Stormy Weather: D: Dive Into Mobile Postponed Due to Hurricane Sandy
It is with great regret that we have to announce that, due to Hurricane Sandy, we are postponing our D: Dive Into Mobile conference, which had been set for tomorrow and Tuesday in New York City.
Context & Ripple Effects
AllThingsD's storm-season toolkit from a year earlier reads differently now: the site's own flagship mobile gathering, set for Monday and Tuesday in New York City, has been pulled off the calendar as Hurricane Sandy bears down on the region. The postponement is confirmed, not rumored, and lands on one of the industry's marquee mobile stages.
The story did not stay contained — Gizmodo, Mashable, The Verge, The Next Web, BetaNews and others all carried the announcement, and same-day reporting shows Facebook's New York gift event getting blown out too. Sandy is not singling out one conference; it is clearing the city's entire tech-event week.
First-order effects
- Attendees, sponsors and speakers booked for D: Dive Into Mobile absorb rescheduled dates and stranded travel plans, while AllThingsD loses its planned two-day window for mobile news and demos.
- Facebook's parallel New York event cancellation means the companies counting on this week for launches and announcements lose the concentrated press audience both gatherings were built to provide.
Second-order effects
- Other organizers with events on the New York calendar face the same go/no-go decision under the same storm, compressing the fall announcement season into whatever dates survive rescheduling.
- Venues, hotels and travel providers tied to the city's conference circuit take cancellations across multiple clients at once rather than one-off losses.
Third-order effects
- If major coastal storms keep hitting dense event hubs like New York, conference operators will need explicit weather contingencies — insurance, flexible venues, or remote participation — baked into how the live-events business is run.
The trend: Extreme weather is becoming a recurring force majeure on the New York tech and media event calendar, forcing organizers to treat schedule risk as a structural cost rather than bad luck.