#NEWS 

 10/06/14 

A report of our experience at this fair

After a long period of exhibitions which made us turn to half the peninsula, it is time for Vicenza Thunders to take a long break to develop new projects, not before, however, of the 25th of October when you can find us in Torri di Quartesolo at the Linux day. This could be the last event that we'll participate at (or maybe no!). In doubt, come to visit us anyway!

Fixed this appointment, we would like to sum up about the most awaited event by all the European makers which brought us to our capital: the Maker Faire Rome, which was held at the Auditorium Parco Della Musica this year, unlike last year. The Maker Faire brought to Rome a huge amount of exhibitors and visitors to try to make Europe know the latest innovations in the field of crafts and to make public understand how maker movement could revolutionize the economy.
From our point of view (and also of many other exhibitors), however, this event wasn't exactly what we expected. In fact, we noticed that, in general, compared to the last year, the organization was much more superficial and coarse.
First things first: as soon as we arrived in Rome, we immediately rushed to the Auditorium Parco della Musica because we had set up our booth before 7pm, but we were stunned when we saw the conditions of the space devoted to us and to other twenty makers (Photo). The tent I, reserved to robots and drones, still had to end up being mounted well, besides being flooded and without electricity (it's not a news that water and electricity do not really get along). Moreover, there were many water leaks from the ceiling, which inevitably fell over the booths. This thing should be avoided in an exhibition of this caliber, which shows mainly electronic products that may be damaged by water.
In the following days the situation did not improve very much: the carpet and the tent luckily dried, cause of the very sultry climate, but at this point the tent became a real oven because it was not planned any way to make the air circulate. So we exhibitors had to lift the sides of the tent.
In addition to this, in the space in front of our booth, the floor was badly mounted and there was a sinking which made visitors stumble and that caused shock on the tables of exhibitors, not allowing us to use our 3D printer.
Surely in an innovation fair you would expect that the WiFi has worked, no? Exactly: the answer is no! Only during the last day it worked for a bit, while on the other days, in our area, you could not even login.
As icing on the cake, we noticed that some booths didn't have the nameplate indicating the name of the project (including ours because nothing went well for us). Luckily our Riccardo in the afternoon of the first day of exposure, found these nameplates in a corner of the tent (Photo).
Let's talk about organization: in the tent of robots and drones, there were some robots (including ours) and some drones: the rest of the booths were dedicated to other projects, very interesting, but not linked to the topic of the tent (photography, hand-made masks of superheroes, gadgets lights etc.). This contributed to confuse visitors, who perhaps wanted to see what are commonly called drones, such as the multicopters. In addition to this, often people could not orient themselves and asked where to find some booths. Many visitors made us notice this fact and they told us that they had the feeling of not having visited all the fair.
We also noticed that there was no real route to follow to make people visit all the booths, but they gave more visibility to the sponsors putting aside makers, last year was not like that, maybe also because the place was best suited to host an event like this. Everybody could notice, in fact, that in the amphitheater and in the booths near the entrance, visitors were many more than in our area in the garden upstairs. In particular, this inequality of treatment hugely disappointed us because we are two university students of engineering and we have invested a lot in this trip to Rome. It seemed almost a lack of respect for all our works and sacrifices (and also those of other makers).

The thing that has demoralized us more, however, was the theft of the medal that we won at the RoboCup Jr 2012 (Photo). For us it had such a great value because it reminded us of how, after a hard work, we could win and become champions of Italy. Since our "great friends" of ITIS A. Rossi lost the cup that was given us with the medals, now to witness that event only remain another medal and a few photos.

Despite everything we have known many people with interesting products, we have received many ideas for new projects and at least one satisfaction has come: we won the contest organized by Codemotion, which has rewarded us with its gadgets, an interview on its YouTube channel and the official Maker Faire pennant (Photo).

Said that, we hope that our misadventures at Maker Faire will be useful to the organizers to figure out what went wrong and to improve the event for the next edition. To prove this, we wrote directly to the organizers who said they will consider our suggestions.

At the moment we don't have an office,
we are often between Padua and Vicenza.
If you need to meet us, contact us
and we will organize it.

We usually reply quickly, if you don't
get any answer just resend the email
or try another method.
Info@VicenzaThunders.com

Attention: if you need to call us,
we suggest you to send us an email or an
SMS first because we aren't always available.
You can also use Whatsapp if you want.
+393484808073
+393494548359

You can find us on many social networks,
when we have free time we like to share
our works and experiences!