I will be in Spain next week at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2008, representin’ Trampoline. There are some cool sounding sessions, and evidently there is also a concurrent Gartner event (why oh why do people run two events at once in the same place? it’s hard enough with 5+ tracks in one event!) for us plucky new-comers to the enterprise scene. I will be at both. My interest is in where Gartner sees Enterprise computing heading over the coming months/years, connecting with technology providers, checking out our competition, and meeting with customers.
It should be interesting as I don’t speak Spanish. Much as I delight in saying “Berthaylona”.
I begged my 12 year old son to ’splain to me how I might go about ordering food, or even just bottled water, when my vocabulary consists of cerveza, a few Mexican food names, and por favor. (I speak Simplified American Taco-Truck quite well, thank you very much). He said he’d try to send me a few sentences in email, which means that evidently some 12 year-olds know of this old-fashioned thing called “email”. Not very many. Like maybe 2. That’s a trend right there! I’m sure Gartner is all over it.
And yes, I do know about the interweb and it’s language-ness, and translation books. It’s just been a few years since I was last in-country where I don’t speak the language AND I’m travelling on my own. I’ve become wussier in my old age. In China, Germany, France, Japan and even the UK, where they speak something called “English”, I have or had the benefit of translators…
Anyway, if you are at either show, please let me know. We can drink some, er, agua and eat some, er, frittata? : ) If you speak Spanish and will be there then hey, you are my new BFF! Peter (at) trampolinesystems (dot) com
