Last week the IP Expo Europe 2018 was held at the Excel Centre in London. After a hefty trip across London, the Tesrex team arrived to see all the new happenings and trends that are going on in the world of cybersecurity. With well over 200 booths at the exhibition, businesses often rely on a fun bit of tech or a gimmick to attract visitors over to their section in order to explain to them what they do. Some companies go all out with this idea and spend a lot on making their booth the most popular one. Here is a list of all the best booths we saw at IP Expo Europe 2018.

Kaspersky Lab had a large presence at the Expo featuring different parts of their portfolio. In order to attract people over to them, they had set up a large, triple screen racing rig with a replica F1 seat setup running Assetto Corsa. It was an impressive toy to say the least. Every time we walked by the booth there was a queue of at least five or six people waiting to have a turn so it was obviously a successful idea at garnering attention to the booth.

Sungard Availability Services is a provider of IT production and recovery services with offices in 9 countries. The company uses its experience in recovery to design, build and run production environments that are more resilient and available. In order to attract guests over to them, they set up a small Scalextric track for two cars. We were particular fans of the “Data Corruption Chicane”.

Garrison is a company that offers a secure browsing service to customers meaning they can go to any website no matter how shady it is, without the fear of getting infected with malware. This is done by providing users with an HD video feed and browsing the internet from a completely separate location. It’s a very interesting idea once you understand it. They helped people visualise what was going through a fun little gimmick called Ravi. Ravi is a robot who sits at a PC and mimics any keyboard input or mouse movement that you perform on an adjacent PC. However, the engineer at the booth was keen to explain that this was just a marketing tool and they certainly aren’t a robotics company.

WatchGuard is a Seattle, Washington based business who provide a number of services to businesses that help them protect against malware and ransomware. They had a real fan favourite set up at their booth. Mario Kart is one of those games that brings back a lot of nostalgia for most people and so it was great to see they had a 2-player Arcade version of Mario Kart. This was a lot of fun. We’d like to think this machine has a permanent residence at the WatchGuard residence.

Egress Software provides a range of data security services designed to protect shared information throughout its lifecycle, offering on-demand security for organisations and individuals sharing confidential information electronically. Similarly to a few other booths we saw at IP Expo Europe 2018, they opted for a ‘Batak Light Chaser Challenge’ for their booth. As you can see, this is a board that features eight lights. When the light flashes on you have to hit it with your hand as fast as you can. The more you hit in 60 seconds, the higher you go on the leaderboard. The high score was 55 when we looked and none of us were overly confident of beating that. We’d be interested in knowing what the final high score was at the end of the event.

If you are in this industry and didn’t get a chance to visit the IP Expo Europe 2018, we would highly recommend going next year. After all, it’s free! Along with all the fun parts we have mentioned in this article, it is a great place to network with other likeminded people and learn more about the happenings in the industry you work. If you’re interested in reading about the three things we learnt while at the exhibition then please click here.