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“We’re building a holographic studio” – behind the scenes at the My World of Tomorrow show

Want to get your hands on the latest tech before it’s in the shops? There aren’t many opportunities here in South Africa. Worse, it can still take months for new hardware to go on sale after big international launches and some gadgets arrive in such short supply that you’ll be lucky to see most of them at all.

What is the discerning geek to do. And how does the person on the Johannesburg omnibus stand a chance of seeing the full breadth and range of what technology is available and what it’s capable of?

The best advice at the moment might be to get yourself down to the Sandton Convention Centre next month, for the inaugural My World of Tomorrow (MWOT) show. It’s an ambitious attempt to combine a high end talking shop conference with a big consumer show, so that members of the public can get to play with the latest kit from Samsung, Canon and the like and see demos of what these companies are trying to put together for homes, schools and governments across the world.

While consumer tech shows are popular across the globe, it’s not often that consumers actually get to attend. Most – like the enormous CES in Las Vegas – are for trade and press only. The Gadget Show Live in the UK is a notable exception, and that regularly fills the massive National Exhibition Centre in Birmingham.

As far as South Africa goes, however, there’s very little on offer. And according to the brains behind the event that’s a problem.

Business Connexion's Matthew Blewett.
Business Connexion’s Matthew Blewett.

“The sad truth is that here in South Africa we’ve gone backwards in terms of events,” says Matthew Blewett, “A part of what we are trying to do is trying to revive the idea of technology companies trying to launch products here properly. We have a launch zone to encourage some of the mobile guys who usually just leak stuff on to the market to actually take an interest and make an event of it again.”

Blewett’s day job is Chief Investment and Alliance Officer for IT supplier Business Connexion (BCX), and for the first year at least MWOT is being driven almost entirely by BCX. Curiously, you won’t see much of its branding on adverts though.

“We want to be key sponsors for this,” Blewett explains, “We could have gone ahead and done a BCX event and got all our partners together, we didn’t want that. We want everyone to come together to share what they feel is important.

“In two or three years time we’d be happy yo be a normal sponsor and let it have a life of its own, but to start it we needed to go to the board and put money behind it and bring our partners along.”

What’s important to Blewett is that the much abused buzzword ‘convergence’ has evolved again, and not many people in the enterprise world with which he’s most familiar quite understand the significance of what’s happening.

“We want to get past our traditional audience of enterprise and CIOs,” Blewett says, “Today you have convergence in a new world – it’s not just telecoms and IT but media and gaming all merging into one field. What’s exciting is that the audiences are all merged into one.”

To that end, MWOT will be a different experience to the similar rAge expo which takes place at the Randburg Dome a week earlier and also allows the general public to play around with new tech. While rAge’s main focus is on games with some consumer tech tagged on, MWOT has a much broader appeal, and Blewett is hoping that the range of people he can attract to MWOT will in itself have consequences.

“We want to get the public sector guy walking along with the consumer and his son and looking at the same exhibits,” he says, “Everyone can to learn from each other. A CIO might be missing an opportunity for his mining company by using technology designed for a completely different field, for example, Gaming is now key for sales and social.”

The final list of exhibitors hasn’t yet been confirmed, but Blewett is keen to discourage the idea that this will be about selling devices or simply a trade fair open to the public. Exhibitors will be encouraged to show what their technologies can do rather than just displaying what it is.

“We’re forcing them to show us what they’re doing for the future,” he exaplins, “For example, we have this whole experience zone where you can come and experience what the shop of the future will be like, with digital fitting rooms to some leading simulators to this holographic studio we’re creating.”

While a celebration of the potential for technology to improve specifically African lives is worthy, however, there is one ulterior motive that Blewett confesses to.

“We also want to get young people in there,” he says, because despite being the largest provider of business IT services, “Our brand is not known by young people leaving matric or university. We want to get the best coming to work for us – and my view is that if you don’t get them early you don’t get the best of the crop.”

My World of Tomorrow takes place on 16-18th October at the Sandton Convention Centre in Johannesburg. htxt.africa is an official media partner.

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