The Bett Show - Smart Technology for Education.
I recently attended the BETT show at the Excel Center in London. It was the first time I had attended the show and I have to say that I was mighty impressed with both the size of the exhibition and the variation of exhibitors that attended. My own company was invited, but I choses to check out the show myself before investing 10k in a stand!
The BETT Show is entirely dedicated to technology for the Education Sector. We are not just talking about Pcs; just about every technology you could image was at the show. Because the focus is on education, a lot of technology being demonstrated was actually quite fun to use. Most manufacturers are tasked with making technology fun, and what better way to do that then to introduce interactive technologies into the classroom!
The majority of exhibitors were technology organizations that were showing off their latest innovations. Touch screen technology was definitely the most popular technology on show and there must have been at least 30 different stands showing off their latest touch sensitive monitors. The outskirts of the show were occupied by many software organisations that were exhibiting new learning tools and applications specifically design for educating.
There were also many ICT Support Organizations at the show. Our friends at Our ICT were in attendance and I bumped into them just as I was about to buy my latte. I thank you for buying my drink with a link to your website J - http://www.ourict.co.uk
The biggest stand at the show by far was for RM, the biggest supplier of computer technologies for the Education Sector.
The stand was MASSIVE, but the design had been well very well thought out. RM has recently launched RM Unify, a dedicated cloud-based solution for the Education Sector.
RM seems to have just about every technology base covered. They offer their own branded hardware, onsite and remote support, installation, cloud technologies and network monitoring. There is no doubt that they are a big player in education technology, possibly the biggest.
For me, Stone Group had the most impressive ICT stand at the show. I thought that the stand design was innovative and I loved the way infographic style information that covered the stand. I also learnt that they have their own branded hardware!
The Dell stand was brilliant. We have a long chat with Kevin who was the server specialist onsite at the time. A very knowledgeable guy, Kevin demonstrated the new SAN technology, where dedicated sans run independently within a single server infrastructure. It is amazing how technology has moved on since my days of selling Windows Server 2003 hardware.
As always, I was very impressed with SMART.
SMART are the original supplier of interactive technologies for the education sector and their new inventions never fail to disappoint. One of my favorite products at the show was the SMART Table 442i, an interactive table for learning. Expect to see a lot of these in the classroom soon.
Definitely. If you work in education, or if you have an interest in the latest technologies then I think that it is well worth a visit. Tickets are free, and you can register on the BETTS website.