The last time I was in Chicago was several years ago to attend COMDEX Spring. Guess where I was this past week?
Yep. For the 15th time during a 12-year period, I attended another COMDEX trade show where I learned once again the reality of the cliche, "The more things change, the more they stay the same."Trade show food is generally lousy and way overpriced. Hotels always jack up their prices in anticipation of the ensuing arrival of trade show attendees, even the lousy ones.
Your feet, legs and back hurt like mad after standing and walking on concrete floors for only two days. (And, anything beyond two days is pure torture on the body.)
However, you can always count on seeing old friends, making new acquaintances, and with luck, you might find at least one really good restaurant. (We did. It was Giannotti's in Norridge, a suburb West of Chicago.)
Overall impressions
The McCormick Place is a huge convention hall that straddles Lake Shore Drive just south of Soldier Field where the Chicago Bears play football.
Even though Chicago is a great location for a trade show such as COMDEX, attendance seemed down this year, as all the exhibitors and editors I spoke to commented on the smaller crowds. (Although the firm our company was representing at the show had very good booth traffic).
However, when I spoke to a COMDEX spokesperson about the attendance, she thought the numbers were actually about the same as 1995, with roughly 100,000 attendees and 900 exhibitors.
Maybe I'm just used to the crowds of 200,000-250,000 that attend Fall COMDEX.
Who was there?
This year, 17 Utah firms were listed as paying exhibitors, slightly more than half the number that regularly attend COMDEX Fall in Las Vegas.
These firms came from throughout the state, from St. George-based Strata to Logan-based Omnidata International, with the majority of the Utah companies exhibiting at the show based in Salt Lake and Utah counties.
Two Utah firms had two booths at Spring COMDEX: Iomega and Novell. Iomega's second booth was dressed up as a roadside stand selling giant vegetables (it's a play on its current television commercial), where its people passed out literature and buttons with wacky slogans on them.
Novell's second booth was filled with 25-30 business partners, each of whom paid $6,500 for the privilege of using an area measuring 6-by-4 feet.
SoftOne of Orem also had a large booth to display its computer-based training software and videos. And although Corel is not actually a Utah company, there are some 600 Utah employees who might get kind of ticked off if I didn't at least mention their firm's major presence at COMDEX.
What was there?
Of all the new corporate announcements at COMDEX from Utah firms, and there were several dozen at least, the one that impressed me most was from Access Software.
Salt Lake-based Access is one of the up-and-coming computer game developers in the country with such notable software hits as Under a Killing Moon and Links.
Its newest title is The Pandora Directive, a six-CD interactive computer game that appears to further blur the lines between the computer and entertainment industries.
The Pandora Directive follows the further adventures (or misadventures) of the bumbling private investigator of the future, Tex Murphy.
Although I only saw a few minutes of the new title, it looked awesome as the characters and settings appeared even more realistic on the computer screen than ever before.
Access also took additional pains to improve the final product by hiring a movie screenwriter to spruce up the screenplay and a Hollywood producer to produce the "game."
By the time it was done, Access had spent more than $4 million on The Pandora Directive, which is expected in computer stores by the end of summer.