How do we attract interest for our booth? How do we get people in a relaxed mood for an open and informal discussion? After all, that is the sole purpose of having a booth at venues like the recent Future Network & Mobile Summit, so we gave it some thoughts. “Let´s use the SAIL sail-shaped leaflet” someone said. “To boring…” the colleague responded. “No, not like a leaflet, but like a sail-boat I mean” the response came back. Said and done! A regatta at the SAIL-booth was announced on Twitter and spectators started to pop in…
Any more serious conversation around SAIL, had then to be either started or finished with a match race over the booth table! It turned out to be a successful move…!
In the middle of the race
What races did we do then? Well, we had good discussions (and races) with conference delegates from vendors, operators, content providers, academia and not the least the European Commission. Geographically our visitors came from countries like Spain, China, Luxembourg, Poland and Finland to mention just a few. The time in the booth was well spent and we got multitude of opportunities to present the important work we are doing within the project and to explain also to the ones who initially had a somewhat simplistic view about the project that we indeed have a solid grip on what we are doing and the importance of it. The ground for further collaboration with related EU-projects, such as the GEYSER project, was laid.
We are complementing each others in a good way and there is willingness from both sides to explore how to demonstrate in some way how our respective architectures fit together.
The most brave sailor in the booth? Well, Lauri Oksanen (Head of Research for NSN) turned out to be a real fast racer. However, he went out a bit too hard and capsized on the finishing line. I am sure though that his team within SAIL will do what is necessary to repair their reputation 
Greetings from the SAIL booth in Warsaw – Thomas and crew
Disclosure and disclaimer: I am engaged in SAIL, an ICT project around the Future Internet, on behalf of Ericsson. However the opinions expressed in this post are my personal, and not those of the SAIL project or my employer.
