How many Zigbee engineers does it take to turn on an audience...?

I had hoped to meet my old sparring partner, Bill Carney, on the TI stand at Wireless Connectivity World today. By the time I got there, he'd given up, and gone back to Texas - or at least, to his hotel. You can't blame him; he was probably swept along by the crowd - of people abandoning their booths and heading home.

In one sense, it was a pity, because I got a few good stories there. But it was easier than usual to get the attention of senior people. Nobody else was distracting them, to be blunt.

I stopped by the Broadcom meeting room, around 3 PM on the second day of the show. All the gear was already boxed up, ready to go. "Can I talk to your PR person?" said your reporter, timidly. "He's gone!"  Philips told me there were "lots of people! Lots!" around the other side of the booth. So there were - all Philips staff.

Can't blame any of those who left early. The exhibitor from Penrillan (software consultants) was talking to someone when I stopped by. It was someone on his cellphone, which he was hastily putting back in his pocket when I snapped him, and there were several other booths where even the exhibitors had given up and left.

The show is aimed at silicon customers. Well, one hopes it is, because most of the exhibitors are silicon foundries, or designers, or similar. The names at WiCon World are people like Texas Instruments, Freescale (formerly Motorola semiconductor) Cambridge Silicon Radio, and so on.

As far as I can tell the audience in the seminars was entirely composed of people waiting for their turn at the podium.  A generous estimate says that there was "quite a buzz" at this show, compared with last year's meeting in Amsterdam - but if there was a buzz, it was mostly about Ultra-Wide Band (UWB) and Bluetooth, with Zigbee trying to make remote light switches sound exciting. 

Favourite quote of the day: "There's probably a reason all these new wireless standards like WiBro and WiMax start with the syllable: 'Why?' but ..." from Nick Hunn, former CEO of TDK Grey Cell, and now tech supremo of the buy-out Ezurio  - chairing a couple of sessions.

I don't know what to suggest. This show has clearly lost its way; it has a focus that is too wide. Nobody who (like Hunn) is a Bluetooth enthusiast, really cares about the Zigbee booth - and there really wasn't enough Bluetooth here to make it worth coming all the way down to the Excel Centre, down beyond Docklands in the East End of London.

And it's a lovely centre, as far as that goes; but the journey here is painful. I took the Silverlink train from Highbury - the old North London Line - as far as Stratford. I didn't take it as far as Canning Town, which is where the Excel centre is, because the train stopped at Stratford. There wasn't another train for 25 minutes.

If Excel can't get together with the transport people to make sure people can get here without spending a fat fortune on taxis, their future is grim.