The Midwest region of the United States is home to some of the most impressive and versatile event spaces in the country. Whether you’re planning a large corporate conference, a small business meeting, or a full-scale trade show, the Midwest has something to offer for everyone. In this post, we’ll be highlighting the top ten Midwest conference and convention centers that will be sure to impress your attendees and make your event a success. From state-of-the-art facilities with stunning architecture to versatile and modular spaces, these centers have it all. So, without further ado, let’s dive in and explore the best conference and convention centers the Midwest has to offer!

The Full List

McCormick Place

With more than 2.6 million square feet of space, McCormick Place is one of the largest conference venues not only in the Midwest, but in North America. The venue is located 3 miles away from Chicago’s Magnificent Mile, and can be easily accessed from the downtown area and from O’Hare and Midway airports. 

McCormick offers conferencing and convention space in four buildings, which are interconnected for the convenience of visitors. The venue can accommodate assembly-style seating for 18,000 people, and additionally offers a 10,000-seat arena, three theaters with a capacity of 300 seats each, and a large theater that sits more than 4,000 attendees.

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Whatever variety of corporate entertainment an organization desires is available in Dallas, TX’s. An elegant evening meal and dance to present awards and recognition or a fun and entertaining team building venue can be booked any time of year for visiting VIPs or local firms.

One of Dallas’s newest event centers for both corporate and social occasions is Ashton Gardens. Their event specialists assist with theme suggestions, meal planning, audio/visual needs, and set-up for the venue. The experience their people provide keeps the event moving smoothly, impressing all in attendance with the excellent food, the quality technology available and always first-class service.

Ashton Gardens culinary team prides itself in preparation of original recipes consisting of the highest quality, fresh ingredients. Then their service staff takes over with 5-star pampering for every guest and anticipating their every need ensuring the event’s success. They have all-inclusive pricing packages that eliminate surprises for the corporate budget. Read the rest of this entry »

Rockville, MD
Rockville is a small suburb of Maryland that has a population of a little over 50,000 people. While it may not be the biggest place in the world, its location is what makes it such a hotbed of startup activity. Its proximity to a number of major national laboratories makes Rockville specifically a hub of the biotech industry, and it means that there are a lot of funding sources available for the right type of startup.

San Francisco, CA
San Francisco, California, is known mostly for its art and culture, but it also has a bustling economic scene in these tough times. The real benefit of operating out of San Francisco is the convergence of academia and business. There are a lot of established universities out here, as well as a lot of giants in the technology industry.

Franklin, TN
Franklin, Tennessee, is a small town about the size of Rockville, but is more of an entity of its own. There is a major biotechnology push in Franklin, with the university putting up state-of-the-art facilities to push development in that sector. More than half of the people living in Franklin have at least a four-year college education, and the technology industry here is on the rise.

Bellevue, WA
Close to the home of such giants as Microsoft, Bellevue, situated in Washington, is one of the hottest spots of activity in the technology sector in the country. Bellevue’s residents hold more patents than any other city in the country, and there are a lot of tax incentives for small startups, especially in the technology sector. Being so close to many of the larger, older technology firms gives startups the ability to utilize a wealth of industry information that is more readily found in this area than in other areas.

Cambridge, MA
Cambridge will be recognizable to most people as the home to both MIT and Harvard, two of the most prestigious universities in the world. As a town of roughly 100,000 people, Cambridge maintains a very low-key persona that carries an air of growth. The town has a reputation to uphold as one of the hotbeds of advancement in the country, and the incentives for small business development here are ample.

Irvine, CA
Irvine, California, has a number of things going for it that make it very attractive for startups. It is right outside of Los Angeles, so it is mostly populated by technology and entertainment-based startups, but there are many different businesses here. One of the most attractive aspects of the city is that it gives entertainment and technology startups access to Los Angeles without actually having to be located in the city itself.

Bend, OR
Bend, Oregon, has experienced a growth rate of 50 percent over the past decade, and it doesn’t show any signs of slowing down. The town itself used to be centered around logging, but has since become very involved with the technology, aviation, and biotech industries.

Santa Monica, CA
Santa Monica, California, has become very popular for film startups over the past decade. The proximity to Los Angeles is the big draw here, with business owners getting all the benefits of Los Angeles without the stifling taxes that come with living in the city. Digital media production companies find that they are able to compete with larger film companies while operating out of Santa Monica.

Boca Raton, FL
Looking to shirk its reputation as nothing but a paved old folks home, Boca Raton, Florida, is very welcoming of startups, especially in the technology industry. There are a lot of smaller companies that work here that have been started by employees of IBM, which has operated out of Boca Raton since the 1970s.

Boulder, CO
Boulder, Colorado, has become something of an icon of the technology startup community. As the university has advanced its technology base over the past ten years, more and more businesses have been developing here from the resulting boom in startup grant funding. There are a number of national research labs maintained in Boulder, and these labs bring in a swathe of talent from around the globe– making Boulder a hotbed of activity in the technology industry.

5. Eugene, Oregon

Eugene, Oregon, is in the top five for a number of reasons, but the biggest of these reasons has to do with electricity. The city of Eugene gets almost half of its electricity from renewable resources. Most of western Oregon gets around 34% of its energy from hydroelectric dams, but Eugene takes things a step further by adding on 9% from wind farms. The city’s water utility– EWEB– even buys back excess energy produced by residential solar arrays.

4. Oakland, California

The city of Oakland, in the state of California, has been long-heralded as one of the most forward-thinking cities in the US on the environmental front, and that has helped to drive new technologies in Oakland. The most impressive of these technologies are the hydrogen-powered buses that roam the streets. These buses have significantly cut down the pollution in the city, and have helped to develop this technology into a more economical form.

3. Boston, Massachusetts

Boston has a highly developed public transit system, as well as an impetus toward innovation and new technologies. This is highly evidenced by the unique system that Boston is implementing to help produce methane for generators. They are using bacteria within residential glass clippings to produce the methane. This is a fuel source that is readily available, and which would only be going to waste otherwise. Modest projections state that the system has the potential to create enough methane to power 1.5 megawatts of electricity. At the end of the composting cycle, the grass and leaves will have turned into a source of fertilizer that can be used for residential or farm fertilizer.

2. San Francisco, California

San Francisco, California, is another of the cities with a highly developed transportation sector. Public transportation is a large part of how people get around here, and it has a significant impact on the air quality and health of the people living here. Also, San Francisco has one of the most aggressive large-scale photovoltaic projects in the country, with massive potential for both environmental and financial benefits.

1. Portland, Oregon

Portland, Oregon, is the most eco-friendly city in the United States. While it lags behind other cities in terms of energy and electricity, it blows past them on things like public transit and green construction. 35 buildings in Portland are certified by the U.S. Green Building council, and a quarter of workers in Portland commute by bike or public transit.

According to a recent survey conducted by Gallup Daily Tracking, around six percent of workers are employed by the State of California, which goes up to twelve percent if you include local and federal workers. More than sixteen percent of workers in America were employed by the government last year.

The state with the highest percentage of government workers goes to Hawaii, which employs over twelve and a half of the state’s workforce. Alaska came second, employing eleven and a half percent of workers, followed by West Virginia, coming in at just over eleven and a half percent.

According to the survey, the US states employing the least number of government workers were New Hampshire, with just over four percent, Pennsylvania, with just under four and half percent and Maryland and Ohio, with both states employing just under five percent of workers.

Whether inspired by famous movies or celebrity quotations, city nicknames and slogans are a fantastic and informative way to introduce your city to a complete stranger. We all know that what happens in Las Vegas, stays in Las Vegas, but what about other locations across the States?

Offices.net has compiled a list of city nicknames and slogans to try shed some light over the historic, social, cultural and – sometimes criminal – situation of each and every state, as well as most of the cities.

There are the flavoursome (Hershey, aka Chocolate Capital of the World; Kansas City, aka BBQ Capital of the World), the beautiful (Los Angeles, aka City of Flowers and Sunshine), the scary (Kansas City, aka Killa City; Roswell, aka Alien Capital of the World; Salem, aka The Witch City), the foreign (Ouray, aka Switzerland of America), the odd (Strong, aka Toothpick Capital of the World) the down-to-earth (Plano, aka Play No Games) and the humorous (Telluride, aka To-hell-you-ride).

The list of official and un-official state nicknames and taglines shows how over time certain things started to be associated with particular states, became inseparable and widely used, and in many cases treated as the -state surname-.

If you happen to know of a state motto or a city moniker that we haven’t included in the resource, please get in touch. Your contribution will be greatly appreciated. Read the rest of this entry »

Just like there are millions of ways to change a light bulb, apparently there are many ways to misspell the names of cities and states.

We have looked at the most common misspellings and decided to compile a helpful resource, containing over 1000 versions of cities we all love to spell correctly, but oh-so-often fail to do so!

Amazingly, there are ten ways to misspell Fayetteville, involving extensive swapping of the letters, doubling them where necessary, or trimming them down. Even the shortest of the shortest city names are featured in the list, i.e. Lodi in CA is commonly misspelled as Laudy, Lody, Lordy and Lowdy. Inventive!

If you are aware of any more common misspellings for US states or cities please feel free to submit them using this form.