Exhibitions still work
1 min read
Given that engineers can get pretty much all the information they need from the internet, many wonder what's the point in going to an industry exhibition?
With this in mind, there was a deal of trepidation in advance of last week's Embedded World exhibition in Nuremburg. Bearing in mind the state of the economy, would the show be the success the exhibition organiser was anticipating?
The answer turns out to be a resounding 'yes'. Final figures issued by Messe Nurnburg showed the number of exhibitors was 5% up at 704, whilst the number of visitors was the second highest in the show's seven year history at 15,850 – 23% of them coming from outside Germany.
Part of the success of the show is to do with its location: if it wasn't held in Germany, where exhibition attendance is regarded as an essential part of the job, it probably wouldn't do anywhere near as well.
In the 1970s and 1980s, exhibitions were everywhere and well attended; you could see design departments wandering around discussing the pros and cons of the technologies they encountered. But since the mid 1980s, the number of relevant exhibitions has declined and with it the attendance figures.
Where there were 10 people in a design department then, perhaps there are two or three today – and probably with a similar workload.
Even so, are we now too busy to take a day to go to an exhibition or a similar event and 'top up' our technical knowledge? Or is it a case of the industry coming to us, by courtesy of the distribution sector's field applications engineers?
