Kenneth Briodagh

Last month, the Cobo Center in Detroit played host to the largest automotive show in the country and some of the largest and most elaborate exhibits and consumer activations in the industry. EM was there to bring you the highlights.

The North American International Auto Show, in preview week right now in Detroit, was chock-full of hot cars and sweet interactives, and the digital star of the show was the Toyota Vision wall. The wall is made up of three 82-inch LCD panels, equipped with multi-touch technology and loaded with tons of content and features about the new Prius. Each of the three screens focuses on one area of content, combining to tell the whole ownership story of the Toyota culture and the lifecycle of the vehicle. The software that runs the experience is based on Microsoft Surface, but is custom-designed.

To begin building popular and political support for its bid on an upcoming high-speed rail project in Florida, tech giant Siemens’ Mobility Division will hit four of the state’s cities to educate consumers about the high-tech public transportation system, which would be one of the first of its kind in the U.S. The project has an allocated $2 billion in federal funding and is expected to award the winning bidder in the summer of 2012.

In 2009, Cisco Systems set out to save costs by taking its weeklong annual sales meeting, the Global Sales Experience (GSX), out of the real world and into a virtual one for the first time in its 20-year history. That experience taught the tech giant several valuable lessons about what works and what doesn’t when it comes to educating and motivating a driven and competitive sales force in a non-physical space.
(Check out last year’s story here)

IT professionals and decision-makers go to a lot of developer conferences and the offerings are often the same from show to show. They spend a few days on the show floor enduring demos that are very heavy on specs and frequently far too light on interactivity or engagement, and go home with a lot more information than inspiration. Important for their businesses? For sure. Thrilling and cool? Not so much.