Ty giving speech at BSEC 2010
We arrived back from the 2 day BSEC conference at London Excel late last night – so a day later, we’re reflecting on the event as a whole. Ty’s presentation (see below) seemed to go down well although the atmosphere in the conference seemed a bit flat. Other people from the event also commented on how the exhibition element worked pretty well but the conference has lost its edge (see the twitter posts via #BSEC ) and as for the after dinner magician… lets not go there!
I think personally Manchester was a much better location and the footfall was way down as a result… and counting/scanning people every time you come in and out of the exhibition shouldn’t count in your figures! (think ‘unique users’ guys). There was also no wifi and limited mobile connection which was amazing for a modern venue. And for the final time – can we reiterate – BSEC is NOT our event, we get no financial benefit from it at all.
On the plus side the launch of our marketplace went down very well, the quality of some of the stands was superb and we met some excellent people including some exciting new leaders in the school design world (more to follow on this). We have also posted some photos on flickr of some great new organisations we came across. Our overall report – B+ trade fair, C- conference (could do better).
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Agree with all that Ian and with bells on….it wasn’t a conference at all! It was a sponsorfest with the big players strutting their stuff and being sycophantic to boot.
I felt for Stephen Heppell who must have had to struggle to maintain his positive and enthusiastic disposition in such a corporate trumpeting.
My question remained unanswered;
“Given the advances in digital technologies and mobile access do we need to be building quite as many schools?”