SIGGRAPH Day 4
Filed under SIGGRAPH
Wednesday I spent most of the day walking around the show floor. I was *really* disappointed...there were few interesting things to see. In the past I could have spent days learning about new products and services...this year I didn't see anything I hadn't seen before.
I use the show floor as an indicator for who is gaining in importance in 3D graphics and who is falling off the radar. The bigger the booth, the more important you are.
Based on the floor plan above, the biggest booths were:
- The Art Institutes, 2000 sq ft
- Sony Pictures Imageworks, 1800 sq ft
- Lucasfilm Ltd, 1600 sq ft
- Newtek, 1600 sq ft
- Autodesk, 1500 sq ft
It is interesting that 3 of the top 5 booths were there to recruit people, not sell products. That is definitely a change from previous years (when the floor was more interesting).
Also interesting was who was not present, but usually is...
- Apple
- Adobe
- Intel
- Microsoft
- Dell
- PDI/Dreamworks
From that list, I was most surprised by Adobe and Apple. Normally Apple has a huge booth promoting Final Cut Pro, Shake or Motion. Same goes for Adobe. They recently released CS3, and I would have figured they would have been showing it off at SIGGRAPH. PDI/Dreamworks was at SIGGRAPH for the job fair, but not on the show floor. Here is a list of all the exhibitors.
We had a large booth at SIGGRAPH because we are hiring a lot of people (see here, here, and here). We also had some really good presentations. I sat in on the John Knoll/Pirates 3 presentation that was packed...
Lucasfilm hosted a party in the Gaslamp District that evening. It was pretty easy to find...just look for the place with a bunch of Stormtroopers out front...
Two girls I met at the Autodesk party (Dorina and Laura) won a record single of "The Imperial March (Darth Vader's Theme)" during a contest at the Lucasfilm party.
The girls wanted me to autograph their record...which is ridiculous because I haven't done anything. They still wanted my autograph so I signed it...but I told them I could get some guys that actually worked on Transformers to sign it. I saw my bball buddy Nick Woo at the party and asked him to autograph the record...
I also saw Jeff White there and he signed it and then took a picture of me with the girls...
After the Lucasfilm party, I headed to the SIGGRAPH reception at the Marina Park to get my one free drink. After the drink, we went back to the Gaslamp District to hit the Softimage party.
The Softimage party was at the House of Blues. Initially, the line to get in was over 2 blocks long and it wasn't moving. We went to another bar and hung out until I got word from The Intern (Noah) that the line had disappeared and they were letting people in.
The HoB is a cool venue. They had a woman DJ spinning some groovy industrial dance tunes with go-go dancers on either side of the stage. Other than those women on stage, it was SSS (Standard SIGGRAPH Sausage-factory)...
SIGGRAPH
House of Blues
Softimage
Lucasfilm
Comments (4)
Why am I getting dragged into this again? The autographs were ALL Laura's idea!! haha Thanks for inviting us to the party, it was a lot of fun!
Posted by Dorina | August 21, 2007 7:15 AM
Posted on August 21, 2007 07:15
Why didn't you use the old tried-and-true "I work for HP" bit?
Surely the HoB values their relationship with HP.
Posted by Ian | August 21, 2007 2:31 PM
Posted on August 21, 2007 14:31
All three of my last companies (computer hardware) have seen diminishing ROI on having a booth at SIGGRAPH, plus other tradeshows, so booth justification has been on the steep decline and they've gone to just seeding hardware.
I remember when I was at Compaq at a CAD show and all Dell had was a microbooth, more of a kiosk, just showing some of the newest workstations, and then the next show I went to (while still at Compaq) Dell had no booth presence but their machines were in other booths. ELSA did the same thing.
Posted by Steve's Cat | August 24, 2007 5:47 AM
Posted on August 24, 2007 05:47
I found it sad that with all the money spent on putting up giant booths and such, hardware companies wouldn't spend diddly on personnel to demo applications. Without that expertise in house, there's no way to properly show off your wares unless you do the system seeding thing. Just borrowing a guy from Autodesk for two hours doesn't cut it.
When (now defunct) Compaq got rid of its DCC group, they were convinced that a set of WHQL certified drivers was all any customer should ever need or expect. Kind of explains the "now defunct" situation.
Posted by Kelvin | August 24, 2007 12:18 PM
Posted on August 24, 2007 12:18