OpenSource Connections
Category: Conference
Its Tuesday morning, which if the final day for exhibitors at the AAAE conference for airport executives in New Orleans. Eric, Riley, and myself, along with my wife Lauren, have been here since Saturday talking to regional airports around the country about OpenSource Connections new product AeroWeb.
The reception has been really great so far. While I think exhibitors always wish that there was more traffic by the booths, the quality of many of our leads has been very good. We are demoing the websites on our laptops, and have a screencast of AeroWeb running on a large monitor at the front of the booth. The screencast has certainly helped bring people into the booth, and our demos have been running very well so far and everyone who sees them seems to be impressed.
Weve had conversations with a wide range of airports, with airport consultants who could conceivably recommend AeroWeb to their clients, with other vendors we could potentially partner with, and with industry journalists. Weve also made a few contacts with companies who may be interested in the software development skills of OpenSource Connections, outside of our airport product.
The features we are showing airports for the most part seem to be right on. A couple of ideas that attendees have brought up have been interesting. One attendee noted that the main reason he felt people go to his airport website currently is not passengers, but vendors who are looking for information about RFPs. So he wanted a content section with a lot of information about RFPs. After looking at the websites of some other airports weve talked to, they also have at least a page with current RFPs listed on it, and PDF downloads of the RFPs right there. Of course, this is easy to do in AeroWeb, but we hadnt put a page like that in our demos.
Another interesting observation made by a trainer from a small airport was “Can you schedule content to be published at a certain date?” The answer to this is also yes when you are editing content and blog posts through our back end Expression Engine administration tool. However that functionality and content versioning is not currently exposed through the inline editing tool we are primarily demoing to clients.
Ive got some photos to post, so Ill post those and more comments later today after the show ends. For now, Ive got to run back to the booth for exhibiting hours!