The Pavillion ran throughout the conference, as vendors and groups tried to push the latest wares.

By listening to those wares, we developers would be gifted with shirts, cups, keychains, and more.

But we developers weren’t interested in that. Oh no. All we cared about was one thing.

As you can, BEA’s PSP draw was the main attraction everyday, with 10 chances to win one with 3 games! Not that others weren’t trying; others had draws if you dropped your business cards into a bowl. Parasoft had the most embarassing. They handed out t-shirts and plastic dog snouts that if they caught you wearing on the last day of the pavillion they would gift you with a PSP. Many rushed to embarass themselves. I chose to workout.

Just a side note. The booths offering iPods weren’t generating as much interest. Obviously; everyone has one now. And with the hackability of the PSP now apparent (and please Sony, don’t prevent this, in fact encourage it), Apple should start looking at the idea of a video iPod very seriously.

In terms of the Pavilion, here are my best of and worst of:

Most Friendly: Google (no surprise) and MICROSOFT! Yeah, surprising, but the guys manning the Empire’s booth were really down the earth, non-hype people. They were getting the word out on their video blog, Channel 9, and cause they liked my questions so much (I have an ongoing concern of integrating JAVA enterprise tech with .NET), they gifted me with the last copies of a book and software.

Best Booth Babes: The BEA girls. Slim, athletic, lightly made-up, and frigid. They pushed all the right buttons.

Skankiest Booth Babes: Tie, between the Parasoft girls, who dressed naughty, but didn’t have the nicest faces, and the xFy girls, who caked on WAY too much makeup, yet only wore t-shirts and jeans.

Most hated: xFy. Their floor presentations were loud and annoying, full of hype, and no one could understand exactly what they were selling. But they had T-SHIRTS!!!! And GIRLS!!! and YELLING!!! Meh.