SJS and I went to the Oracle World exposition in San Francisco yesterday. It was big enough so that we hardly got to each booth in 6.5 hours! This is encouraging, IMO.
There were companies there that were looking to open offices in the SF/SV area. There were small outfits with new and/or useful Oracle tools - such as KeepTool gmbh, and Runner Technologies, as well as the usual big firms - Oracle, of course, but also Sun, IBM, Dell, Intel, HP, Veritas, Legato, Computer Associates and others.
I printed up 15 business cards, and gave away all but one! (I only do cards on demand - I'm a cheapskate.) This is different from both the Seybold 2002 and LinuxWorld DF 2002 shows, where I gave out maybe 5 to 8 cards.
Swag was more plentiful than in the recent past - and lots of companies are now puting together demo CDs. While not as recycleable as paper, they're also not as bulky to carry around. Runner Technologies actually had a nifty floppy with their SQL Toolkit v2.3 on it(only installs in Windows), clipped to a laminated cheat card telling what scripts and options were on it. They tied for the most useful swag with Quest Software, who had t-shirts and umbrellas for people who would actually wear the t-shirt.
Speaking of t-shirts, there actually were people who had long sleeve or non-white t-shirts as give-aways. Maybe people are realizing that geeks don't wear white t-shirts (or if they do, they don't stay white for long.)
The niftiest trick was the UPS kiosk at one company's "partners" area. They had the usual grot bag, and I mentioned that I didn't need yet another plastic bag. The guy then proceeded to show me that, at the end of the day, you could just fold in the handles, pull off the backing from a sticky strip, seal the bag and it became a UPS shipping bag for the junk you had collected! Useful... if you're from out of town.
We didn't get to any of the keynotes, and we of course couldn't afford any of the conference sessions. OTOH, not a bad day at Moscone.
Posted by ljl at November 13, 2002 04:16 PM | TrackBack