AGI Tat

Thursday, 14 September, 2006

I was speaking in the Solutions Centre at the AGI Exhibition in the British Design Centre (BDC) today. In order to setup I had to get to the BDC at lunchtime which left me with a few hours to wander around the show floor. I thought I would run a little competition to see how good (or bad!) the free “tat” on the stalls was. So, to pre-empt my list below and in no particular order I’ll briefly run through some of the tat I encountered. To make my life easier I immediately discounted anyone with pens, sweets or bottles of water; we can all do better than that!

The OS were weak with a stupid little key-ring designed to remind you of TOIDs, MapInfo appeared to have nothing, whilst ESRI had t-shirts and not much else. So a poor start from the bigger vendors. Positioning Systems had a natty three-nib highlighter and HP were constantly running off big A0 poster prints (and, because this was a geospatial trade show, no one was interested in maps, but rather grabbed the Disney Madagascar posters!). Cities Revealed had a naff “build your own” press out cube jigsaw and Infoterra really plumbed the depths with a paper aeroplane!! Cadcorp started out well with some good (cycling) water bottles and Intermap hit dizzy heights with a credit card full of mints and an impressive super-bright LED keyring. So I saved the best till last, with Autodesk providing a full set of stainless steel coasters. Cool!

Worst Tat
1. Infoterra: paper aeroplane (well done Andy)
2. MapInfo/ESRI: nothing of value
3. Cities Revealed: stupid cube (Note: its not a bad coffee matt though)
4. OS: pointless TOID (Ed, does this fall under your remit?)

Best Tat
1. Autodesk: high quality, Chinese manufactured, bright as a button, stainless steel jigsaw coasters
2. Intermap: super-bright LED
3. HP: great posters
4. Positioning Systems: highlighter

I have to admit at being disappointed at the pointless tat this year. Things are definitely getting worse. For instance, a couple of years ago Intermap had some super nifty stainless steel thermal mugs. All this can mean is that GIS is a mainstream, low cost, product that has been commodified. Anyway, does anyone have any highs and lows of pointless tat from AGIs gone by? Leave a comment below and lets see what used to be on offer!

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