The Elemental team showed off RapiHD at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) show in April in Las Vegas. Our marketing superstar Monica was responsible for organizing everything, and made sure that we had all our ducks in a row. Assuming you've done diligent preparation, these shows are a great opportunity to meet with a variety of prospective customers and business partners. We learned a few things along the way, and thought we would share some of them here to give any startups trying to pull off a smooth show a head start. T-x months: Book the space. Key learning here – check the site often. There is a lot of flux in the space game so the more often you check the better your chances are to get a good spot that might be visible from the main aisle or near a larger company that has a product that has synergy with your own. T – 4 months: Booth design. We decided to rent our booth since we were pretty sure we might want a larger, different booth in coming years. When you are making progress on start-up speed it is hard to believe anything will last for longer than a few months. Finding a rental booth that would stand out is tough but we believe we got one that did just that. A big part of doing that was making sure we had eye-catching graphics and deciding to have a screen with our demo running; but more on that later.

 T – 3 months: Demos, Demos, Demos. Since we had accomplished something that had long been talked about but never achieved, demonstrations were critical to our booth. We had a small amount of space and lots of different things we could show. We decided to make one of our demos self running in a loop and put it on a screen that we put on a stand at about 7 feet off the ground. That enabled us to have two more stations in the booth to allow for interactive demos. The issues around speed of video processing seemed to resonate with all the attendees. The demos of RapiHD running 7X faster than a CPU-only solution were required to convince most people that it can be done with off-the-shelf GPUs. T – 3 months: Graphics. We knew that a large, eye-catching graphic would be required to draw people's eye on the crazy NAB show floor. So shopping for a high quality graphic that would look great at a large scale and designing the booth to incorporate detailed enough content to explain ETI’s RapiHD™ technology took some thought and careful planning. T – 2 months: Trinkets. Having high quality schwag is a core ETI value so getting these picked out and ordered and shipped to be ready in Vegas is critical. We went with green stress balls that kinda matched the ETI ball brandmark. T – 2 months: Tagline. This is harder than you thing since it needs to be in a large enough font so people can see but having something meaningful and descriptive to say. We came up with "Hitting the sweet spot for video processing." T – 1 month: Decisions, decisions, decisions. Padding thickness, carpet color, trash service, electrical, internet connections, stools, AV rentals and much much more. There are tons of things that you can buy at trade shows. Some you will decide are not worth but the tip here is that whatever you decided to do, get your paperwork in before the deadline where prices go up because there is a steep penalty for being late. T – 2-4 weeks: Booking meetings. We sent out our invitation about a month before the show, but discovered that the critical meeting booking time is about 2 weeks before the show. There is a key window you must hit when people are ready to think about their schedule but before their dance card is filled. T – 2 weeks: Uniforms. We bought polo shirts and had our logos stitched so that people would know who were are. T – 1 week: Packing list. Make a packing list of everything you need to set up your booth and run your demos. Don’t forget to take Windex, tape, scissors, power strips and twist ties. Give yourself a full day for setup, as there will be a variety of emergencies. And then ... wallah! ... it's 8 AM on Day 1, and customers are streaming towards your booth!

Enjoy! Although there is a lot of work and months of preparation, a trade show is a great experience and you can get a lot accomplished in a very short amount of time.

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