Competitive Intelligence

SCIP 2004 Trip Report from Boston

The picture above is taken from booth #218, where my brother Derek and I were staffing Aurora’s exhibits for most of the show, alongside the more than 60 other vendors at SCIP’s 2004 International Conference & Exhibition in Boston this week.

This is a short trip report, because I missed the conference almost entirely; however, the turnout was successful, I’m told by reliable sources, and helps to solidify SCIP’s position both financially and in terms of its leadership in the business. For my colleagues in the CI field, we really need SCIP to succeed more than ever before. The clearinghouse function it performs has become a lot less biased in recent years under Bill Weber’s leadership as Executive Director and that’s good for everybody. Sadly, Boston marked Bill’s moving on to bigger things, but I made him promise he’d stay in touch with the industry - Cheers Bill!

Speaking then purely as a vendor exhibiting at the show, the event was great. A ton of prospective clients came out, as well as a lot of existing ones to see what was new and interesting. Aurora had two big things going on:

ReconG2 – Our next generation current awareness and early warning intelligence service got its first sneak peek from a few select clientele in Boston – more on this to come in later entries; and, the...

2004 CI Portals Report – Lacking an updated, omnibus understanding of CI software portal offerings myself, earlier this year, I decided to write one. You can download yours from the Web for free in a few days. Scarcity breeds excitement by the way - we gave away 25 hardcopies to lucky, registered winners at the show – they were VERY popular.

With that, best wishes to SCIP, all the friends I look forward to seeing every year there and thanks to SCIP's staff and everyone who attended for making it another great event. See you in Chicago next year!

And, best of luck Bill; you’re a tough act to follow... but if anyone's suited to bridge the gap, it's Paul Brecht.

- Arik