From the Inside Out

For me, today kicked off with a series of meetings and the Microsoft keynote speech.  As expected, Microsoft attempted to take some jabs at Cisco, but it was a pathetic effort at best. 

After the keynote, I stopped by “Villa de Flora” (an Italian Food restaurant at the Gaylord) for lunch with one of the new executives on my team.  The Villa de Flora is a buffet style restaurant.  The food is decent, but not great.

The rest of the day was filled with meetings and booth duty (late shift again).  Here are some pics of the booth.

Here’s a cloudy view of a live TelePresence session.  I’m taking pictures from my camera phone through thick anti-glare glass, so the quality is poor.  However, you can still get a feel of what a TelePresence experience is like.

My last day at VoiceCon is tomorrow.  I’m catching the last flight to DFW which should put me home around mid-night (or shortly thereafter). 

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.