Dispatch from the Exhibit Hall -SLA2010
Jinfo Blog

18th June 2010

By Nancy Davis Kho

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Members of the FreePint team spent the first part of this week in hot and steamy New Orleans at the SLA Annual Conference. Our aim there was to connect with subscribers, to learn more about what information we can provide to help them with their work; with vendors, to hear about innovative solutions of interest to our readers; and with prospective readers to spread the word about FUMSI and VIP. The good news, as a vendor, is that we had plenty of time to talk with exhibitors and customers - and that was also the bad news. Attendance figures were down significantly - the official number was 3,000, but that always includes exhibitor personnel. The 'real' number of attendees was probably closer to 2,000, down by more than half from last year's centennial conference in Washington, D.C. Exhibitors conspicuously absent included Bureau Van Dijk, and many other vendors had smaller booth footprints. The consensus among visitors to the FreePint table was that budgets for this year's conference travel was set at the depths of the recession in 2009, and New Orleans was a hard city to rationalize both because of the expense getting there (for attendees) and the lack of customer visits that could be tacked on (for exhibitors.) Hopes are high that next year's more accessible location in Philadelphia will make attendee and exhibitor numbers rebound. Still, the attendees who came benefited from lots of one-on-one attention from exhibitors - and extremely good odds of taking home an iPad. It seemed like every booth had one on display for their drawing - a sign of mobility in the workplace yet to come? The FT.com was displaying its award-winning app for the iPad (http://apps.ft.com/ipad/) and I found it an interesting shift that James Mann, their director of Corporate Content Sales, was able to take his product around from booth to booth to demo - flipping the trade show model on its head. Maybe someday the attendees will sit still and the vendors will rotate, carrying their mobile devices! Aside from the emphasis on mobility, we had interesting conversations about Greek and Chinese data sources; product platforms morphing due to acquisitions and realignments; and ongoing innovations in news platforms and sources. Look for upcoming product reviews to reflect some of what we learned at the show. We also handed out lots of forms to gather feedback on the show and will be sharing attendee impressions in a future report. The final word? The SLA show in New Orleans was high on opportunities to network and learn - and the beignets, po' boys, and shrimp etouffee made it all the more rich.

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