what are trade shows or conferences all about?
A place to make contacts and get information! Well, guess what? They just don’t always have to be location-based activities any more. The old ploy of time-consuming travel to conferences at enticing, but expensive, plush resorts is going to diminish, along with overloading conferences with so many concurrent presentations and events to maximize audience size, that it is impossible to do anything efficiently. You might say conferences are a useful way to participate in a presentation, discussion, or round table. Well, there too, it doesn’t mean you have to be physically present to do so. In fact, real-time discussions may be less useful than threaded exchanges to allow more thoughtful interactions at the convenience of interested participants. Perhaps the only justification for location-based presence is where there has to be physical hands-on to a product, say, for an automobile. Otherwise, person-to-person contacts, information access, and demonstrations of business process applicatio
