Preparing for KioskCom tradeshow next week

This has been a hectic week as we prepare for KioskCom NYC on October 23^rd & 24^th at the Javitz Convention Center in mid-town Manhattan. If you are not familiar with it, this is the largest kiosk industry tradeshow. We exhibited last April at the KioskCom in Las Vegas which was huge! This was the first time we exhibited at KioskCom and we had a new booth made just for this show. We had previously exhibited at the “Self Service and Kiosk Show” in San Antonio Texas the year before, but that show was bought by KioskCom and is now the NYC show next week. Interesting how these competing tradeshows buy each other out rather than compete for traffic. But there’s a little history for you.

I fly into NYC on Monday for setup of our kiosk hardware: The EasyShip, and our healthcare kiosk software: The EasyAdmit. I’ll blog from NYC and tell you about all of the busted knuckles and lost shipments (oh God, please no!) that can make a tradeshow setup interesting. During the days of the show I’ll tell you about the interesting speakers, vendors and best of breed hardware and software that is being exhibited. We tear down on Wednesday and prepare to ship everything back to our main office in Cincinnati. Hectic, but always interesting.

As I mentioned, getting ready is a lot of work. But luckily the work has been mostly on the shoulders of our expert IT administrator who has been imaging hard drives for me to take to NYC and our software developers making small tweaks to the software. We are showing off the new 2^nd generation IBM AnyPlace kiosk with dual core processors and lots of other nice features. Our company was given a pre-release version to work with for current high profile projects (a secret right now, but I’ll tell you in future blogs) and to integrate with our hardware. When we received the IBM APK it had no OS on it and getting a Win XP installed along with proper touch screen drivers was a bit of work, but our IT person figured it out. He always does, he is great. All of this he is doing while having to move our collocated web hosting servers which need to be moved by Oct. 31^st! Yeah, he is a bit stressed this month, and working hard. But in the IT industry that is what it takes to make a business run. Sales and IT are so important to a company. Times like this remind you of that fact.

Come to KioskCom if you can make to NYC next week! And look me up in the IBM booth.