Virtual tradeshow for minority-owned businesses

By siliconindia   |   Monday, 14 February 2005, 20:30 IST
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Stillwater, OK: iTradeFair.com, Inc. announced today the launch of the 6th virtual tradeshow in the Supplier Diversity Fair series with its Winter 2005 edition, a virtual tradeshow aimed at providing Minority-owned, Women-owned Business Enterprises (MWBE) businesses with direct access to power-buyers in Corporate America via the Internet. Supplier Diversity Fair Winter 2005 will take place on the Internet live on from February 23 -25 and will continue to be available for 30 days thereafter for follow-up. Diverse-owned businesses as virtual exhibitors, will ‘staff’ virtual booths from their own offices without incurring the expense of traveling to a trade show venue, shipping booths or taking time away from work. Exhibitors will enjoy visibility for their virtual booths to decision-makers and influencers in the corporate world, who rarely travel to tradeshows for sourcing. Further, this edition of the virtual tradeshow will feature a U.K. pavilion with exhibitors that are ethnic minority-owned businesses (EMB’s) from the U.K under a special arrangement with CRÈME, the Center for Research in Ethnic Minority Entrepreneurship. “Virtual tradeshows or itradefairs are increasingly becoming part of mainstream marketing, with new itradefairs being created in niche areas and several existing tradeshows looking to add virtual after-shows, said Ramesh Sambasivan, co-founder of iTradeFair.com, Inc. the technology company that powers Supplier Diversity Fair. “Through such virtual tradeshows, we take an exhibitor’s booth directly to the desktops of power-buyers and commodity managers in some of the largest corporations in the nation,” he added. Power-buyers, end-users, decision-makers and supplier diversity officials from several corporations in the U.S. and U.K. will attend Supplier Diversity Fair, Winter2005 from their personal computers without traveling. Corporate participants from the United States include Agilent Technologies, Alcoa, Archer Daniels Midland, AT&T, Avaya, CBS, Cisco, DePuy (a Johnson & Johnson company), Enterprise-Rent-A-Car, Johnson & Johnson Consumer Products Company, Kodak, MetLife, Monsanto, Motorola, NCR, Nordstrom, Saint Luke's Health System, SBC, Unisys and United Airlines among others. Overseas attendees will include U.K. based organizations: De Montfort University - UK, Environment Agency - UK, Ford Motor Company Daventry Spare Parts Division - UK, IBM - UK, Leicester City Council - UK, and Severn Trent Waters - UK brought online in a special U.K. pavilion sponsored by the Centre for Research in Ethnic Minority Entrepreneurship (CREME), a joint venture between De Montfort University and the East Midlands Development Agency in the U.K. It takes about 60 minutes to build a virtual booth once the digital content is lined up. Certified diverse-owned businesses are invited to exhibit at the virtual tradeshow. Exhibitor registrations are now open online. For details visit http://www.SupplierDiversityFair.com