Well, the show's over and it's back to the real world.
It was indeed a ride that can spoil a person, but I'm smart enough to know not to get used to it. On the other hand, it did make good financial sense to commute instead of paying for airfare, meals and lodging, so we may start seeing more of it. The plane is owned by our CEO, and when he's not using it, it is available for lease. It's my understanding that the plane has been a profitable enterprise in itself. The same crew flies the plane each time, so that ensures it is handled by people who are familiar with it, regardless of who's sitting in the back.
There were only five of us one the plane today, and I took my good camera along, so I hopefully got some better interior shots. I'll have a look at them later tonight and probably put a few more pics up for grins.
Stu was also right on the booth bunny definition. We don't actually have them working in our booth, but they wander around the crowd and survey people. (It's how we determine what the public needs and wants.) We do avoid the overtly sexy costumes and that sort of thing, since it's not the kind of image we're looking for. We staff the booth itself with regular employees who do have a working knowledge of our products. Some are Marketing and PR people, others are in the Sales division, and they always have one or two of us techies along to answer any questions the others can't. In the case of this show, there were two of us, and we took turns doing the presentations. (Watch the presentation...get a t-shirt.) Some companies hire actors to present a scripted pitch. We prefer to take a less structured, 'flying by the seat of the pants' approach. I think it gives us a bit more credibility to have someone from the development team (me) or from Tech Support (my partner this week) tell the audience the benefits of our products in their own words instead of reading a script. We show a few slides and discuss some bullet points to explain the problems our products handle, then we just run the products and demo a few things they can do.
And I don't think there was room for a lathe in this one. It'd be hard to keep the aisle clear.
We did see a couple Boeing 747 private jets parked on the apron in Vegas. Now
those guys...they have room for a lathe.
