An adventure to Spring Internet World '96 in Los Angeles....this had some promise. It was a little disheartening just because, well, just because L.A. is L.A. I had come to the conclusion a long time ago that the very best thing there is to do in LA is to leave. The promise to the whole adventure laid in the fact the company was footing the bill and it was 3 days away from the office even if it was in the most mentally and emotionally vacant city in America.
With that in mind, I whisked away via jetliner to this enchanted land of blech and, as chance would have it, was graced by being seated next to a fellow who was not only wearing a perfectly pressed suit (tie still tight at 8:30 PM) but was reading the Wall Street Journal, drinking a Starbucks coffee, and had donned spray-on hair. This guy actually was using spray-on hair! At the same time I wanted to torment him and somehow try to make his flight miserable, I had to feel sorry for him. He was younger than me and something had twisted his mind far enough to make him purchase SPRAY-ON HAIR. I felt the gods were preparing me. As the flight landed, I glanced out across the sprawl which is Los Angeles and once again was filled with little or no emotion by its lack of beauty, even when lit at night from thousands of feet in the air. I have never known a city to have less appeal.
I will not digress into an L.A. bashing as it just comes too easily and will instead begin the adventures where the adventures were meant to begin. After gaining a fair night's sleep and gulping my complimentray, in room, orange pekoe blend tea, I was charged and ready to sink my teeth clean into the fleshy belly of Spring Internet World '97.
As soon as I approached the L.A. convention center I knew this was huge...epic to be exact. I know the Internet has grown by leaps and bounds but this was nuts. This conference has easily tripled in size over the last two years. I dove quickly into the convention center to escape the official convention info-giving folks clad in bright green shirts that said "Ask Me". I just could not bear another geek passing by one of them and asking, "What is the meaning of life?". Although well rested and amped on orange pekoe blend tea I was a bit fuzzy around the edges due to a late-night grapple with several rounds of a distilled cough syrup agent known as After Shock the prior evening. The swampy-headed feeling along with the bright green T-shirts catalyzed some chemicals in my mind and the idea of the Auricular Immersion Media Internet World '97 Awards of Distinction was spawned.
The idea of the awards is to honor those exhibitors and participants of a very "special" nature that appeared at the show. This first round of awards is presented solely in print and I will begin my work on an actual physical award for the next Internet World I attend. I am sure all recipients will be more than proud to display these awards at future shows. So ladies and gentlemen...without further ado...I present the awards.
Most Over the Top Booth Design By An Exhibitor
This goes, hands down, to Interact. Although there was close competition from some of the bigger, and seemingly more elaborate, yet merely disgusting displays, Interacts booth was almost worthy of serving as the entire decor of a giant rave. Picture scaffolding, beautiful white screened banners displaying the company name, giant white cone- pointing from the center of the top of the scaffolding to the floor. Intellibeams (yes those multi-thousand dollar disco lights) mounted atop the scaffolding. Moving purple lights projected across the surface of the material of the cone. If MDMA was not a factor in the design of this set-up nothing was.
Ugliest Booth by an Exhibitor Award
Hewlett Packard - This was almost the Most Over the Top winner but the exhibit so damned ugly it warranted a category all to itself. HP decided that a Bavarian gingerbread hofbrau village might attract folks in to take a gander at their wares. Completely earthtone in color, it reminded me of some run down amusement park out of my childhood (visit Storyland near Conway, New Hampshire). I frequently associated high end technology and societal advancement into the new frontiers of science with the Bavarian Hofbrau. To truly put them way out of range of the measure of any ugly stick was their stage. This presentation stage had bright flourescent green walls and floor. I had entered Ingrids Black Light Hofbrau. I thought for a moment that maybe the flourescent green served as a green screen and they were video taping the presentation and rebroadcasting it chromakeyed onto some ultra cool background on giant monitors surrounding the stage. Well, nice try...I didn't see any. I may be wrong but I had a hard time looking around for too long. This booth was a constant reminder of the amount of cough syrup disguised as liquor I had consumed the night before.
Award for the Most Misleading Demonstration of a Product
And the winner is........Adobe! I hate to say anything bad about Adobe because basically they rule. They are the coolest. But...Adobe's demonstration for Pagemill was intensely misguiding. "Very slick," says master Yoda, "but the true power of the Force lies in demonstrating over a real internet connection - a real Jedi knows this". Adobe's demo had some really elaborate and large gif animations and very heavy graphics. The main animation was easily over 100k, if not I need proof. It looked good. The Web site they had designed with Pagemill was bitchin' (even if it was a stupid concept - URL and The Webtones - come on!). Animation, music, great graphics, lots of content...so you ask, what was the problem. They served the material for the demo off of their hard drive at the show. The audience was led to believe that they could do exactly what Adobe had done but they were not told that this particular site, in the form it was presented, would have taken about 100 years to download from a real live web server over a 28.8 modem. Suggestion - run a demo off your website next time. Also, for you newbies to the trade shows, look at the location bar on the Netscape browser to make sure the demo is coming over an internet connection and the location does not say C://bigdemo/thatwon't/workinthe/realworld.html.
The "Whoops Maybe We Should Have Waited Till The Next Trade Show" Award
The purveyors of cute technology names gets this award. Marimba...Castanet...Bongo...whew! I have been keeping my eyes on these folks simply because of their shining background and the promise of their developed technology. This trio of toys is really great and will change the way a lot of content, especially software is delivered via the web. There are quite a few neato castanet channels out there already such as Hot Wired. The problem: During their demos there were consistent glitches, including having to reboot their PC. The inability for them to connect to the "transmitter" to demonstrate how to publish changes to a channel was pretty shabby. Best of all...while showing what sort of cool channels could be developed they opened up the Hot Wired channel and lo and behold it seized, kapoot, hiccup, cough. These kids are smart though. Those bugs will probably be gone from their demos at Summer Internet World in Chicago but I was certainly glad to catch this demo.
The Award for Bravery in The Line of Duty
The bravest display by any vendor would easily have to be Macromedia's. Behind the main presentation area at Macromedia booth were three rows of tables and easily over 20 computers. Every half hour or so a fellow would stand in front of all these computers like the conductor of a world renowned symphony and teach a hands-on tutorial to the show attendees. The tutorials were great - I sat through an Authorware session myself. I was given a basic feel for the program and how its interface worked and its capabilities as well. Not only was there the Master of Authorware walking us all through the tutorial but there was a good number of Macromedia staff present to jump right in and help whenever someone panicked and could not figure something out. I put them to the test by not performing three of the steps in the tutorial and then looking up in a confused manner and then the Master of Authorware summoned one of his underlings to my side, they quickly whipped through the steps I missed, explained what the steps were and caught me up with the tutorial. They put themselves in the awkward position of teaching any passerby that felt like sitting down for a while the basics of some pretty complicated software and they did it well. Not just brave but intelligently and smoothly executed.
The Humanitarian Award for Employing Out of Work Actors
There is a tie for this award. This award is shared by both SUN and Caere. I have seen my fare share of tall busty blondes with no knowledge of the product they represent propped up in the periphery of a vendor booth before as well as the summon of a strip club barker calling you over to the next demo of useless junk. This show had an abundance of out-of-work actors employed simply to make the demo seem more like a sitcom. I will not even bother to describe the whole presentation because you can get the idea of it simply by watching any network sit com doomed to cancellation. This clued me in to the fact that the Nielsen family is slowly mutating into the Netscape Family Robinson.
The Coolest Product, Best Presentation and Free T-shirt Award
I shook my head all the way through Allaire's presentation of Cold Fusion. I had heard this package rocked and it sure as heck does. The presentation was bare bones - no flashy display, no pushy sales person. The president (as well as the chief technician) of the company, Mr. Allaire himself, did the presentation. No double talk, no sales pitch, just pure facts and no nonsense. What an absolute breath of fresh air. I eagerly filled out the response card for this product just because it was a truly fine piece of material. At the end of the presentation, unbenounced to us, as we turned in our response cards, we were handed an Allaire Cold Fusion T-shirt (and a fine soft flannel 100% cotton one at that). I know the T-shirt is far from unusual but to give everyone a shirt, without having to use the lure of a shirt to get people to sit through your demo, and to give one to everyone who saw the demo was very kind indeed. Now, upon my return home I received a phone call from the folks at Allaire. This might have been inconvenient but it wasn't. Very friendly, very nice-- questioning as to whether I had downloaded and tried out Cold Fusion and if I had if I might have had any questions. I tip my hat.
Honorable Mention for Silly Chotchkes
You all know who you are. As promotional items some things are just silly. If I had picked up all the promotional doodads available to me I would now have about 100 key chains, 10 mousepads, a harmonica, a whirlygig, rainbow colored plastic slinky, an inflatable flying disk, a roomarang as well as non functioning foam rubber boomerang, boxer shorts, several squash balls, a variety of hand exercise balls, 3 wrist rests, a rubber ball on a rubber band, a yo-yo, 10 or more book bags, 5 baseball caps, 1000 cheap ball point pens, 500 buttons, and of course 50 free hours of AOL time of which I may have spent trying to log on. This does not even include the countless diskettes, and CD-ROMs of demo software. If I were to add all of this into the suitcase full of T-shirts I received it would have made for a serious booty. Basically, all this plastic stuff is useless. The T-shirt is a promotional universal, the pinnacle of walking billboards, the most useful of advertisements. All this other stuff is cute maybe but it serves no purpose. People always wear T-shirts and other people will always read was is printed on them. No one ever asks me what is printed on my yo-yo, and if they did I am sure I would avoid them.
Watch out vendors of software and hardware...you never know what trade show A.I.M. will end up at next!
contact the author via email aherrick@auricular.com
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