The Massive Technology Show, Fourth Time Around

As I’ve writ­ten in ear­lier post­ings, I have soft spot in my heart for the annual Mas­sive Tech Expo. I remem­ber learn­ing about it first in Boston, before I moved to Van­cou­ver, and then decid­ing to have our first exploratory visit to the city coin­cide with it, back in 2005. Read­ers of this blog know that it was through this show that I even­tu­ally got my first job here, and also met the owner of the condo that we ended up buy­ing. That first Mas­sive was good to us.

This year, I have the some­what less urgent needs in terms of employ­ment (am work­ing now, even if it is a lit­tle spo­radic to begin with), and hous­ing (we are still in the same place we got via that first show). The first time I attended it, the con­fer­ence and show floor occu­pied the Telus Sci­ence World ‘golf ball’ (geo­desic dome) at east­ern end of False Creek. In the years after that, it grew to take up part of one of the show halls in Canada Place (the big build­ing with white ‘sails’ on the the roof, look­ing out on the Bur­rard Inlet), the show’s largest foot­print. This year, ‘Mas­sive’ was notice­ably less mas­sive, and housed in less fancy digs (partly due to ongo­ing con­struc­tion), the UBC Rob­son Cen­tre, an under­ground down­town cam­pus that sits smack in the mid­dle of the city, across from the Van­cou­ver Art Gallery, which I’d say is the city’s heart, as well as its liv­ing room, pillow-fight/flash mob site, party room and Olympic Count-down clock man­tel. Has it shrunk because of the cur­rent econ­omy? I’d say that’s a good bet.

I was pleased to run into some friends there: Jonathan Nar­vey, who cov­ered it well for TechVibes, as well as Jenn Lowther, Kris Krug and Tris Hussey. I also chat­ted with Chris Breikss at the 6S Mar­ket­ing booth, and had a photo taken of me with my face turn­ing crim­son (I wish I didn’t blush so eas­ily) as I held up my free T-Shirt (for tweet­ing the fact that I was vis­it­ing the 6S Mar­ket­ing Booth, of course) flanked by 2 pretty girls, with the slo­gan ‘Show us your tweets!’ on it.

The after­noon (I had to do a work thing in the morn­ing, and hence, didn’t get to the show until around 2), was mainly spent chat­ting with ven­dors, explor­ing the pos­si­bil­i­ties of some refer­ral pro­grams and poten­tial busi­ness oppor­tu­ni­ties for my com­pany, but it was actu­ally pretty low-key and friendly.  The most stress­ful moments were when I was inter­viewed live on the Inter­net (stream­ing video) by the folks at Media2o, a video/multimedia pro­duc­tion com­pany (the com­pany Tris works for, who pro­duce the local tech TV show “Con­nect­edLife”). I don’t think I blushed for that, but I can’t be sure, as I didn’t see the feed.

If my usual good luck that involves the Mas­sive show applies, I’ll bet that one of the peo­ple I met or talked to or deals I explored will result in some­thing good down the road. It’s only a mat­ter of time.