Because the changes never stop and, well, it’s nice to get out of the house with other techies once in a while, we stopped briefly at JupiterMedia’s Wi-Fi Planet Conferences and Expo down at the San Jose Convention Center around lunchtime today. Touring the show floor didn’t take but about 45 or 50 minutes and if we hadn’t run into an old friend from Sun (Hi Sameer!), wouldn’t have even been that long.
Not a great sign of the alleged tech recovery, either judging by numer of booths or attendees. I was mainly reminded of the old real estate agent joke: What are the three most important things in real estate? Location, location, location! Except in this case, for wireless networking, switch the answer to security–at least half the exhibitors, maybe more, were showing products to solve provide protection for such nets. Or equipment to easily set up billable wireless access in places like hotels and stores.
The only vaguely interesting booth for me, besides the free espresso at PCTel, was Intel’s stand demonstrating location-based computing. They have both Java and .NET software bits to help with such applications but I couldn’t find them on the website, maybe I’ll follow up with the SE I spoke with about this.
And not much in the way of booth babes either! Matched the semi-dreary weather quite well.
BillSaysThis 