Futurex Expo 2006

I’m sitting at Jo’burg airport, patiently enduring my 3 hour wait for my flight back to Cape Town. The flights are too full for me to get an earlier flight. Seems like everyone wants to be home in time for the Champions League final. Guess where I will be during the exact 90 minutes of the game? Bleakness.

Today I had the fortune to attend the Futurex Expo at Sandton Convention Centre. Its been a long day the feet, but the exhibition was most impressive, and definitely worth the visit. Last year’s Cape Town Futurex was cancelled due to a poor response from both exhibitors and visitors. This years event was jam packed with great new products and services. I won’t go into much detail now as the battery is dying, but I’ve attached a few photos of some of the products that caught my attention.

It was hard to miss the Flybook exhibit. There unique marketing plan consisted of 4 hot ladies in little clothing, shaking their booty and Flybooks in the air. Probably not the way I would have advertised, a bit tacky I thought, but defintely bought attention, especially amongst the geeky business men.

What is a Flybook you might ask? A good spec notebook/tablet running Windows XP Pro, EDGE, GPRS, GSM, WIFI and Bluetooth compatible. With the Flybook, all you need to do is plug in your cellphone SIM card and get connected via GPRS to the internet. Alternatively, plug in your 3G card and voila, your connected. It makes internet connectivity a breeze. Costing you about R18 000, it is rather overpriced, but can be rented monthly @ R699 (I think), with the advantage of upgrades when new models come out.

Evenflow had some nice VOIP products, including a very stylish Skype phone. The Shuttleworth Foundation geeks were all there with some nice new Linux based apps.

LG’s massive, 1600:1, ultra high contrast ratio, plasma screen was awesome. Probably extremely expensive, but awesome.

MTN had a huge interactive golf simulator that not only made you feel like you were playing golf on a very prestiguous golf course, but also made you feel like you were flying on top of the golf ball once you hit it. That’s if you managed to connect the ball with the screen, and not catch a rebound into some techy geek watching behind you (Didn’t happen to me, but I witnessed something similar).

It had absolutely nothing to do with the services they were selling, but also managed to capture attention.

Golf + Hot chicks + Cool Techie Toys = Heaven for men.

All in all it was most informative, and a great place to source new technologies to sell. I urge all you geeky Jo’burgers to visit the expo.

P.S. One hour and fifty minutes still to wait, and laptop battery almost dead. Grrr… what to do, what to do.