VoiceCon 2008: Day One

VoiceCon kicked off today in sunny Orlando, Florida.  The workshops began in the morning, and the exhibit hall opened at 3 pm.  Even though I was scheduled to work the late shift, I dropped by the booth about 30 minutes before it was supposed to open.  I wanted to check out the demo and conduct a dry run — pretty standard stuff.  My plan was to do a quick “run thru” and then walk around the floor to visit the other vendors’ booths.  I’d come back later when it was my time to be on the floor.

I was unprepared for what I found when I showed up.  The demo was haphazardly set-up, some of the equipment we needed wasn’t there, and several parts of the demo weren’t working.  And, to make matters worse, it was only 30 minutes before start time…ugh!  It was going to be one of those days.

Now, anyone who has ever worked a trade show before knows that it’s rare for your demos to work perfectly during a show.  It’s just the curse of working booth duty and having a “live” demo.  You have to learn how to work around it and skillfully distract people from the features that aren’t working at that moment in time.

But this was worse than normal.  Frantically, we began to work with the demo team to correct the problems.  About an 90 minutes later (and with customers already on the booth), we finally had an adequate demo.  It wasn’t perfect.  There were features that still didn’t work, but it was much better than what we had originally.  Trade shows are so much fun…NOT!

Anyway, I finally walked around the exhibit floor.  The great thing about VoiceCon is that everyone in the industry is here, so in addition to checking out the latest technology, it’s sort of like going to a reunion.  You see all of the friendly faces from your past and get caught up on each others’ lives.  It’s one of the things I like most about coming to this conference year after year.

I started my shift at 5:30 pm.  Booth traffic was steady, but never overwhelming.   I’m actually hoping it will be a little busier tomorrow. 

The show floor officially closed at 7 pm, but my company was hosting a private reception on the booth for analysts and consultants.  Everyone stayed late to provide demonstrations for the VIPs.  By the time we got them out of the booth, it was about 9 pm and time for dinner.

Below are a couple of pics from day one.  I’ll try to get better shots tomorrow if it’s not too busy.