We went to Kuala Lumpur and became part of a smart nation
- Colin Bell
- Sep 30, 2022
- 2 min read
Updated: Nov 25, 2024
Better two and half years late than never... under our Lab 4.0 brand, from 27-29 September 2022 we exhibited at the Smart Nation trade show at MITEC, the major exhibition centre in Kuala Lumpur. The show was originally scheduled for 2020 but was postponed several times because of Covid.
We have worked at trade shows before but this was the first time we have exhibited our own company. We were at the show promoting our Internet of Things (IoT) and industry 4.0 education solutions for Malaysia and ASEAN. Naturally we brought along our Lego model of a smart city, stuffed with technology and sending live data up to the cloud and back to our monitors (which meant that the data was going around the world in the same time it took to take the couple of steps from one side of the booth to the other).
The various postponements meant that the show was quite different from its original plan. We had hoped to see many more representatives from education institutes such as universities at the show. But, it was an interesting experience anyway, and hopefully we made a few useful new contacts and spread our name (and our t-shirts) a bit further.
Here are a few pictures from the show...
Lessons learned
We got some good insights into what it is like to be a self-managed small company exhibitor at a trade show, so here are a few lessons we learned, in case anyone else is in the same position...
If you have posters or banners that you stick up around your booth, make sure they are all accessible in case any of the tape or whatever is holding them up turns out to be not strong enough and you need to do running repairs. You can never have enough double sided tape.
Likewise, if you have a display model or something similar that has wiring or other connections, make sure it is all reachable in case of failures. And, plan ahead for how many power sockets you are going to need, and make sure you have more than enough extension cables.
Skirting. It might look a bit old fashioned, but in a little 3m x 3m booth (the standard size for small company booths at trade shows around the world) there isn't much space to store things, so if you have a table make sure you have skirting around it. It hides a multitude of sins.
Make sure you know what companies are exhibiting around you. If possible, if you are promoting something fairly quiet like training services, try to make sure your booth is not situated opposite a massive company which is promoting their services with a very popular and very loud virtual reality zombie apocalypse first person shooter game...
