What I find interesting about the Best 2021 Expo is that it is a scam and it is my sincere belief that many people copied it and used it as their own without verifying the credentials of the organizers. I attended the Best 2021 Expo expecting to see and hear about new innovations in IT tools, but I was deceived and I got conned. It is very important for us as consumers to understand that whenever you get conned or played like this, then it is better to pass on the opportunity. Let me explain why I believe so.
The Best 2021 Expo is an indirect multi-stakeholder direct mobile marketing fair organized by the Direct Mobile Association of South Africa (DMASA) and co-hosted by Kaspersky and MTN. My experience at the expo made me realize that they had many people copying their sales pitch to the Nasionale crowd. There was very little or no attempt by the organizers of the Best 2021 to maintain a level playing field with other exhibitors, especially considering that Kaspersky and MTN are some of the biggest players in the mobile industry. It became apparent very early on to me that they were trying to co-opt the expertise of the South African mobile innovators into their own offering of tools and services. In most cases, when I presented a case to one of the technical support executives from MTN, she said that the Best 2021 would help MTN in its efforts to “penetrate the enterprise”. Later, she repeated this claim to me. 2021 neco expo
Later she said that the event was a good platform for her company to promote its own products and services, in that case she would be happy if I would share with her my six, seven, eight subject practicals. Well, that is exactly what I did and I shared with her all six of the basic points on the six subject practicals. She was happy and recommended me to contact MTN and Vodacom to set up an appointment for a “confluence meeting” to discuss the areas of synergies that MTN and Nasionale would explore jointly. This meeting did not take place.
When I presented the six, seven, eight and nine subject practicals to the MTN leadership team, I was asked to give three more points on the table, on top of the overview above. These included six, seven, eight and nine subjects, covering topics such as payment per subject (PPS), which is a feature available in MTN’s Nasionale software; application integration (AIO) of pricing and SaaS; and application security (ASM). At this point, the meeting leadership team started discussing and making decisions on what to do with my six, seven, eight and nine practicals on the sales floor. The discussion leaders decided to shorten my 6, 7 and 8 practicals to a three-part series of eight and nine topics.
This was problematic because in my series of eight and nine subject rationales, which covered topics such as product pricing, marketing, business development and service strategy, and growth, it was very clear to me that each was not only unique but also not directly related to one another. Each of my rationales had a distinct focus within the larger topic area of the Nasionale software application, for example, product pricing. In order to help this process along, the sales leadership team suggested that we create a “hybrid pricing series,” which would combine the six topic areas into three new logical subtopics: Business Development, which would cover patent and SaaS applications; SaaS Application Development, which would include a new sub-topic of “Software As a Service” (SaaS); and International Business Development, which would include new sub-topic of “Offshore Software Development.” By combining these three logical subtopics into a single logical series covering the topics of six, seven, eight and nine, I was able to shorten the presentation, making it more digestible to the crowd, and easier to transition from one logical issue to the next.
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