The technology zoo
[ Last byte ]

A non-techie attendee at an informationation technology and telecommunication exhibition describes her enlightening experience

ITCN Asia was being held at the Expo centre in Karachi last month for three whole days and I was required to attend and get ‘educated’ on what the latest gadgets and services in information technology available in the market were.

Upon entering the Expo centre on the third day, I was pleasantly surprised to see a whole band set up at the reception. My joy knew no bounds when I assumed there was going to be live music. Upon closer inspection, my heart sank in bitter disappointment when I realised the instruments, a guitar, keyboard and drum set, were simply shells of what they were ‘supposed’ to be. I was offended at seeing that the guitar was without strings. It was an insult to the instrument itself.

Moving on, the hallway was full of blown-up advertisements of various mobile operators, mobile phone companies, television channels and maps of the exhibition. We, me and my colleagues, headed towards the area which seemed to be generating the most excitement from the crowd: the hall which hosted stalls by all the mobile operators in Pakistan.

The stalls themselves were humongous and had interesting shapes. The music playing from each stall was deafening. What was even more irritating was the fact that Telenor had Ali Zafar’s Channo on repeat mode. When it came to stall size, Mobilink beat all but failed to generate a crowd. Telenor on the other hand had everyone in the hallway going nuts. Standing on chairs, Telenor employees were throwing dozens of company-branded T-shirts, caps and badges high into the air towards the crowd and the recipients, in turn, would desperately try to catch whatever they could. Somehow it reminded me of the stories about medieval noble men throwing pieces of bread to the poor and hungry. The reaction was the same. And oh, I found out Telenor is starting a service that is faster than GPRS and would work just like a regular high-speed internet service.

A sudden, major shift in the crowd from the Telenor stall towards the Ufone stall soon revealed that Ufone was also throwing away freebies. Also present were a few Indus Music video jockeys (VJs). After a while these VJs were moved to a separate, tiny little makeshift room to be stared upon by their gaping admirers while they just sat there, had their photos taken and chatted amongst themselves. If this isn’t analogous to the modern-day zoo, where humans are both the animals on display and the spectators, I don’t know what is.

Not to be left behind, Mobilink employed a little two-wheeled cart that moved around the hall carrying their colours and logo. The person driving it looked like he was having fun. Seeing him, I desperately wanted to have a go.

The next hall we entered displayed everything related to computers, MP3 players and television sets, some from companies that I had never even heard off. What was refreshing to note was that Playdium had a stall where they had wide screens on display which some attendees were playing video games on.

Moving on, I found out that Intel had launched its second version of dual-core processor (dual-core? Wait, processor?). HP claimed to have the best PCs (the casings were amazing) and laptops in Pakistan while a relatively unknown company was giving out MP3 players via a lucky draw.

While turning round a corner, my attention was caught by 10 or 15 people, all dressed in black, wearing black caps and carrying little flags. They stopped in the middle of the hall and while waving their tiny little flags around and started to yell, “Acer! Acer!” I immediately decided never to buy an Acer product, even though I had yet to figure out what exactly they sold.

The stall that stole my heart, the products which still dance in front of my eyes and haunt me while I sleep, was Apple’s. Forget the iPods that most people, minus me, are carrying around nowadays, Apple’s MacBook looked very tempting. I’m not a Mac user, but I was ready to convert then.

One of the things I learnt was that the exhibition organisers know nothing about musical instruments or how to treat them. If I ever had my own company, I would never pull the Acer stunt and scare potential customers away and that Apple products cost three times as much as those by any other company in the same industry. Most importantly, it doesn’t matter whether you use their product or not, getting a free t-shirt from any company will, at that moment, make you happier then ever before.

First Published:
Spider
September 2006