Friday, October 3, 2008

Misco Expo '08 "a success"

Yesterday, we attended the Misco Expo at Old Billingsgate in Central London to learn a bit more about the ecosystem surrounding the company's operations across Europe.

It's fair to say that Channel Expo, or CTS as it's sometimes known, is on its last legs – the UK IT industry appears to be moving away from the trade-only show held at the National Exhibition Centre in Birmingham and is instead looking towards a more distributed events calendar.

In a brief chat with Katy Pailing, European web marketing manager at Misco, told us that the event had been a success for the retailer with a higher than expected attendance. She didn't, however, go into detail on how many attended the expo.

During the day-long show, we managed to grab a look at some a few interesting products—some of which we've seen before, but there was one product in particular we saw (and spent quite a bit of time with) that we'll be revealing to you in the not-too-distant future.

There were a number of seminars hosted by industry experts that covered various aspects of the channel sector of the market – the most interesting of which was a talk on piracy and Internet security from Brian Grayek, vice president of product management at CA.

The focus was more on the latter than the former, and the speaker's definition of piracy was a little different to what you'd first think of. Instead of being focused on copyright infringement via the various illegal BitTorrent trackers distributing copyrighted material, he was instead focusing on things like financial gain through stealing information from victim's computers, along with robbery and blackmail amongst other things.

Grayek claimed that one in seven Internet users will be hit by identity theft this year, because of Internet pirates' increased focus on malware and trojans – he said that the last major virus outbreak was a few years ago in fact and virus threat levels are dropping steadily. A few parts of his speech gave me the impression of scaremongering, but he did go on to make some good points about responsible Internet browsing.

Discuss in the forums.

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  • Roy Taylor on game physics, AI & piracy
  • E3 looking empty this year?
  • Piracy softmod comes to the Wii
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