If HITEC Were Five Days; A recap of personal experiences from the Hospitality Upgrade and Hotel-Online Staff / Geneva Rinehart / June 2011

While all the sessions I attended were great, the closing session by Scott Klososky was a huge hit. To those who left before this entertaining and insightful hour, I couldn’t possibly do his presentation justice. If you have a chance, pick up his book Enterprise Social Technology. This confusing world of social technology is more than Twitter and Facebook. It is far, far more and those businesses that can embrace, understand and continually engage have a clear upper hand going into this new phase of communications. I could see the heads bobbing in agreement as Klososky made some great insights. And the roars of laughter during the video examples surely were heard well outside ballroom D. There were many insights, but I will point out just one: we are at the beginning of a completely new communication norm so dramatically changed from even a few years ago. Social technology tools have already started to change the way the world operates, and the fact is we may look back at the past decade as the dark ages of information and knowledge transfer.

Geneva's HITEC 2011 Scrapbook

So many meetings packed into four days. The days were long. The nights were even longer. There were years at HITEC (I’ve been to 16 in a row, missing only one) when the last day really fell off and was simply a day to recover from the many Wednesday night parties. In the past I have walked the aisles on Thursday morning to see the tired, bleary eyed and often green booth attendants propped up with chairs or anything stable. But this year as I walked around making the final rounds to salute those who braved the unofficial sending off party (a.k.a. MTech/Libra OnDemand/Intelity bash) and still managed to arrive on time, bright and upright, most were still answering questions and giving intelligent demos to eager attendees and the occasional press person like myself still meandering the hall. I finished up my last official meeting with a vendor at 2:10 p.m., 10 minutes after the show floor closed. Looking back, it was probably the busiest and most productive week I have ever had at HITEC.

So as the plane lifts off the exhaustion sets in. I slip off my flip-flops and rub my tired eyes. I look around at this full flight of so many industry friends in much the same condition and I wonder, could we even survive a fifth day of HITEC?