 The magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group APCUG Visit and Comdex Noel Peters Vice President & SIG Coordinator |
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A Newby’s Impressions of APCUG Fall 2001
Getting back from this visit earlier today, Sunday 18 November, with the deadline to catch the Dec/Jan issue long passed will require this to be a short summary of the APCUG event and will depend upon Gary being able to exercise all his last minute page manipulation skills to fit it in. A subsequent report on the Comdex part of the visit will be prepared for the next issue when I have had the time to go through this mass of paper and electronic material. Incidentally, it weighs more than the full box of our current magazines, one of which George and I each included in with our luggage going to the conference. The former awards for best magazine have been discontinued presumably on the basis that it favoured larger groups like the Houston Area League of PC Users (HAL PC) and Melb PC.
Organisation
As a first time attendee I was impressed by the APCUG organisation that provided such good facilities for the interchange of ideas and information between the 386 delegates on ways to increase and hold members and improve services. The organising committee works extremely hard to forge and strengthen the links to hardware and software vendors and encourage sponsorship of user groups.
One particular point of interest to an Australian visitor was the involvement of female members of apcug in the executive and the massive part they play in making the proceedings such a success. President
Judy Lococo, VP Peggy Ireland and Treasurer Joan Dineen form the four-person executive with Secretary
Christopher Sarson.
Roundtables
As previous Melb PC attendees have indicated, four streams of roundtable conferences run simultaneously over the Saturday and Sunday preceding the five day Comdex show. George Skarbek and I selected from the twenty being run those we considered the most useful to Melb PC and attended separate roundtables to obtain maximum coverage. I participated in:
Rebuilding Membership: Marketing Your Group: Getting Volunteers and Keeping Them: Comdex for First Timers: Getting Your Word to the Media and Other Sources.
I have earmarked for consideration by our own committee and members a number of ideas and strategies quoted as being successful. Many groups rely on raffles, freebies, discounted membership deals, sponsorship, coupons in advertisements, one-day computer fairs etc. all should be discussed and chewed over. George with his stronger computer knowledge covered what technical offerings there were. One session he attended and to which he contributed was on
"Making & Selling Shareware CD-ROM" as our committee is currently working on the production of CDs for our members.
Sponsors and Presentations
Sponsors of the conference who made presentations and whose hospitality fed delegates at breakfasts and other functions included
Adobe Systems Incorporated: Casardy & Greene/Borland: Handspring Inc: Intuit: JASC Software: McAfee.com: Microsoft.
Significant items of interest among these presentations and associated activities at Comdex was the launch by Handspring Inc of Treo the combination handheld computer and mobile phone utilizing the Palm operating system. Obviously the contribution of Microsoft with the launch of X Box, its new game playing system is challenging the Sony PlayStation 2 market. Also, Microsoft and associated consortia are bringing the Pocket PC 2002 operating system powered "handheld" to the fore, to compete with Palm driven systems.
The rest of this report, of an intense, interest filled week of user group activity plus exposure to the new hardware and software in the IT and allied fields will have to wait until next issue focussing on Comdex. Let me say however that I was greatly privileged to represent Melb PC in these environments and to make contacts with many like-minded volunteers and useful people in the industry who can be encouraged to make a contribution to a richer experience for all of our members. My personal thanks and that of our group are being communicated to all concerned.
Reprinted from the December 2001 issue of PC Update, the
magazine of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia
