Gossip

A WiFi award that walks away with itself

The WiFi and 3G industry Summit Awards may not be the oldest, nor the most prestigious, nor even the most expensive awards, but boy, they are innovative. Sniffer watched the event at the Business Design Centre ... and fell about.

Well, you can't blame the organisers; it's the first time they've done this. They managed to get the bits of glass printed, and they even sat down the "industry luminaries" like the Ecademy, and came up with an impressive list of candidates.

And then somehow, life took over.

For example, it was entirely right to invite both the founders of LocustWorld up to receive their award. LocustWorld pretty much invented the market-leading wireless Mesh using WiFi, and sells it all around the world to serious industry professionals, who provide serious industry professional services. Brilliant!

But for the photo, both Richard Lander and Jon Anderson went up on stage; and each was given an award. A pity, then, that one of the awards was the one earmarked for Purple Patch who invented the "Hotspot in a box" design. Yes, they should receive an award; so someone - poor old Fish, to be precise - had to chase after Richard Lander and retrieve the Purple trophy.

And then HP very kindly donated a Tablet PC to Myzones - which would have made a wonderful trophy! - except the Myzones founder wasn't there, and neither was the trophy. HP's hapless representative just happened to have one: so the organisers grabbed, and gave it to some poor guy (Clive Mayhew-Biggs) from Myzone. And then took it back from him after the photograph!

More awards ceremonies should be like this. You could sell the video ...