SAPPHIRE 2003 Tradeshow

Let me apologize right off the bat for the brevity of this webpage. It's just going to be a quick writeup. Come to think of it, though, that suits the event rather well given the the fact that the initial inquiry for my participation was made about 4 weeks before the due date. And since for two of those weeks I was travelling across the country, I actually only had about a fortnight to get something done.

Cap Gemini Ernest & Young asked me to help them promote their tradeshow booth at this year's SAP sponsored SAPPHIRE tradeshow which was held in Orlando, Florida. The company's theme at the show was something like 'Building an Adaptive Enterprise,' and that phrase seemed to lend itself to the notion of 'building with LEGO bricks.'

I was asked what I could do at the show (like most tradeshow gigs this was to involve myself building something live during the course of the show to attract attention to the company's booth).

Given the exceedingly short timeframe, we decided that I would do the following:

Build a faux computer system and monitor out of LEGO bricks,
Bring my previously built LEGO Globe and build a duplicate of it onsite, and
Install my large San Francisco mosaic in the booth.

So, that's what I did.

The mosaic was hung without glue, as usual. The tricky part was the fact that it was actually hung against a convex wall. I wasn't sure how well it would handle the slight bowing effect, but there was no trouble at all (look along the top edge of the mosaic in that picture to see the curvature).

Also, instead of driving nails into a wall and hanging the mosaic from those (as is the usual mode of operation), this time the mosaic was hung using wire 'S' hooks which were placed over the top edge of the exhibit wall. Again, there were no problems.

I never got anyone to snap pictures of me building the models at the show, but I did take a couple once they were complete: pic 1 (the 'fat spade' built into the monitor's screen is the CGE&Y logo), pic 2.

Of most interest to myself was the keyboard I built for the computer model (the design and placement of the smooth keys was a fun task -- yes, the whole keyboard is built sideways).

Update (11 Sep 2003)

One of the conference participants was kind enough to send a picture of me actually building at the booth. Thanks, Katherine!

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