A couple days ago I visited the Bett show in London along with our friends at BBJT (bbjt.co.uk). The Bett show is all about technology use in education and although Slick Productions doesn’t really have anything to do with the education sector apart from web design for schools in the future maybe, it was a very interesting experience and probably worth the £40 in petrol, endlessly getting lost in South London, negotiating the M25 and the 7am start.
This is by no means a comprehensive coverage of the stuff on show this year, as I really hate walking and ExCeL is a really big place.
Overall, it’s interesting to see what’s going on in the education fields, as when children are introduced to particular software they usually stick to what they are familiar with later on in life. That’s why Office is free for students. Think about it. They’re gonna buy the full suite of office software when they get older because they already know how to use it.
It seems that the traditional projector is now a endangered species, Bett was littered with massive 100 inch led screens, some even packing Intel based PCs inside them, and I guess when a screen is that big, then why wouldn’t you include some sort of PC as well. But it seems for sure that the humble data projector is on the way out. All of SMART’s flagship products this year have ditched projectors and include a screen of some sort. The only projectors that really got any show time was Epson’s short throw projectors, tiny handheld projectors and a handful of stands had augmented reality projector setups where anything else wouldn’t have worked.
Lunch was a brief stopover at Subway, which cost a whole £10 for a 6 inch sub. Overpriced, but tasted nice anyway. That’s what you get for getting a lunch at ExCeL London I guess.
Another highlight was the Dell stand. A massive stand in the middle of the show showcasing all of Dell’s latest achievements. We spent much time here pining over their ranges of servers, thinking about just how expensive they are now and how cheap they’ll be in 10 years time, when I expect I’ll pick up a few from eBay. But in any case, + points for dell for having a interesting stand.
The Arduino Stand was a little lacklustre to be honest, and not all that inviting. No freebees sadly. Even the folks at Rasberry Pi were more interesting even though they had nothing new to show really.
Nothing particularly interesting at the Adobe stand, although you could clearly see it was designed by a company that specialized in design.
Slick Awards
Best freebee award goes to Cisco with their USB to Lightning/Micro-USB/USB-Type-C charging cables. I made sure to pop buy several times and pick up a couple. Will be handy in the future.
Worst stand award goes to a small company who’s name I can’t be bothered to remember, who were selling paper workbooks, the kind bound with black plastic binders. 10/10 for effort and creativity but a -1/10 for use of technology, photocopying paper is so 1999.
– Slick Productions, 26 Jan 2016
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