An expo without tears

By N. N. Sachitanand

BANGALORE, JULY 15. Participating in a trade fair for any company is a big pain. There is the logistics nightmare of getting your products to the exhibition site, the headache of chasing contractors and the organisers to ensure that the stall is ready on time along with the necessary utility connections and the agony of having your key personnel tied up at the site for a number of days.

On top of that, managing the rush of visitors and distinguishing among them the serious customers from the `droppers-in' is an almost impossible task, especially when one has to make do with untrained, young locals as stall personnel.

Now, a Chennai-based company called IPF Online, promoted by Mr. R. V. Pandit, whose print publications, Industrial Product Finder and Indian Textile Journal are well known, has come up with an alternative that avoids the above hassles.

In association with the Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India (Assocham), IPF Online is offering an interactive Virtual Expo, which exploits the power, reach, flexibility and convenience of the Internet.

It is a web-based platform which duplicates the look of a trade show in virtual reality. Each company is allotted a stall in which it can showcase its products and the layout of the stall is just like in a real trade show.

The stalls are graded according to the maximum number of products that can be displayed: platinum (13 ), gold (9), silver (5) and junior (2). The price charged accordingly is Rs. 26,000, Rs. 23,000, Rs. 20,000 and Rs. 10,000.

Each stall has an equivalent of a front desk on which two boxes appear - one for entering the visiting card details of the `visitor' to the stall and the other a set of replies to the most frequently asked questions about the exhibitor company. The latter box pops up as soon as the visitor clicks on the stall.

The technology deployed in this Virtual Expo is the same as that used in games and simulation software, says Mr. Brian Parker, General Manager for Content at IPF Online. The constraints of narrow bandwidth availability in India have been taken into consideration.

The Expo web site applet is just around 50 KB in size. The visitor need not download the entire stall but only the picture of that product in the stall which catches his fancy. Compression techniques have been used so that the approximate page weight for each product is just 3 KB.

Unlike in a real tradeshow, where the visitor has to search a lot and walk a long way to get to the stall that he wants, this Virtual Expo has a search facility that allows the visitor to directly open the stall that he wants.

A string search will allow him to categorise the kind of industry segments he wants to see. For engaging the visitor's attention during the initial download quiz contests with prizes are incorporated.

The advantages that this Virtual Expo offers to exhibitors is enormous in terms of time and costs saved in changing the exhibits if needed, enquiry and negotiation management, e-mailing promotional material to prospective clients (a mail tracking tool has been provided), getting visitor profile data and the like.

For visitors, perhaps one big boon will be that their queries can be answered authoritatively and immediately, unlike in the real trade shows where, more often than not, they have to fill in a questionnaire and wait for weeks for the answers to reach them.

Perhaps the biggest gainers from this Virtual Expo will be foreign participants - both exhibitors as well as visitors - since they can avoid all the hassles of international travel and transport.

For the organisers, IPF Online, the biggest advantage is that they can keep on adding new exhibitors without having to worry about limitations of space, infrastructure, administrative and managerial staff.

Of course, in a virtual trade show the physical feel of the product cannot be rendered. But other things like the three- dimensional appearance, the aesthetics, a sequence of movements (the machining process in case of a machine tool) can be depicted on the computer screen at the visitor's end, the only limiting factor being the bandwidth availability.

The first virtual trade show by IPF Online was on the Machine Tool industry. It lasted from January to April this year and had 48 exhibitors. According to Mr. E. N. Venkat, Director of IPF Online, the Expo attracted 30,000 page views per month.

The next Virtual Expo being planned for later this year will be on the material handling equipment sector. IPF Online is also hoping to have another virtual fair in the beginning of next year as a complement to Engimach-2002, Ahmedabad's engineering trade fair.

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