Food design and event management company, Tapenade has won a contract for the second year running with the Ideal Home Show at Earls Court, from 15 March-1 April. The company has secured 250 covers in the Gregg Wallace Seasonal Restaurant, 50 covers in the upstairs Champagne Bar and Pamper Lounge and 50 covers in the ground floor Champagne bar of the renowned home show.

Working alongside the ‘Ideal food & housewares ambassador’ Gregg Wallace, Tapenade will be serving up mouth-watering menu choices for visitors wishing to engage in some fine dining in the Gregg Wallace Seasonal Restaurant, sponsored by Knorr. Offering a two or three course lunch between 11.30am and 3pm, taste buds will be tantalised by delights such pan fried salmon with Asian style cucumber sauce; chicken in filo with mushroom and lemon filling and the ‘Ideal Home Show Trio’ dessert, consisting of Eton mess, peach and almond tart and chocolate mousse.

For visitors wishing to take a break from their busy shopping schedule, they can relax with friends and enjoy afternoon tea in the restaurant from 3pm-5pm, with sumptuous sandwiches, scones and miniature treats; all served on vintage crockery.

For those looking for a little luxury, Tapenade will be tempting visitors with charcuterie boards of fish and meat in the Champagne bars, situated within the Ideal Gardens section on the ground floor and the Pamper Lounge on the upper level – where visitors can take the weight off their feet and indulge in a pedicure!

“We are delighted to be working with the Ideal Home Show again. The restaurant was hugely popular last year and with another restaurant and two Champagne bars this year, we anticipate these will be a big hit with visitors who are looking for a place to relax after all that shopping!” comments Tim Stevens, managing director of Tapenade.

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The NEC has recently launched a £1m upgrade to its Wi-Fi facilities that provides visitors with free access to the internet in all areas of the venue.  The upgrade has taken place following consultation with several trade bodies representing various sectors of the events industry, and will no doubt have a huge impact on the experience of organisers, exhibitors and visitors to the venue.

Wi-Fi access in event venues has been criticised in recent months, but the investment made by the NEC is a significant step in addressing the need for people to stay connected.

Having first made Wi-Fi available nearly seven years ago, the technology and infrastructure that replaced their initial pay-as-you-go hotspot access had become outdated, so in 2011 the venue operators launched a consultation process to identify the best ways forward.

Murray Dickson, Business Solutions Analyst at the NEC, spoke to Exhibition Industry News to firstly tell us why they made the decision

“Three years ago we expanded the Wi-Fi access from hot spots to all of the public areas.  However, things have moved on quickly and when people can get free Wi-Fi in a local coffee shop, they expect to be able to come to a venue like the NEC and do the same.  There was a need to address the access within the halls and to re-address the access in the public areas.

The consultation process also saw 7,500 visitors surveyed along with all of the exhibitor contacts held on their database.  Following this, a set of business requirements were drawn up using the Official Journal of the European Union (OJEU) standards by which all public tenders must be written.  Over 60 companies came forward with expressions of interest, before the list was gradually reduced down via a tender process.  The preferred bidder, Galliford Try, was announced late last year.

Recovering Costs

To invest over £1m on a free to use service does raise questions relating to cost recovery through other channels, such as parking or hall fees for organisers.  However, despite the huge cost of the upgrade, plus the ongoing maintenance, Murray says that they are not looking for a specific return of investment.

“It’s about making sure that our venue is fit for purpose and stays at the forefront of the event and exhibition industry”, said Murray.  “Organisers were telling us that it was becoming more and more difficult to entice people out of their offices and in to shows.  By giving them Wi-Fi that is free and accessible everywhere within the venue, we are giving them the means to continue going about their daily business whilst also being able to visit an event.”

The NEC views the investment as having reciprocal benefits through the shows and events that are held there.  If customers can continue accessing the web freely and easily, their experience of visiting an event is heightened, making the event more productive.  This has a positive effect on factors like exhibitor re-bookings, in turn helping the events themselves to develop and potentially expand within the venue.

Designing the System

It was decided at an early stage that each individual space within the venue would be looked at on its own in order to determine the requirements.  Using the maximum capacity of each area, a connection ratio was applied to calculate how many people in any given space at any one time would be sending and receiving data.   A design was then factored for each area, be it a hall, conference room or office.  The finished upgrade allows for 22,000 concurrent users to be accessing the web at any one time.

“The system allows for many more than that to be connected to the Wi-Fi.  However, in practice if you have 5,000 people in a hall, even if they are all connected to the system they won’t all be sending and receiving data at the same time.”

The system was designed to have no single point of failure, meaning that should an element go down, it is instantly transferred to a separate element.  The radios transmitting the Wi-Fi signal were also crucial to the winning design, as Murray explained.

“The actual boxes were supplied and installed by Xirrus.  One of the main reasons they were selected is that their system deploys several access points within a single array.  This means that only a single hard-wired line is needed to connect it.  Some of these arrays have eight radios within them, so it greatly reduced the amount of infrastructure that needed to be installed in order to hit the required specifications for the system.”

Each radio unit within an array can also be switched from 2.4ghz to 5ghz.  For those non-technophobes, most smart phones up until recently use the 2.4ghz frequency.  Brand new devices like the iPhone 5 and the most recent iPads now use the 5ghz frequency.  The venue can monitor the amount of devices using each of these frequencies and over time will be able to switch more of the radios to the 5ghz range as visitors gradually upgrade their devices.

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On Tuesday 19 and Wednesday 20 March, audience engagement specialist Crystal Interactive and holographic projection technology specialist Musion, will be running a seminar at International Confex entitled The Conference Suite of the Future. This will reveal five key trends pointing to ways in which technologies will combine at events to give delegates a more memorable, integrated experience.

The session will be a collaboration between the two companies and is designed to help organisers better anticipate the needs and expectations of their future audiences.

Crystal Interactive Managing Director Chris Elmitt said: “Technology is creating much greater freedom and flexibility, for attendees and speakers alike.  We’ll be explaining how event content will become more portable, presenters will be more mobile, and delegates will actively shape the content of the events they attend – partly thanks to their ability to share ideas and insights using their own mobile devices at events.”

In addition to hearing presentations and seeing demonstrations by Chris Elmitt and Musion Director James Rock, seminar attendees will be given the chance to experience the newest event technology first-hand.

The seminar will be held in the Live Lounge at International Confex, at 11.15-12.00 on both Tuesday 19 and Wednesday 20 March.

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Award-winning grow-your-own event, The Edible Garden Show, is putting down new roots at London’s Alexandra Palace in March 2014 in a move to bring the popular show to new audiences around the country.

TV presenter James Wong, who has been a celebrity speaker at The Edible Garden Show since its launch at Stoneleigh Park, Warwickshire in 2011 is delighted that the event will be sowing seeds in the capital. James, who is on a mission to persuade the nation to plant exotic edibles, says: “It has been so wonderful to see the huge enthusiasm for the show, from both visitors and exhibitors, at Stoneleigh but with a move to London the show will go positively inter-stellar!”

The Edible Garden Show was launched in response to the grow-your-own revolution sweeping the country as more and more people are digging for the dinner plate. Latest government figures show that 5% of all our food is now grown at home and not just on allotments or vegetable patches in the garden. Tasty crops are being nurtured on patios, balconies, window boxes and even front doorsteps by families wanting to save money and lead a healthier lifestyle.

Debbie Smith, a Director of The Edible Garden Show, says: “Our visitors at Stoneleigh have come from all over the UK from the south coast, Devon and Cornwall to the Home Counties, Midlands, Wales, the north and Scotland. We even have some people travelling from Northern Ireland and overseas.

“Grow-your-own enthusiasts come from all walks of life and many of them are enjoying their slice of the good life from urban gardens and tiny spaces. We have decided to move to London for 2014 to bring the show to a new audience, as well as welcoming our regular visitors to a different venue and experience. Alexandra Palace will be a great home for the event in 2014 with good transport links, 1500 free car parking spaces and a huge exhibition space. We will be hoping to increase both our exhibitor and visitor numbers.”

Scheduled for the beginning of the growing season, The Edible Garden Show is bursting with innovative products, top exhibitors, home-grown produce, food, livestock and a celebrity line-up of experts.

The show harvests a huge crop of exciting exhibitors and brings inspirational celebrity chefs and gardeners together under one roof in a one-stop shop for anyone wanting a slice of the ‘Good Life’. Personalities at the 2013 event include James Wong, Gardeners’ Question Time panellist Bob Flowerdew and author and TV presenter Alys Fowler.

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