First day exhibiting Tablet software at Microcomputers in Education Conference (MEC) 2005 went well. The conference is for educators. I think about 1200 in all.
I think we had just under 100 people drop by over the five hours today. The “booth” is in the South Hall where many of the smaller companies are. We almost made it into the North Hall, which would have been cool since HP, Dell, and Toshiba–who are all there–aren’t showing any Tablets.
Interestingly, our booth is between a handwriting pad digitizing company and a handheld email product. We had the Saraha i213, Fujitsu ST5020, Acer C110, Toshiba M200, and an NEC LitePad sitting out for people to try so that attracted a lot of traffic.
Most people that stopped by today knew of Tablets or knew someone who had one, but they hadn’t tried it for themselves yet. I wonder if a different group will stop by tomorrow.
I only saw two Tablets at the conference today. One was from an amazing Tablet advocate that dropped by (I’ll post more about my conversation with him tomorrow) and the other was used by the IT administrator that was handling the show.
I spent a great percentage of the time simply showing Tablet features to everyone. There’s still more educating to do. And this got me thinking. I wish I’d planned ahead and asked to give on a talk on Tablets in one of the sessions. There definitely would have been interest.
In terms of software, there was lots of interest in MathPractice, CoinPractice, and ArtRage. Makes sense. These are all simple programs–although few were able to draw anything with ArtRage. GoBinder was familiar to several people–although I think some got it confused with Franklin Covey’s app. No doubt people want to be organized. We also showed MathJournal, Physics Illustrator, and a handful of other “education-oriented” apps quite a bit.
In preperation for tomorrow, I need to install PDF Annotator and InkyBoard on all the Tablets. At least the crowd today was interested in them.
Oh, one more thing. I was surprised–very surprised–by the number of people who knew about Tablets, but didn’t know about Skype. I’m still trying to figure out what this means.