Inventing for the Rest of Us » invention convention

Putting on a Giant Expo

Bryan Daigle — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 23:17:30 +0000

Now back in college, I ran a couple events for the University of Texas Ultimate Frisbee Club Team. Our biggest money maker as a team, and a way to subsidize our spring season travel ($50,000 travel budget), was hosting tournaments. Back when I was there, our club team hosted two tournaments.

I learned a great deal from putting on these events, the biggest which would attract up to 30 teams, or 450 individuals to come play, and several hundred spectators. We’d organize about 45 volunteers for an event like that, so we definitely had a LOT of help.

Never had I appreciated the experience of putting on a large, high-traffic event until 5 weeks ago, when IdeaTango was officially acquired by InventBay. Since then, my focus has been on only two things, the InventBay Expo, which we held last weekend, and launching them a new website within 3 weeks.

We launched the new website October 9th, with much help from my IdeaTango partners and our experience working together. This past weekend, October 18 & 19, 2008, we officially held the coming-out party (Quinciniera or Barmitsva as it is called in other cultures) for InventBay, in the only place big enough to hold us, Las Vegas, Nevada.

The expo was hosted at the Sands Expo, in Hall A, which has 178,000 sq feet of open space. Of course since this is our first year, we only filled up 1/2 the show floor with ~130 exhibitors + another 70 booths where people could sign up for local inventor associations.

Some valuable lessons that I learned when putting on tournaments, came in handy when being an integral part of this expo:

You can never do something on this scale alone, so the ability to delegate is more important than any other factor.
If something can go wrong, it will. Double-check and verify everything. For example, for one of our tournaments, the person who wrote up the tournament finals bracket left it at his house, and caused our Sunday playoffs to start an hour late. Eventually this led to us shortening the finals game because we didn’t have daylight. At our expo this year, Kinkos was scheduled to print up a bunch of stuff for us the day before the doors opened. I asked our guys to double check what they received. Well, Kinkos forgot to print our speaker bios and we had to go back and pick it up 7 hours later. Good thing we checked!
Stuff will go wrong, and rather than say that was ____’s job, just take the responsibility. Do whatever you can to fix it, even if it sometimes costs money.
Always throw a party. I was able to convince our executive team that we needed a mixer, networking-like event either Friday or Saturday. Thanks goodness, because some of the people we talked to said that they met “so and so” and because of our party, they’ll come back next year. It’s a great way to informally talk with exhibitors, speakers, VIP guests, because once those show doors open, you won’t have another opportunity.
Have fun. This goes with the point above. No matter what, if people have fun at your event, most will come back. Of course you need things like qualified attendees and exhibitors, but having fun can make up for quite a bit.

Let me tell you, it was fun and emotionally fulfilling to be part of such a big event, but I’m glad it’s not happening again until next year!

- Bryan Daigle

Moving IdeaTango Blog

Bryan Daigle — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 18:28:30 +0000

Because we now have blogging capability on the NEW IdeaTango.com, we’re moving the IdeaTango.com blog here. Not only will I continue writing the blog, but now famous inventor of the French Twister, and partner of IdeaTango.com, Lisa Lloyd will be sharing her wisdom on the new blog.
This blog at bryandaigle.com will become my personal blog (less corporate) to share my thoughts with inventors, entrepreneurs, and to anyone else who will listen. Let me know what y’all think of our new site, we’re super excited!

Bryan Daigle

Yankee Invention Expo, etc.

Bryan Daigle — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 18:04:41 +0000

Dear Blog,
I’m sorry I have neglected you over the past few weeks. I know you’re very reasonable but I just wanted to let you know I didn’t want to hurt you. It’s just that with my online community for inventors and their invention ideas, IdeaTango.com, we were launching a new, and much improved version of our web site. If you don’t believe me, go to IdeaTango.com right now and you’ll immediately see the difference. Our team was very excited to get this out.
I realize that’s not enough to help you forgive me, but in addition to IdeaTango, I was helping launch another company, InventWise. At InventWise we’ll provide inventors with market research, cold hard facts, that will help them prove the viability of their product. It’s a fantastic group of people, and we’re all driven by a desire to deliver credible, independent research. Normally maybe launching a new IdeaTango.com wouldn’t be enough to keep me from you, but our InventWise team also had to launch a whole COMPANY in a period of a month (web site, team, 800 number, services …). Luckily we had a running start with the experienced founders, but starting a company in a month is no less than an amazing feat. And we did it.
I know what you’re going to say, this isn’t good enough. But let me stress that we were limited by a hard deadline, the Yankee Invention Expo in Waterbury, CT October 11-13th. We had no option to do all this before then. if you don’t believe me, you can go see pictures from the invention show.
So I hope you understand and can forgive my absence. Lucky for you not only will I be writing to you, but also Lisa Lloyd, our wonderful, and successful inventor partner. I hope we can have what we had before.

Bryan Daigle

What Happened at the Houston Invention Association Tradeshow?

Bryan Daigle — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 04:53:42 +0000

To answer the question posed by the title of this post, more that we expected. The HIA event turnout for the show was double what they expected. The show topped out at 250 attendees and the little room was jam packed with inventors, businesses, and service providers. I was impressed!

An MBA student that has been working with me for the summer thought of a great idea to get people to visit our booth . . . hand out free cake! It worked, we didn’t have to take any home. We of course decided to continue our trade show trend of wearing our light bulb (or chef, or pope) hats to draw attention.

The quality of the speakers is what impressed me the most. Apparently the guy who invented the reusable home air filter is from Houston, who knew? He spoke. So did another guy who made money on a weed-eater attachment, and now owns a product development company in Houston. So did Richard Scruggs, a very well connected venture caplitalist, angel investor, serial entrepreneur, and currently head of the Texas A&M Center for New Ventures & Entrepreneurship. All the speakers gave great advice such as:

make sure your invention sells before putting too much money & time into it,
be persistent,
don’t listen to “experts”,
look to friends & family for startup money,
start small & grow big (not the other way around),
learn and read everything you can about invention and entrepreneurship.

Helpful advice no matter what your going into.
Bryan Daigle

Some Pictures from the Show

Notes from an Invention Show

Bryan Daigle — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 13:15:26 +0000

We just got back from a fantastic trade show called Inpex. Known as America’s largest invention trade show, this Pittsburgh based show brought in several thousand attendees and hundreds of exhibitors. We had traveled to many a trade show, but this was the first one where we actually hosted a booth. To get people to stop by our booth, we took pictures of them in a giant light bulb hat. We’ve posted the pictures from the invention show on our website and MySpace page.

For those of you inventors or entrepreneurs deciding whether to host a booth or not, here are some things to consider:

- Hosting a booth will get expensive. I’d say triple the cost of the booth space itself, and that’s a good estimate for how much you’ll spend on the whole trip. You need to buy equipment, print banners, hire someone, UPS anything too large to carry on the plane, etc.

- That said, the decision to host a booth should come down to how many conversions can you get per $ spent. If you just visit a trade show, yea it will cost you less, but you may only get 50 names. If you host a booth, it may cost you a bunch, but you may get 300 names.

- It also depends on your personality. If you visit a show, you’ll have to walk up cold turkey and make your pitch to anyone that will listen. If you have a booth, you will still have to grab people out of the aisle, but you’re more in control because you have the booth and they don’t. So if you’re a people person, either way is good. But if you’re, hmmmm, let’s a say less of a people person, maybe a booth will be more natural.

Those are some thoughts I thought would be helpful to trade show newbies. Stay tuned because next time I’m going to write about a great reality TV show I found last night (and it’s not American Inventor).

Bryan Daigle

Whoa! A toast to Stanford's Cool Product Expo

Bryan Daigle — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 22:19:57 +0000

This week we stopped by Stanford’s Cool Product Expo 2007, and we must say . . .

Before we say anything, we’d like to mention how great it was to see this convention room full of all sorts of gizmos & gadgets. Most everything that was on display came from the minds and hearts of independent inventors. There was everything from a powered skateboard, to bamboo flatware, to video games controlled by brain waves. Of course a couple high-tech objects required an entire university team to develop the algorithm, but most companies presenting started out as inventors with a passion for their product.

Inventors flew in from as far as New York, Singapore, Korea, and Germany to display their fantastic “cool” inventions. It goes to show you, there’s always room for more innovation.

That said, we saw some pretty sweet stuff. But words here just don’t do it justice. C-net was on location capturing the intensity, as best they could, with their video camera. They told me they’d have the video out next week, so be out on the lookout. In the meantime, here are some snapshots from the event.

Our vote for “Most Cool Product” at the show has to go to NueroSky’s brainwave reading machine. By putting on what looked like a pair of headphones, you could play a video game using your brainwaves. Of course it’s still in it’s infancy, but in the game you could push, pull, or levitate objects just by focusing your concentration on them. Think Luke Skywalker becoming a Jedi. I tried it out myself and was blown away. It’s straight out of a science fiction book. SO congrats to Nuerosky, and all the other inventions that were displayed at the expo. We look forward to next year.

Bryan Daigle

View pictures from the show…

Coming to a city near you

Bryan Daigle — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 18:39:18 +0000

Next time you go out for lunch in your city, you might see us. That’s because during March we plan to hit up several big events around the country to celebrate the upcoming release of our redesigned website. We think it has the power to help so many people, that we don’t know where to start!

Our first date was this week, where we spoke to some manufacturers and industrial product companies at the Houstex show.

Then starting this weekend, March 11th through the 13th, we’ll be drumming up some juice at Chicago’s Home & Housewares Show. Not only will companies, manufacturers, and various agents be taking part, the show will have a large section of the show just for independent inventors. We’ll let you know how it goes.

On March 19th we’ll be handing out goodies at the American Inventor auditions in Los Angeles. We’ll also make appearances (we sign autographs) at the San Francisco auditions March 25th.

As mentioned on our home page, if you see us, and mention this article, we’ll give you a free ideatango.com t-shirt. You’ll be the hippest cat on the block.

Bryan Daigle

Invention Trade Shows – the scoop

Bryan Daigle — Fri, 12 Jan 2007 04:06:00 +0000

Invention Trade Shows – they can be a wonderful way for both inventors and companies to find one another and initiate a dialogue. Hundreds of people with the same common interests in a single room, it’s like 2000 people coming to your own personal pool party. But at what cost does this face to face contact come at?
For an inventor or company just to attend, your talking minimum 1-2 plane tickets (or more if you want to hit up all the booths), hotel, domestic brand mid-size rental car, employee time, and last but not least, the admission tickets. So you’ve spend well over several grand just to get you there, your work has just begun. I’m not going to even talk about the cost of hosting a booth and if you don’t know what it costs . . . you don’t want to know.
“Now why couldn’t someone replicate the convention type feel, at a fraction of the cost” you ask inquisitively. Well my good friend, that’s what we’re doing here at IdeaTango.com. We’re bringing the seedy underbelly of the invention convention world straight to your monitor.
When we release the full website here in the next few months, we’ll have all the stuff you’d expect out of an invention convention, at a fraction of the cost and with the convenience of the internet.
Actually, we’ll be completely FREE, but only for a limited time. So be sure to jump on our bandwagon early, take advantage of our tools, and join us in our quest to revolutionize invention conventions, Web 2.0 style.

Bryan

Inventors – submit your new invention ideas to companies
Companies & Entrepreneurs – connect with our community members to generate new product and business ideas for your company

All at IdeaTango.com

Bryan Daigle