Category-specific floor plan,'hall of fame' at this year's INFOTEL

This year's INFOTEL exhibition will be more focused, facilitating a greater number of business- to- business ( B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) interactions taking the form of face- to- face meetings, stall-based presentations, etc., according to the event's Organising Committee Chairman Chinthaka Wijewickrama.

Further, he also added that the fourday event, slated to kick- off on October 24, would be open to businesses exclusively for the first day, students for the second day, and it will include all other audiences for the balance two days.

Speaking to the Business Times, Mr. Wijewickrama also commented that, this year, there will be a bigger effort in making the exhibition more structured, with an easy-to-navigate, more categoryoriented floor plan structure for stalls, which will be further segmented into agriculture, tourism, transportation, etc. He also noted that there will be multiple conference rooms for product launches, etc. There will also be a ' hall of fame' where visitors will be made aware of the best stall winners at the beginning of the exhibition so that these could be best viewed by attendees.

In addition, another special feature this year will be a dedicated exhibition space for app (application) developers to showcase their creations at a minimal cost. These mini stalls, which will be about 2 feet by 2 feet, just enough to hold a laptop, are part of INFOTEL's initiative to promote app development, a growing area about which organisers' are ‘very keen’, said Mr. Wijewickrama.

Commenting on 2013' s participation, he opined that about 100,000 visitors were expected and that 250 stalls were being made available, with at least 10 countries taking part in the international pavillion alone. Since its beginning in 1992, with the event being held every two years, INFOTEL has gradually grown to become the largest of all exhibitions in Sri Lanka, showcasing a full range of software and hardware, as well as IT training and solutions. As such, the goal of the organising committee was to grow this exhibition into the biggest such event in South Asia, revealed Mr. Wijewickrama.