Podcast and Portable Media Expo thoughts!

Well I am still in Ontario but will be heading for home in the morning. I had some wrap up meetings today. But I did want to talk about my experience at the Podcast and Portable Media Expo of which RawVoice the company I am the CEO of had a booth along with some of the other events that took place.

Thursday the team arrived in waves and we finished the booth on time. We had a couple of business development meeting in the early evening then opened the hospitality room around 9pm and by midnight nearly 200 people had stopped by to say hello. The Micro Brewery beer was a big hit.

Friday morning the team met and we had a very good board meeting. When we got over to the Convention Center we got set up and waited for the rush. When they opened the convention floor to all of the expo participants we got slammed. We had 7 people manning the booth and all of us were busy for seven straight hours. I had to bug out at 3pm to get setup for the 2006 People’s Choice Podcast Award Ceremony. That event started at 5pm and by 6 we had finished honoring all of the 22 podcasters Pictures are available via Flickr. Upon completion of the awards ceremony I immediately went back to the suite as we had two meetings scheduled.

But I must backup and say that during the day at the convention center it was terrific to meet with all of the different podcasters. I am not sure how many people we talked to but the number of business cards we each ended up with were in the hundreds. The various stories we heard along with accolades and engaging questions made us all pretty happy with the first day.

We have always known that our turnkey instant media solution which we call RawVoice Generator was going to be popular and by the close of the first day we had talked to a significant number of companies, schools and institutions wanting proposals so we are pretty pumped up about that.

We opened the hospitality suite again on Friday evening and while the traffic was not as heavy we still went through like 30 pizzas and countless cases of beer. I think most of the team got to bed about 3am which we all thought was pretty early.

On Saturday the traffic in the convention center was much more manageable and we only needed 5 people in the booth but I was pretty amazed at the number of people that came up and shared there positive experiences with being part of the Blubrry community. I am awaiting some logs to verify the numbers but I had 11 podcasters tell us there traffic is up about 45% since being listed which we were pretty happy to hear.

My session I was involved in as a speaker had a great group of podcasters in attendance and we covered a lot of ground on monetizing a podcast and which way is the best way to go in using a service like RawVoice or doing it yourself. Having been on both sides of the fence It was pretty funny to be able to play devils advocate on my own experiences.

Saturday evening we had more business meetings and opened the suite again and wow is all I can say. I thought security was gonna shut us down but luckily they did not and the last guest left at about 1:30am we stayed up to about 4am talking about everything. What an amazing weekend and what a great time meeting with thousands of podcasters.

We have some cool Pics up on the Parties and the Booth

The team at TNC Media were very gracious and we could not have had a better experience. I heard a lot of positive things about the sessions and because I was not able to attend them but look forward to the podcast releases.