For the past 4 years I have been meaning to attend BETT. I have always had a professional and personal interest in the new, the exciting and the ingenious; BETT has always seemed like the perfect demonstration of all of these from the biggest and smallest players in the education/technology game.

I will not hinder this article by detailing my planning and journey to the event, but I would like to say thank you to Tony Sheppard among others for a series of extremely useful tips as to how and what to prepare for BETT, some of which I followed (some I didn’t and live to regret!). Those key points I echo at the end of this article!

1st impressions

I arrived with a medium-sized crowd from the tube station, and found the entrance procedure very well organised. I do feel the entertainment industry could take a few tips on how to arrange large-scale events with the use of pre-printed tickets, bar code scanners and self-service entry points. Mistake number 1 however was picking up the BETT ‘catalogue’, my back will corroborate. Remember I had never been to BETT before, nor Olympia and initially was a little underwhelmed by the size of the place, but that was soon dismissed once I got my bearings and compared the size of the Microsoft stand to the map!

Read the full review on my site: www.ReedSoft.co.uk