Okay, if you aren’t interested in business information, competitive intelligence, market research, etc. then I suggest you skip this post.  But if you are interested, read on.

My main responsibility at the SCIP conference in Chicago was working with the exhibitors and sponsors.  Since there were about 60 of them I didn’t get to talk to them all in-depth, but I did get to spend some time with many of them.  Here’s some of the more interesting (to me) services and products I came across:

Traction Software — These guys provide an "enterprise blog", which is essentially a blog on steroids. Jordan Frank is one of the "funner" guys to talk to in the business. 

auroraWDC – Partners (and brothers) Arik & Derek Johnson have a consultancy in Wisconsin and even better (for my purposes) a blog.  Arik’s also a SCIP Board Member, and did me a huge favor by moderating our CI Buyers Panel this year.

ZoomInfo – This firm provides a business person search engine. Just type in a person’s name and all of the relevant web-based info tied to that person comes up.  Great tool if you want to get some basic background on someone you are going to meet, or someone you’re doing a deal with.  Rest assured, however, that there isn’t anything personal about it.  Since it only pulls information from the public web it’s mostly bios, press releases, etc. They had the benefit of having two speakers mention their product, causing a flood of traffic to their booth, but Leah Kirlis, a product manager for the company seemed to handle all the attention without breaking too much of a sweat!

Alot of the big-boys in the industry were present too.  Here’s a quick list:

Thomson Scientific – Had the pleasure of speaking with Todd Cohen for a while and I was happy to learn some of the new developments for them.  Surprise: acquisitions!

Thomson Dialog – We just inked an annual marketing agreement with them, and they had a good presence at the conference.  Definitely a tool that any researcher would love to have.

Standard & Poors – Had a very interesting conversation with James Postell about the need for basic financial education in the business realm, especially with researchers, corporate librarians, etc.  Hopefully something fruitful will come out of it.

Finally, I can’t forget the guys at Proactive Worldwide.  They had the biggest presence at the conference.  Big booth, oxygen bar, water giveaway, two $500 raffles at the general session and an army of staffers on site.  Top it off with David Kalinowski receiving a Catalyst award and I think you could say they hit a home run.

I could go on and on, but I think you get the idea.  Very impressive people from very impressive companies were at the SCIP conference.  I couldn’t list them all, but it was definitely a privilege getting to work with them.  Hopefully I’ll see them all, and many more next April in Orlando.