Vodaphone – Unleash the power
Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010
Spent the day at Mercedes Benz World at the Vodaphone Unleash the power conference, and while I am not a huge fan of conferences like this, they are just glorified marketing and sales meetings, this one was not bad.
If you have never been to Mercedes Benz World then it is worth a visit, it was much bigger than I thought although probably not big enough to fill a full day. The building looks quite grand on approach and is even better inside. The site is in the centre of the old Brooklands Race Track which if you are a race fan is amazing to see. The first thing I see when walking to the front of the building is a McLaren Mercedes SLR …. drool …
Inside they have three floors of cars from the classics to some AMG’s, not enough to call it a museum but nice to fill the time between conference talks. The building itself it typical German Mercedes quality, neat and tidy, well laid out.
Here are a few pictures, shot with the 7D and the 17-55mm kit lens from the 450D.
The guest speaker was Tiff Needell who was very amusing, he is a patron of the Blooklands Museum so gave that a bit of a hard sell but had some great stories of his rise to fame and his nearly F1 career. The rest of the sessions were ok, nothing I haven’t heard before and while I see some of these solutions working for some companies I am not sure others work the way Vodaphone think. I am always amused at how much marketing and PR speak goes into these things.
We got the chance to visit the Brooklands Museum in the afternoon which has a Concorde (the greatest machine to ever take to the sky) but they were filming inside so we could not look round. We did go into the flight sim which really does feel weird and like you are in a plane. Not sure I would want to spend £195 to play on the flight controls but looking was fun. Next to the Sultan of Brunei old plane. I am sure at the time it was the height of luxury but it does look a bit like a 70′s porno set now. The rest of the museum has quite a few pre war racers and other cars, bikes and cycles including a Raleigh Chopper (the memory’s came flooding back). All in all a fun day out.
