I/ITSEC 2012 and My (fave) Usual Suspects

I am officially out of the kool kids club for M&S these days, but it doesn't mean I'm not paying attention. Particularly this time of year. I've been watching what's been happening down in Orlando at I/ITSEC and it is seemingly a quieter show from a news perspective - though no less exciting on the show floor!

The I/ITSEC Show Daily is jammed with some amazing news - not least of which is NGRAIN's new Augmented Reality demo that blends the company's 3KO with mobile computing deliver a compelling and interactive maintenance training solution. As a former NGRAIN-er, this was really awesome to see.

TSJ, which is now incorporated into the Defense News site, reinforces that a continued theme at this year's show is declining budgets. LeAnn Ridgeway, vice president of Rockwell Collins simulation group, highlighted the attractiveness of COTS products when maximizing budgets but with the desire to move forward quickly.

At the same time, Nick Giannias, CTO at Presagis spoke about the business drivers that make COTS software attractive when reducing costs, and enhancing training for defense customers. CM Labs and Presagis continue work on ground vehicle simulations that are highly accurate - using COTS solutions to "create and deploy a high-fidelity, real-time simulation core" based on large quantities of data.

[CM Labs Excavator Sim]

[Ya, Ya, I get it. My friends do really cool stuff. And yes, I'm sitting here slightly jealous - ok, well a lot actually! But I'm also just so dang thrilled to see that innovation is really moving forward for these companies and that the "cool" factor is going WAY up!]

But with all this cool stuff, the show still seems kind of quiet. Twitter is barely moving at all with posts using #iitsec and #iitsec2012 crawling by hourly. Blogs like defpro.com unfortunately retired earlier this year, but others which have kept things going aren't making much noise from the show floor at all.

In a world where things should be integrated from a marketing, PR and social media perspective, I'm wondering how so much AMAZING stuff can be happening on the show floor and not making its way to the news pipeline and online quickly. [Maybe I'm just too much of a NERD? Or maybe it's time companies take charge and create their own forums for news?]

Either way - I'm following the news! And encourage everyone else to get more involved - reTweet, share, post, follow and engage! Get activated! There's so much cool stuff going on and it's up to everyone to get more people talking.

And if you only do one of those things today, "Like" the I/ITSEC Facebook page. If they get to 1000 by tomorrow, the NTSA will be donating $500 to Wounded Warriors.