Czech company Agentura Modre Stranky arranged a virtual trade fair,
Computer Forum,
that with more than 270 exhibitors and average of 1.000 visitors daily, was successful and gives good prospect for the next year.
Basically, the virtual trade fair is a sort of Web portal. The organizing
company built several “pavilions”–portal pages containing links to
individual “stands” (i.e. homepages and exhibitor pages).
Most of the
exhibitors used their normal Web sites in the role of stands, but some of
them built special ad hoc presentations. These exhibitors were among
the most successful in terms of visitors’ interest.
The portal site of the trade fair was divided into categories, including hardware, software, communications, and office equipment. The fair was also equipped with full-text search engine,
chat rooms and a published regular e-zine as the daily of the
fair.
The organizing company tried to mimic in cyberspace all
possible features of normal traditional trade fair–except one. There was no fee for participating and,
of course, no fee for visiting the fair, either. Its main goal was
to verify whether is the whole concept is viable.
Is it? Both the number of exhibitors and amount of visitors seem to be
quite good in context of Czech Web, where the most successful
Web sites can’t boast more than 4.000 individual visitors daily.
Obviously, that doesn’t mean that the virtual trade fair is a proven
business model.
Nevertheless, as the costs of traditional
fairs are becoming higher and higher, there is some temptation in moving
these activities into cyberspace. But who needs special event like
virtual trade fair, taking into account the whole Web as sort of a
permanent fair?
