Trade Show Recap

My tradeshow Week was pretty darned busy.

Sunday – Tuesday  - IPC APEX Show, Mandalay Bay, Las Vegas

• Main contributor at two press roundtables that included all the trade media and representatives from three multi-billion dollar companies who’ve lined up with us on my project.
• Received and industry award from SMT magazine for the new software functionality that the team put together over the last year or so.
• LOTS of networking. Increasingly at these events, people whom I don’t know, certainly seem to know me. I’m starting to get people coming up to me out of the blue to introduce themselves. Now, it’s one thing when I staff a booth and people introduce themselves, but walking the show floor has usually allowed me to just blend in. Not any longer; and that’s when I started to notice this point.

Wed – Thurs   -  Embedded Systems Conference, San Jose

• We shared booth space with our assembly partner, and talked to a LOT of actual customers.        
• Networked even more than in Las Vegas. This is because lots of potential collaborators were at the show. I got to do a lot of recruiting and vetting for fit.
• Demos of our new functionality were received universally with acclaim.

Meanwhile, at home,  both my children have located and joined a FIRST Robotics team just starting up in our neighborhood. Both children want desperately to particpate. R called me at the show, to deliver a well-organized request to join the team. Of course I told the future robotics engineer “yes”.