What was interesting at Internet World?

We have had a busy three days at Internet World – walking the floor. there was plenty to see – and I am going to give you a view of what I thought were interesting – As a Magento fan it might be considered a somewhat partisan view, but nonethless i hope you will find it useful. I probably bumped in to plenty of you during the show (we were the ones wearing the white magento Tshirts (there’s my colours nailed to the mast then!)
Once you had got past the spectacularly beautiful girls on the Server Beach stand it was an interesting show for a number of reasons. Firstly it was interesting for who wasn’t there. The big hitters in e-commerce were conspicuous by their absence, and of the leaders in eCommerce only E-Inbusiness were there in any force. This might be a product of tighter belts – but it was strange not to see people at least on the show floor.

Magento was there in evidence thanks to OnTap and the Magento Mage::Camp. It was great to see that more and more people had heard of Magento, and that plenty of you were actually using it – the eCommerce revolution is definitely under way! Varien sent down their CTO, Yoav Kutner, to help spread the world, and he was more than happy to help the community get the most out of the product. We saved ourselves at least 6 weeks of development time just by talking to him for 10 minutes.

For us the most interesting aspect was who was developing plugins for Magento. The best one we saw was FACT-Finder, who have developed an advanced search fuzzy logic plugin for Magento – which looked great. Of course they are going to want paying – but it still represents an excellent way to upgrade Magento’s search capability, especially for those of you managing large product catalogues. We will be looking to utilise it for one of our customers.There were some great lectures – one of the best was by Ravi Damani of Imano – who gave us all some simple and practicle advice on strategies for boosting traffic. No snake oil there – just good clean marketing! Mage::Camp also had some interesting discussions – not least a case study on MyDeco – which is a Magento user.

So in summary an interesting show – Magento is definitely beginning to seize the agenda. Get in touch with us if we can help with more information – justin@grassrootsdigital.co.uk.