A crowd jostles for a glimpse of the wares displayed under a big blue-and-yellow banner.
“WORLD’S SMALLEST STORAGE DEVICE,” the sign screams.
“Fits in your pocket. Convenient. Portable. Take it anywhere.”
A footlocker for fleas? A pint-size closet for Lilliputians?
Hardly. This featherweight gadget is electronic. And it’s an attention-grabber on the popcorn-littered floor at Comdex Chicago, a trade show under way this week at McCormick Place.
Drawing an estimated 70,000 visitors, the event is probably the only gathering of its size where as many people stop to inspect refrigerator-size Web servers as pause to gaze at the grand prize in a drawing by Electronic Data Systems: a shiny new Corvette.
They’re willing to stand in line for a chance to sit with like-minded souls for 45 minutes while a trainer from VA Linux Systems shows them how to write a program using Linux script.
They’ve come to see what’s hot, what’s not in their industry, and who’s likely to be around next year.
This event is one place they go to take the tech industry’s temperature. (Their answer this year: tepid and cooling fast.)
For sure, the stock market is convulsing while tech companies shed hundreds of billions of dollars in market value, not to mention employees.
But more is shaping Comdex than the economy’s slowdown.
This annual spring show–like its bigger counterpart in Las Vegas every fall where tech companies unveil new products in time for the important holiday selling season–once was a must-attend event.
It drew geeks and gadget-lovers from around the U.S. But that was during the personal computerindustry’s heyday.
Comdex crowds have grown a little smaller every year since the Internet revolution began in the mid-1990s, and shows like Internet World began to steal some Comdex thunder.
The Internet’s rise is turning the PC world topsy-turvy, just as it has virtually every industry.
Some say the PC is dead. They suggest it has little or no future in a Web-based world where smart appliances and hand-held communications tools are sprouting faster than salespeople figure ways to market the “world’s smallest storage device.”
The PC isn’t disappearing anytime soon. Nor is Comdex Chicago.
But the event continues morphing into a more regional event aimed at small- and midsize business owners and the legions of IT professionals.
Walking the floor are people like Carolyn Boehmer, a Milwaukee-based computer consultant who isn’t feeling a recessionary pinch. Boehmer’s Sunnyside Consulting is a one-stop shop for her small-business clients.
She’s disappointed Comdex isn’t bigger and flashier this year, but she’s seen worse downturns.
“This is a blip,” she says. “You’re in the IT business, you take it in stride.”
As did Madison, Wis.-based Biocentric Solutions Inc., which is sparing little expense to impress the crowds.
Biocentrics is a nod to biometrics, a science that, when applied to the computer world, controls access by identifying users by their thumbprints, voices, retinas, irises and the like.
The company’s matchbook-size BioHub, for instance, plugs into some hand-held computers. It sports a thumb-size scanner that locks out unrecognized thumbs.
The device is shown, along with Biometrics’ other offerings, in a gleaming display of light and pastel Plexiglass. The futuristic case rests in the center of a small sea of carpeting. Biometrics paid about $50,000 just for the space.
Across the floor, in a Maxwell Street-styled space one-tenth the size, salespeople for the “World’s Smallest Storage Device” can’t pass out fliers and free pens fast enough. The pack-of-gum-size device, FlashUSBDrive (www.flashusb.com), plugs into a computer and stores giant gulps of data.
Nearby, a magician draws an even bigger crowd. He promises to turn a $5 bill into $100. And he does–or at least appears to, all while pitching Sun Microsystems.
There’s a tech trick everybody can use.
