TECDO 2008 Overview

The very first thing I need to comment on is the organization of the event itself.  As I had previously predicted, they did not invest enough resources in getting the message to the right people.  There is a great deal of potential visitors who would have benefit from TECDO's offerings who only learned about it a bit too late and were unable to attend.  To be even more precise, most people I network with did not attend the event.  In the near future I would recommend TECDO organizers to be a bit more informative about the Event to the public and companies and be more active in terms of marketing.  One would think there is not a lot of media with a tech oriented audience to target, yet with the right concept and proper marketing, they are reachable as easy as anyone else.

Now, about the actual event, I do have some important comments:

• The conferences: these were not properly organized and there wasn't a pre-registration.  Without knowing who the target audience will be it is a bit hard to prepare in advance the topics to cover.  Myself, I tried to orient my conference for a business-like audience, only to find that the majority of listeners where young students.  I was then forced not to even display the presentation and talk about topics the young students would be in tune with.
• The booths: while I understand they tried to keep things clean and with consistent with the technology concept, they forced everyone to use the same company for the booth.  This was a big problem for almost everyone.  For us, we didn't even get what we paid for originally and we had to resource to foreign people to finish up the things they were supposed to deliver and didn't.  It was not a nice feeling having to overpay for something that wasn't correctly done.  This happened to many others, not just us, which leads me to think that if they give companies the liberty to design and contract whoever they want to get their booth done and focus in selling the space instead of fully featured booths they would do a lot better.  If they want to control the stetic aspect of the booths, they can just pre-approve the designs before they close the deal.  It is really not that hard.
• The cabling: for crying out loud, it is a technology fair, there's got to be a better way to cable all the booth.  It was a nasty setup, cables everywhere.  Not only did it look ugly but it was not correct either.  The power kept going on and off at our booth, the phone never worked and the internet was intermitent, all these on a technology event, that's not good.
• The students: while I would support a higher level of education to be properly invited and greeted at the event, there were many students who did not even meet the lowest considerable level of understand about Technology.  I am sure most companies would rather talk to 3 students who are motivated and actually have a sense of understanding about Technology in general, other than 15 students who are only laughing cuz they got a day off from school to attend the event.  Invited students should be preselected to attend the event.
• Foreign Interest: while there was a lot of foreign participation, I strongly feel TECDO did not prioritize them properly.  We were able to identify these companies and individual people by careful observation and we did make our pitch to them.  Still I do feel they could have prepared better for them.  They could have held special b2b meetings in between local entities and foreign investors who could match offerings with needs, or at the very least, suggest these b2b meetings.  I did not see this to be the case in their b2b tables the days I attended, and if they did, they could have promoted it better because we as a company who could potentially serve anyone did not get to do much b2b.

Those would be my most important observations on things they can work on improving, of course, there are other minor issues such as the equipment control on each booth, security among other isolated cases they could work on, but overall, considering it was the very first time they try an event of this scale I would have to rate it with a 75 out of 100.

Business wise, for us, because I can't talk for other companies, it was a real success.  We were able to get the word out about what we do and what we offer.  People were interested in our services and they asked a lot of questions about it.  We generated many leads we are now explorng to see which ones actually convert.  Once we do, we will have a more formalized idea on how successfull it was, but so far, it looks very promising.

I overheard the next event will be held in 2010.  By then, I believe they would have worked on improving the areas they lacked off and showcase a much better event.  As a company I believe we will participate again.

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