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Paperless Lab Academy

Volume IIEntry 77 of 90 in 20152 min read1 comment ↓

Written by Gloria Metrick on . Published as written. It may not reflect how these systems work today.

Those of you who regularly read this blog have probably picked-up on the fact that I'm not keen on conferences, these days. Large software and services vendors show up at them, sometimes merely to let the world know that they exist, as opposed to learning something new or generating sales leads.

For companies as small as mine, spending money on conferences that don't produce some productive outcome isn't an option. If I don't learn something new and I don't generate sales leads from it, I've basically just thrown my money into the firepit to quickly burn.

However, I was just speaking with Peter Boogaard, CEO of Industrial Lab Automation and the person that organizes the Paperless Lab Academy and I got the feeling that this would be a conference that might have some real content - where I might actually learn something. While I don't want to sound as if I can say for certain that any of you reading this would find this a useful conference, I will say that I think you should take a look at it and give it some thought:
Paperless Lab Academy
One goal of the conference is to get us all out of the stone ages and into modern technology. Whether instruments will ever be plug-and-play is one issue, but the fact that we still use so many arcane communications with them is yet another issue. I warmed-up to Peter's reference to Fred Flintstone in all this. Attend and he'll tell you more - it's a great topic if you're intersted in instrumentation, by the way.

Now that I've said all this, I'll admit that I doubt I'll attend. It does sound interesting and I think there are many users out there who are trying to tame the paper tiger and learn more about connectivity, but for me, having had a hand in these things for so many years, it's hard to imagine that it would be worth my money and time to go attend this to sit and listen to people talk for a couple days on a topic I've written articles about, myself. I don't mean to say that there's not more to learn just that I tend to fill-in my knowledge with the occasional discussion with others in the industry.

Gloria Metrick
GeoMetrick Enterprises
http://www.GeoMetrick.com/

The conversation

1 comment from 1 person on November 9, 2015.

  1. John H. Jones

    I guess there is value in conferences. I have not been to a conference in over 10 years. I do not find them productive for the most part. I enjoy meeting folks but I meet far more in discussion groups and we hold more correspondence through the web than we would ever do in person. I am not a shut in and I do like to go places and meet people but it must be worth the extreme hassle of airports, security, hotels and all the expense that entails.

    If the conferences want to share info, they can video record each of the talks and post it to Youtube. This is not likely because true sharing of information is not the agenda. Attendance is the agenda for a conference. Nothing wrong with that but it simply is not going to meet the objectives of sharing real information the way the internet does so conferences are pretty much a no show for me.

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