Last Friday, at the end of the day, I heard from some girl that the Channel Trends+Visions fair-trade organized by ALSO, wholesale distributor of information and communication technology as well as consumer electronics, is her favourite one. And now I can easily see why.
Starting with the location, the fair-trade is run in a former machine room for furnace blowers – sounds unimpressive, but wait until you see it. Beautiful from the outside, it’s fabulous on the inside, combining the modern spirit of our time with the industrial heritage of the building.
I believe it was an ingenious idea to leave some of the machinery and worn by the time, bare concrete walls with all their little imperfections, and to wrap them around high-tech exhibition pieces and first-class exhibition stands.
Promoters in robot, bird or roller skater costumes certainly added up to the entertainment. In fact, I counted up to seven different characters walking around the fair-trade, offering flyers, promotional bags or just pieces of chocolate to the guests. I personally was charmed by the robots, under whose masks were hiding two petite girls. Probably, because I got a chocolate candy, a robot-like handshake and later on a small complement from them:-)
Oh, they even had a professional caricaturist there! By the way, if you’re interested in more “impressions” from this fair-trade, ALSO has uploaded quite a number of pics on their website too.
As for the technology, the exhibitors had some really nice stuff. I didn’t have enough time to get myself familiar with all of that, but there were some fancy headphones, Wi-Fi cameras, laptops, tech for telecommunication… the list would be endless. I was kind of impressed by a projection of a building worker on the stand of IT2U, which spoke and you could even see the lips moving.
The product is called vPromoter, and it’s supposed to be a substitution for a salesperson, who, as the product flyer states, “is always motivated, in a good spirit and has no lunch breaks”. Somehow, I immediately thought of the movie Total Recall (1990) 🙂
Then came the ALSO Startup Award 2015! Words fail me to describe the feeling and all the emotions that overwhelmed us at that moment. So, as a picture speaks more than thousands words, here is the picture. Well, actually, three pictures:-)
And then there was a party organized by ALSO. Unbelievable – that’s the least I could say about it. It was hosted in an unspectacular industrial building (probably a former warehouse), but the interior was absolutely mind-blowingly styled. With four “themes” – Berlin with good old rock music, Mosel with high-class lounge feeling and great wines, Hamburg with it’s infamous party-spirit and Timmendorfer Strand’s home-made hamburgers and a small swimming pool – I think it satisfied just about everyone’s taste.
All in all, great day, great fair-trade, great experience for all of us. And of course, we’re all very excited about the award and the future collaboration with ALSO. As our CEO Renat said, “We are very happy that we won the ALSO Startup Award 2015. With such a strong partner as ALSO now on our side, we are confident that together, we’ll embark on many exciting projects.” We believe, this will be a wonderful year for our company!
