A trade show is interesting these days not to see new products (we know the products perfectly the same day they are released to market thought the internet) but because they give you the opportunity to see who is the real person you had been communicating via email in the last months and because it provides you with a hands-on with the technology.

I went with Antonio and Ignacio (as in the old days). As usual, we arrived super late and all the parking lots on the exhibition center were full so we needed around 1 extra hour to park the car.

When we finally arrived at the IFEMA, we realized that there were lots of different trade shows at the same time in the exhibition center. There were one focusing on solar energy, another about office furniture, a trade show about physical security, one about digital storage and the Siti/asLAN. The funny thing is that the Siti only needed half a pavilion while the normal trade shows needed several pavilions. Plus we needed to go to an area we never had been before that was instantly named “the low cost area of the exhibition center” because it was clearly half-finished.

But the trade show was interesting indeed, for example we received a fast class about optical connectors and a demonstration of how to use mechanical fiber connectors. We also discover a very interesting Portuguese company with a working solution for Wifi localization inside buildings (and we are invited to go to see a demo in a hospital in Oporto) and lots and lots of surveillance cameras.

There were several non-techie interesting things, I lost a wii tennis match against Antonio (How it could be? I can’t understand…) and I gave a kiss… to a wireless robot. Yeah, this is the first time I gave a kiss to a robot. In public

Javier Olivan, of facebook (maybe the only spanish guy there?)

After the general presentation a bunch of local businesses introduced several applications. One of them interesting and very well localizated (la porra) and others losing the main point of Facebook. While in Canada I installed the facebook developer application and I read a bit of the documentation. It’s easy to build “something” making use of the viral marketing so it’s possible that I will burn some time playing with the platform in the following months.

Martin Varsavsky speaking about facebook and of course fon. If we owe something to Martin is his insistence in making visible the Spanish bussinesses in Silicon valley and the rest of the world.

I don’t know how important will be facebook in Spain but maybe they arrived a bit late. Now there are several facebook clones and at least one of them (tuenti) is almost a exact clone of the facebook’s core applications from the user pointview. However Tuenti don’t have as much users as facebook and more important, they don’t have the cool API for developers facebook has, which can be something that move the scale to facebook’s side the second the spanish teenagers discover all the stupid crap games facebook has in their application directory.