership delivering innovative mobile experiences for many of the world’s largest events including Salesforce Dreamforce, Adobe MAX, Workday Rising and Cisco Live, Eventbase and GPJ are expanding their collaboration to bring Activate and MagicBadge™ to live events globally. 

On November 12, 2025, Eventbase and GPJ will host an exclusive VIP experience at Event Tech Live London called “Find Your Flock”, showcasing a special MagicBadge™-enabled networking experience designed to connect attendees in a personalized and meaningful way.

Beyond the VIP experience, all Event Tech Live London attendees will be able to use their MagicBadge™ embedded within the official event mobile app, powered by Eventbase. With MagicBadge™, attendees can effortlessly exchange contact information as a smarter way to connect. They will also be able to experience the technology firsthand through a live demonstration at the Eventbase booth (D34) and see how Activate and MagicBadge™ can trigger a personalized digital experience on an attendee’s phone and on digital screens throughout the event venue.

“We’re excited to be collaborating with experiential marketing leaders GPJ as we bring Activate and MagicBadge™ to some of the world’s largest events in 2026,” says Jeff Sinclair, CEO at Eventbase. “With our customers tapping GPJ’s creativity and thought leadership, I cannot wait to see the event experiences they create with this powerful new technology.”

“MagicBadge puts frictionless, personalized, and deeply human event experiences in the palm of your hand,” says Ken Madden, SVP, Global Head of Technology & Innovation at GPJ. “It removes barriers to connection and unlocks insights that empower us to craft immersive, unforgettable moments throughout the entire audience journey.”

Ken Madden and Jeff Sinclair are presenting a session on “The Future of Personalized Digital Activations and Gamification at Events” at Event Tech Live London on Wednesday, November 12 from 2:40pm to 3:10pm at the Tech Talks Theatre. The session will explore how Eventbase and GPJ have collaborated on Activate and MagicBadge™, and the vision for how this unique real-time event experience product will elevate events starting in 2026. 

How Eventbase Activate with MagicBadge™ Works

Created by Eventbase and patent-pending, MagicBadge™ is the world’s first secure digital credential for conferences and events. Eventbase Activate is a revolutionary new real-time experiential event technology that features MagicBadge™. With Activate, event organizers can configure MagicBadge™ scanning at locations throughout the event venue and instantly trigger a personalized digital experience on an attendee’s phone and on nearby digital screens with every scan or tap. Activate extends the ability for event organizers to engage with attendees, learn more about them and drive real-time personalized experiences at events. 

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Revolutionary Funk-Soul Luminary » PopMatters
Music

Revolutionary Funk-Soul Luminary » PopMatters

by jummy84
written by jummy84

When a great artist passes, we often say that they were “larger than life”. While this was true of D’Angelo in many ways, it doesn’t exactly do his legacy justice. D’Angelo‘s presence certainly loomed large over the neo-soul scene throughout the 1990s and 2000s, but his music stood out not for its largeness, but its lightness—its subtlety, sparseness, and deftness of touch. It was as smooth as “chicken grease”, to borrow an oft-cited phrase from his musical icon, Prince, at once as sensual and soulful as Motown in its heyday and as effortlessly cool as the best of old-school hip-hop. 

Since his passing on 14th October, many tributes have been paid to D’Angelo, born Michael Eugene Archer, calling him a hitmaker. Yet calling him a hitmaker seems to miss the mark. Yes, he did score a top 10 hit in “Lady”, and a top 25 hit in “Untitled (How Does It Feel?)”, but D’Angelo’s true gift was not as a hitmaker. 

Instead, his music skirted around the rough edges of R&B, the seedy underbelly of 1970s funk. It took the drugged-out, dirt-encrusted sound of Sly Stone and P-funk and pared it down to its barest elements. D’Angelo knew how to both move the listener and restrain them at the same time—keeping them guessing and allowing them to fill in the gaps of his music, both literally and figuratively.

That is evident even in his most ‘billboard’ moments, like “Untitled”, where the oddly syncopated 6/8 beat almost seems to create a delay in the music, an extra space for the listener to fill. The additional space heightens the sexual tension within the track, dramatizing D’Angelo’s impassioned pleas for his lover to come closer, stop playing silly games, and “take the walls down” with him. 

Indeed, if there was one word that truly defined D’Angelo, it may have been just that: space. That was true of the way he made music, but it was also true of the way he treated the musicians who worked with him. As his tour manager, Alan Leeds said:

“D’Angelo always surrounds himself with great musicians, but most importantly, he gives them space. I don’t think I’ve ever worked with a frontman artist as unselfish musically and on stage as D’Angelo is. He’s like a jazz guy doing funk. I think he intrinsically gets the idea that’s foreign to so many musicians today that the beauty of the musical art form is the interplay.” 

Perhaps more than any other artist of his generation, D’Angelo knew how to let the music breathe. He knew that there is wisdom in letting your collaborators find their own rhythm, and that inspiration is something you have to sit with and wait on, not force. As a result, there isn’t a wasted note in his discography, nor is there a bad album. All three of his studio LPs—released in three separate decades—reflect a painstaking work ethic and a patience that verges on legendary. They are all certified stone classics, as virtually any R&B head worth their salt knows. 

D’Angelo has often been compared to Prince, and although the two share a clear sonic lineage—both steeped in the great American funk-soul continuum—in many respects, they are polar opposites. Prince’s music was huge and theatrical; D’Angelo’s was primarily marked by restraint and subtlety. It’s fitting, then, that D’Angelo’s favorite Prince song was “I Wonder U”, arguably the subtlest moment in Prince’s whole discography. 

The beat in “I Wonder U” is even sampled in “Africa”, the closing track on Voodoo. “Africa” was written as a tribute to D’Angelo’s newborn son, Michael, and it’s breathtakingly beautiful—a lullaby with a twinkle in its eye, sleepy, backward guitars merging with D’Angelo’s half-whispered vocals about spirituality and the blessings of “African descent”.

To sum up their differences: Prince made music for the party; D’Angelo made music for the after-party—steamy, slow-burning funk for bleary-eyed dancers taking one more hit of the joint, drinking “one mo’ gin”. It was the kind of music you put on in the wee AM hours when you were tired, high, and could no longer tell the difference between dreaming and waking. 

Yet this isn’t to say that all of D’Angelo’s music was marked by restraint and subtlety (just as not all Prince’s was power-ballad bombast). When the time was right, D’Angelo knew how to let fly and flat-out rock, like on his epoch-defining, 15-years-in-the-making comeback album Black Messiah. 

The album’s central highlight is probably “1000 deaths”, which opens with the sermonizing screed of black revolutionaries Khalid Abdul Muhammad and Fred Hampton and then comes totally unglued, the low-slung, bass-driven groove giving way to an epic wail of gun-slinging, turbine-roaring guitars. D’Angelo, deep in the mix, cries out in a plaintive and desperate battle cry: “You know a coward dies a thousand times, but a soldier only dies just once.”

You could say that D’Angelo’s music bore the best of both worlds—romantic and revolutionary, soft and hard, tender and machismo, masculine and feminine. Nowhere is this world of contrasts more beautifully exemplified than on Voodoo; he appears shirtless, chiseled, and dripping with sex appeal on the cover (just as in the famous music video), but the music itself feels almost supremely feminine and understated—the vocals airy and free-floating, the production minimal and crisp, the lyrics primarily tender and openhearted. Indeed, Voodoo is that rare thing: a 1990s hip-hop record that seems connected to the divine feminine. It doesn’t stand out in the records of the time; it exists in a category entirely separate from them. 

It’s ultimately impossible, in the space given here, to do adequate justice to D’Angelo’s legacy. Suffice it to quote the closing lyrics on “Africa”: “From which you came was love / And that’s how it all should be / You and my soul are one / Through all the time and history / And I thank you, thank you.”

Thank you, Michael Eugene Archer, for gracing this planet with your delicate and beautiful sound. 

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Rap Artists Whose Music Honors Assata Shakur's Revolutionary Spirit
Music

Rap Artists Whose Music Honors Assata Shakur’s Revolutionary Spirit

by jummy84
written by jummy84

Hip-Hop, at its very foundation, has always been more than beats and rhymes — it has been a vessel for survival, resistance, and rebellion.

Born in the Bronx during the 1970s, the culture emerged as a way to channel poverty, oppression, and sociopolitical strife into creative expression and communal strength. That defiant spirit mirrored, and in many ways carried forward, the ethos of the revolutionary movements that preceded it.

The music and the figures behind it were spiritual successors to the Black Panther Party and Black Liberation Army of the late ’60s and ’70s, organizations that dared to empower young people of color to challenge authority, reclaim their dignity, and speak truth to power.

Among the most iconic figures to emerge from that revolutionary era was Assata Shakur. Born Joanne Chesimard in New York, she became active in activism during her college years, first joining the Black Panther Party before transitioning to the Black Liberation Army.

Outspoken and unyielding in her defense of Black lives, Shakur became a polarizing figure in the eyes of the American government.

In 1973, she and two other BLA members were involved in a violent shootout with New Jersey State Troopers on the New Jersey Turnpike. One officer was killed, another was wounded, and one of the BLA members was fatally shot.

Assata Shakur

Bettmann / Contributor

Though Shakur maintained her innocence, she was convicted of first-degree murder in 1977 and sentenced to life plus 26 to 33 years. Two years later, she staged one of the most famous prison escapes in U.S. history, ultimately finding political asylum in Cuba in 1984.

While the FBI branded her a fugitive and threat to society, Hip-Hop embraced her as something far greater: a freedom fighter, a survivor, and a symbol of uncompromising defiance against systemic oppression.

Considered an “aunt” to the late Tupac Shakur, Assata was revered not only by her nephew but also by countless artists who found in her story a reflection of Hip-Hop’s own struggle — marginalized voices fighting to be heard in the face of power.

Assata Shakur

Bettmann / Contributor

Her revolutionary spirit continues to echo through the music, referenced in verses and honored in interviews, a reminder that Hip-Hop is inseparable from the struggle that birthed it. To this day, Assata Shakur remains a beacon of love, resilience, and pride for Black people — a figure whose life, though fraught with controversy, has forever shaped the cultural consciousness of Hip-Hop.

Following her passing on Sept. 25, 2025, at the age of 78, she leaves behind not just a legacy of resistance, but a blueprint for artists who dare to stand defiantly against the forces that seek to silence them.

In celebration of her life and legacy, VIBE highlights more than 50 artists who kept Assata Shakur’s name alive in exile through their music. These lyrics and displays of homage will continue to resonate and introduce her to future generations of listeners and potential revolutionaries.

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