I’ve just visited the Australian Business and IT Expo (ABITE) [1]. I haven’t been to such an event for a while, but Peter Baker sent a link for a free ticket to the LUV mailing list and I was a bit bored to I attended.
The event was a poor shadow on previous events that I had attended. The exhibition space was shared with an event promoting recreational activities for retirees, and an event promoting wine and gourmet food. I’m not sure why the three events were in the room, maybe they figured that IT people and senior citizens both like gourmet food and wine.
The amount of space used for the computer stands was small, and there was no great crowd of delegates – when they can’t get a good crowd for Saturday afternoon it’s a bad sign for the show.
I have previously blogged about the idea of putting advertising on people’s butts [2]. One company had two women working on it’s stand with the company’s name on the back of their shorts.
A representative of a company in the business of Internet advertising asked me how many hits I get on my blog, I told him 2,000 unique visitors a month (according to Webalizer) which seemed to impress him. Actually it’s about 2,000 unique visitors a day. I should rsync my Webalizer stats to my EeePC so I can give detailed answers to such questions.
The IT event seemed mostly aimed at managers. There were some interesting products on display, one of which was a device from TabletPC.com.au which had quite good handwriting recognition (but the vocabulary seemed limited as it couldn’t recognise a swear-word I used as a test).
Generally the event was fun (including the wine and cheese tasting) and I don’t regret going. If I had paid $10 for a ticket I probably would have been less happy with it.
Updated to fix the spelling of “wine”. Not a “wind tasting”.