“In at the deep end” is the phrase that best describes my first day at IFSEC 2007. Just three weeks into my new job at info4security and I’d entered an uncharted world of DVRs, chipsets and video analytics. I’ll admit: it was all a little bit daunting.
It wasn’t long before I was given a photographer to help me out with a couple of interviews around the show. We wanted to get pictures that would jump out at visitors to the website, not just shots of row after row of security cameras, and so we went looking for the show’s most unusual exhibits.
Within a couple of hours I’d tried to smash a car window with an axe, made friends with a couple of sniffer dogs and felt – regrettably – what it was like to be on the receiving end of an intruder smokescreen. IFSEC, I had discovered, could be quite fun regardless of your technical expertise.
Fishbowl
My other resounding memory of last year’s show is the fishbowl that info4security editor Emily and I called home for much of that week. It was a kind of mobile office that we’d dragged up from London so we could keep the website updated throughout the show, with big glass windows facing out onto the exhibition floor. I was amazed at how often people would stop in their tracks, look in at me, and just keep looking… as if I was a new camera on display.
Security types had travelled from all over the world not to look at the latest technology, I thought, but to look at me – the guy who had yet to learn his IP from his ANPR.
