Spent last week in Cannes (France) attending my 8th MIPIM event (with some 20 000 others). Once again it has struck me how brilliant this event is to grow ones international network (and meeting up with the 1000+ Swedes that are there).

Growing a network
Even though the fair has no IT perspective at all. I guess that less then 1% of the boots are IT related, but included RCA, Yardi, Qube, Reidin, HBS Research among others.

However, there are quite a few additional IT entrepreneurs around to meet up with clients. I'm happy to have been able to meet up with quite a few of them. Thank you all for great conversations!

Two types of people
This year at the MIPIM there really were two types of people; the ones discussing how little people there were at the fair, and those telling me that they were able to meet the right people.

Without any question the number of visitors were down from record year 2008 at 30 000, but there was still loads of potential customers. Quite a few of the exhibitors I was talking to were happy to being able to meet the right people, not just running demos.

Best new solution
On the last day of the fair I visited the stand of HBS Research and one of the three founders Blaise Heurteux gave me a demo of their SaaS solution named LaPlace de I'Immobilier. Great stuff. A pure SaaS solution with a well thought user interface. Their service is created from data acquired from 20 different public records in France.

More reflections from MIPIM
Read more about the event at Steve Felix blogg, CREopoint, TheLawyer and Twitter (?).

See you next year.