linuxworld

Haiku made its "big stage" debut at LinuxWorld for the first time this year. If you follow the feeds on our website, you have probably already read the nice reports that Urias posted on the website during and after the show (day 0, day 1, day 2 and day 3). I thought I would give me own personal recount of the event, in order to perhaps bring a little bit of a different perspective, and hopefully also complement what Urias has already written about the show.

I had never been to LinuxWorld before, but I knew from reading about the conference that it was bigger to other open sources conferences we have exhibited in the past. I also had an idea of the demographics of the event, as I had done a little bit of reasearch before proposing our attendance last year. Average attendance was said to be more than 10,000 people, and by the size of the exhibit floor at the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco and the duration of the show (three full days), this seemed just about right; this was obviously a very compelling number from the point of view of getting exposure for Haiku.

Jean-Louis Gassée visits us!

Day three at LinuxWorld Expo 2008 started off with Scott McCreary dropping his car off at my sisters' apartment, and catching a ride to the Moscone Center with me. Despite nearly running over a few pedestrians, we made it there with plenty of time to get ready. Jorge Mare had to leave for home the evening before, so it was just going to be Scott and me this day. I had updated my laptop with a slightly newer revision the night before, and spent some time getting it setup to run live queries before the show started (which seemed to be broken for some reason before the rebuild.)

Special Visitors

It started off like the other days, didn't seem to slow down as much as I expected on the last day. We did have a couple of interesting visitors on this day indeed. Amy Bonner from IDG stopped by our booth to say hello. Amy helped us secure the booth space after we were turned down for a space in the .Org pavilion. She said she was really happy we could make it, and shared some ideas with us for next year's .Org submission. We gave her a complimentary T-shirt for helping us out this year. It was great to finally meet her in person, and we snapped a shot of her standing in front of the booth.

LinuxWorld Day 0

I set out on my 3+ hour trip to San Francisco at 9:30AM the morning of August 4th. My trip included stopping and picking up Jorge Mare (a.k.a. Koki) during my drive along with the rest of the supplies and equipment that he was providing for the event. My car currently has no air conditioning, and the majority of my trip was in 95F (35C) heat - so I was quite sweaty when I arrived at Jorge's house.

Jorge's wife made us some lunch, and we soon packed up the car and set out for our destination around 1:00PM.

We arrived at the Moscone Center a little after 2:00PM in the afternoon - the weather is much nicer in San Francisco. We registered and made our way down to the exhibit floor with as much equipment as we could carry in one trip.

It took us a while to figure out where we were actually located, partly because our booth was what you see here in the picture (hint: we expected to see more than this).

So, this is what we have to work with so far. Clearly, it needs work... before tomorrow morning! We'll update with more information tomorrow.