It’s oh so quiet … Are tech/telecom trade shows done for?
“I remember 1999, there were five-storey booths here and every hall was packed”, Egypt’s communications minister Tarek Kamel complains.
He was speaking at the sidelines of ITU Telecom World, a global conference sponsored by the United Nations’ information and communications agency.
This year the meeting halls are filled with just enough people to not seem empty. But there’s no need to elbow your way through throngs of people eyeballing what’s hot and new in the telecoms world.
ITU 2009 has the feeling of a Sunday afternoon, people are out and about conversing pleasantly with one another but there’s no rush.
Bill Huang, China Mobile research institute chief, says: “Its the quietest ITU show I have ever been to.” Why? He guesses the financial crisis is to blame.
Kamel says the malaise has been going on for longer: “This has nothing to do with the crisis. It started in 2003, the exhibition industry is changing. How? People came here to learn about products, now all this is online. But you still come to see people.”
Hamadoun Toure, ITU’s secretary general, gives a diplomatic statement “We are very pleased with attendance.”
What did you say? Fujitsu slows down speech on phones
Elderly, hearing impaired people are the new cool generation as a largely untapped business opportunity.
The market is growing each year as people live longer and phone penetration among senior citizens is nowhere near 100 percent.
Companies like Fujitsu want to change that and are tackling the main obstacles that have kept seniors from becoming technophiles — tiny keypads, sound quality and people just speaking too darn fast.
Emporia Telecom from Austria is one company that has started to design phones for the elderly with larger keypads and simplified usage but Fujitsu promises to go to the heart of the matter, the spoken word, by using a new software in phones that slows down the speed of speech by up to 20 percent — spreading the sound digitally over longer periods, and filling the breathing gaps.
The ITU show was dramatically impacted by the decision of CTIA to hold a competing conference in San Diego, USA the same week as ITU, thus leaving the technocrats to themselves in Geneva whilst the commercial crowds fought over booth babes in a lower cost and friendlier town. This isn’t to say the economy is any good. CTIA does not have record revenues or attendance, and one need only look at the dismal record at GSMA’s events, where Barcelona had a very low turnout – Nokia pulled out for next year – and their Asia Congress has been reduced to a Members-only meeting.