We had a great time at the Internet Retailer Conference last week in Chicago. It is very stimulating talking to so many people, including online retailers, industry experts, and the other vendors. SLI sponsored the opening reception on the Monday night and we gave away a MacBook Air (from our Cupertino neighbor, Apple) - this created a lot of interest. The winner was Shirley Tan of American Bridal. Conincidentally Shirley is an existing customer of SLI Systems. She was very happy to win the laptop.

Next week on June 10 - 11, we will be exhibiting at the GC 2008expo at Earls Court, London.

GC 2008expo is the leading public sector IT event in the UK. It’s the exhibition and conference where public servants come to see the very latest technologies in action and to discover the solutions to the challenges they face within government.

If you would like to learn how SLI Systems site search and navigation solutions can further advance your on-line presence we would be excited to see you at the GC Expo stand #704.

For those of you who couldn’t make it - here’s a recap of day one at SMX Sydney by Neerav Bhatt. Neerav wrote up SLI as one of the vendors with interesting products and snapped this picture of the intrepid traveller Ed Hoffman.

Next week we’re attending the Search Marketing Expo (SMX) Sydney event in Sydney, Australia - April 10 - 11, 2008.

The event has attracted some impressive international speakers including; Marissa Mayer, Google’s Vice President, Search Products & User Experience, and Danny Sullivan, Editor-In-Chief of SearchEngineLand.com and host of the Daily SearchCast podcast.

SLI will be exhibiting and we welcome you to stop by our booth.

Next week we’re attending the Search Marketing Expo (SMX) West event in Santa Clara, CA, February 26 - 28, 2008.

SLI will be exhibiting (booth #320) and our CEO Shaun Ryan will be speaking on Wednesday, February 27, 2008 at 2pm - 2:30pm. The topic of Shaun’s presentation is “Internal Search and Navigation - Best Practices - and Their Impact on SEO”.

Last week Internet Retailer covered a story about how our customer, Cable Organizer, improved their conversion rate with their new site search.

We’ve put a lot of work into their search and are elated they’re seeing such positive results. Their search has multiple SKUs shown in each result, each with their own user rating. The search has separate tabs to search their information pages or to show the results in a grid format. They are collecting user feedback about the quality of the search. We offer various sort options, refinement options and related searches and are showing keyword specific banners. They’re also using their site search to help with their SEO and to help improve the conversion rate of their landing pages.

The search engineer who did all this work, Hannah Ashworth had a chance to meet the guys from Cable Organizer at the shop.org show in Las Vegas earlier this month - which she really enjoyed. We find these shows are a great way to get a broader understanding of the whole industry - meeting the other vendors, listening to the presentations and of course meeting current and future customers.

We are involved in a couple of events over the next week. This involves a little travel for the ever charming Ed Hoffman. He is speaking at the Product Attribute Summit in Orlando on Friday. This is run by Channel Intelligence. Then next week he’ll be at the Internet World conference in the UK, where we’ll be exhibiting.

Just a quick note to say we will be exhibiting at the SES show in New York next week. If you’re in town then come by and see us at our booth. This is the first time for quite a few years that I won’t be at this show - because of family commitments. However Ed, David, Kim and Todd from SLI will be there.

As usual we’ll be giving away a shiny brass telescope so be sure to drop by booth 1122, put your card in the draw and we would love to show you what we can do.