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As I stated in the previous post I went into London today to visit the Internet World show at Earls Court. This was the last day of the show which I thought would be less busy and perhaps would have more freebies left to claim for my good readers.

How it started

As I walked out onto the show floor I was immediately accosted by a sales rep from Rackspace, he demanded to know who I was currently hosting with and then continued to deride them out of hand. This kind of behaviour as you can imagine had me visualising attacking the sales rep with a chainsaw, but unfortunately not having one to hand (very poor planning) meant I had to settle for walking away instead.

The second stand I approach also turned out to be a hosting company; I could see a trend developing. It quickly turned out that the organisers had been categorising everyone and bundling companies together as geography allowed. This did give great benefits when looking for specific types of companies but had also had an odd consequence.

Two of the largest suppliers of mapping technologies were literally facing each other. Standing between you could imagine the carpet between being a moat which was the only defence from stopping them going to war GPS devices in hand. I was only interested to see if viaMichelin or Map24 had anything new to offer, but the simple answer was no.

SEO

Search Engine Optimisation seems still be to a booming industry and once into the SEO area of the floor I was flooded with constant requests for the URL to any of my sites for them to ‘help’. This ranged from supplying me with my Google rank (I’m pretty sure I know how to do that) up to dissecting every nibble of code (if you don’t know what a nibble is please look it up) and then printing out reports to prove that their company would be the equivalent of the second coming for your sales/marketing.

Sales Tactics

The usual levels of ‘booth babes’ were in place (mainly from the marketing sector) but there was also a good range of interesting attempts to get people onto stands. One that worked on me was the supply of $100 fake dollars worth of chips to be played upon a full size roulette table plus croupier. The person who won the most by the end of the day won some kind of prize.

Being someone who has frequented Las Vegas on a number of occasions (I skipped a whole day at CES once to just sit at a roulette table) I thought I stood a good chance until I sat down and discovered a web designer from a company I cannot recall had already racked up about $2000 and it didn’t look like the prospect of missing the entire show was going to distract him from his new vocation. I decided to bet heavily and quickly lost the $100 thus leaving me to continue.

IPod’s and cheating

One other quick mention goes to a company that was offering an iPod as a prize to anyone who could pick the most highly ranked words (I think on Google). They had a simple web application where you entered the words and it told you if you had succeeded in beating the previous player.

If at the end of the day you were still the highest you won the iPod. So Nokia N95 in hand I quickly entered ‘highly ranked keywords’ and lo and behold… top 15 keywords for last day, week or month. At this point I had a moral decision to make, do I go back and cheat (surely someone else had thought of this) or do I give up the free iPod. Well am afraid yours truly does not have an iPod to give away on the blog, so apologies for not cheating on your behalf.

I came back with a whole load of brochures which I will be reading in more depth and perhaps put up some specific information regarding the offerings in a separate post if I think they are worthy as this post has already got long (and rambling) enough already.

One last quick observation was the lack of blog recognition within the show. I know we are a very small sector of the market, but the power and worth behind blogging cannot be underestimated (as most of my readers will know) and so I was surprised to not find more products/companies engaging with the blogging community when there is so much to gain.