or swag, if you will. the gimmes. the freebies. the loot. even, perhaps, the booty, in that good ol’ pirate’s treasure sense.
this is comdex. and the schwag is why i go. sure, i can learn about some new technology and possibly make a contact or two, but the honest truth is that the dot-com bust has taken all of the whiz-bang galmour out of such techno-shows. the loud presentations are few and far between, the occasional celebrity is off doing something else, the booth girls have gone back to … well … whatever else might pay the bills, and you’re left with a voluminous exhibit hall filled with too many vendors trying to sell too few variations on a product. every other one of them has this eager look in their eye, borne out of desperation instead of drive, all of them just wanting a chance to take down your name, get your information, send you some literature so that maybe you might decide to give their product a fighting chance in the real world. the two big ideas this year? security, the data kind, and wireless networking. oh, and a lot of people hawking secure wireless networking, just to cover the bases. sure, the big guns were there, the microsofts, the xeroxes, the hps, but they weren’t as extravagant as they were just a couple of years ago.
so it is all about the stuff. the dot-coms are gone, so the variety of the free-givings is rather slim, but out of about an hour-and-a-half’s wandering around, i ended up with a bag containing the following:
seven demo CDs of varying importance, none of note.
eight brochures of typical shape.
three brochures shaped like the objects they advertise.
one american flag lapel pin, affixed to an aforementioned brochure.
two mints, one affixed to an aforementioned brochure.
six whitepapers.
seven magazines.
one distribution of the freebsd operating system (from wasabi) – this i might use.
one purple and green owl with eyebrows like bert (from altiris).
one blue letter opener.
one big white button with a red flashy thing on it.
one gold box with a chocolate slot machine inside (from hp).
five ink pens of varying quality and functionality (best from proxim – a bic griproller).
two lanyards for my badge, one white, one black (both from cingular).
one matchbox-car sized porsche in a white box (from syskonnect – i have no idea what they make.)
one ticket to a 60-minute seminar of my choice, unused.
five stress balls – this is a sign of the times, certainly.
no frisbees.
no frisbees. none of the ping-pong-table-in-the-board-room flash of the oh-so-recent past. just a double-twice handful of stress-relieving spheroids. so you crush ‘em and release some tension, when the truth is, you’d rather just find someone to throw them at…
