ITS America Trade Show Feedback...
The ITS America trade show was held this month from June 4-6 in Palm Springs, California. Pre-show feedback for us at Intelligent Devices was disappointing: as more and more of the state and city officials that we deal with were unable to travel to ITS America due to restrictions on “out-of-state” travel.
This was confirmed by the mix of attendees on the exhibit show floor. There were more consultants and general attendees than I had expected (which was good) but as expected there were very few state and city ITS officials educating themselves about ITS products, services and technologies (which is bad). Fortunately for us at IDI we have a mixture of private and public customers, so our booth was very well attended, and we received our normal good quota of sales leads. However, some of the exhibitors that we spoke to, who were focused on the public sector ITS officials, were bitterly disappointed in the number of ITS officials who attended. We received very positive feedback to last month’s article in Intelligent News on this topic…
As an industry, we somehow need to fix this. Every ITS official involved in the planning, specification, purchasing, administration and operation of ITS devices should be required to attend at least one trade show per year and report on the experience as part of their job description.
![[Tradeshow]](http://www.intelligentdevicesinc.com/eNewsletters/images/ITSShow.JPG)
Intelligent Devices Booth at the ITS America Trade Show
The technical content of the trade show was very interesting. Continental tires had an interactive “ride” showing Active Safety Systems, and the VII demonstration in the parking lot was effective in showing some of the basic implementations of VII. Interestingly, to us it showed the “compelling need” to adopt interfacing Standards in this industry, to enable other stakeholders involved.
Other observations:
- Where are the young people? Our industry is dominated by aging engineers, and it seems that we are not attracting young engineers and ITS practitioners. We think there is a clear message here.
- There was a good turnout of exhibitors, but many took smaller booths. This reflects the reduction in the expectation of commercial business coming from the trade show.
- NTCIP is now firmly established world-wide as the ITS “communication and functional” standard. The focus of questions at our booth were all “how to" NTCIP type questions. The nervousness and doubt of previous years about NTCIP was completely absent.
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