6 Top Questions to ask a venue

When booking a venue for your event there are a whole host of services that will need exploring, the IT provision being one of them.
Through many years of experience we know that every venue is unique in its offerings and capabilities.

Discovering which Technical services are provided by the venue and which ones you may need to source externally can be a time consuming process, so we put together this handy guide to get you started:

1. How much bandwidth do you currently have available and can it be dedicated to our event?

2. If we want to bring in our own internet drop from another ISP, is that possible?

3. Is there an onsite company that manages your network or is it managed remotely?

4. Do you use an in-house AV company or is there an outside company that holds the contract?

5. Do you manage electrical needs internally or is there an outside company that manages that for you?

6. Do you have a loading bay? If so, what is the maximum size lorry it can accomodate?

Keep these handy for the next time you are planning an event…

BlackBerry DevCon 2012

Show season is off and running with both the UK and US office supporting multiple shows across the globe.  The BlackBerry Developer Conference is touted as THE showcase for the latest innovations and breakthroughs with the BlackBerry Development Platform. Thousands of BlackBerry enthusiasts came together to collaborate with platform experts from the community and to attend sessions, demonstrations, hands-on labs and keynotes — all focused on developing leading mobile applications, across all skill sets.

While day 1 in Amsterdam met us with -12 degree celsius and several inches of snow it was not enough to stop our team from getting the show up and running! The doors opened on Tuesday welcoming around 2,000 developers from all over the world to hear from their new CEO and debut the Blackberry Playbook 2.0 beta software.
The event took place at the Amsterdam RAI which is the largest convention center in Holland.  The 2 day event consisted of:

Keynote, 6 breakout rooms with around 50 sessions, 2 x 50 person hands on labs,  Aside from supporting each area, F1 handled the entire network which landed 3,100 devices connected to Wi-Fi throughout the venue.

This is a new client for F1 and our first time supporting the event, not only was this a fantastic opportunity it is also an extremely successful show and the biggest BlackBerry DevCon to date.
Ian Farmer                                                                                                                           Senior Technical Consultant