About Convention Center Place (CCP)

The idea

Gwyn Thakur and Vijay Thakur founded Convention Center Place in 2009 to create a comprehensive, easy to use web portal for all things events.

Their vision is to save time and money, and make it easy for exhibitors, marketing professionals, attendees and business travelers to find the products and services they need to attend or stage a trade show or an event.  Convention Center Place combines 3 websites: Convention Center Store, Conventional Wisdom and Convention Center City.  These 3 websites allow visitors to shop for the products and services they need to stage an event, provide event and trade show planning tools and delight business travelers with an integrated dashboard to plan their visit to the city where the event is taking place. No "one" website currently allows you to do all of these things without searching for and browsing multiple websites.  Yes, there are several directories listing websites, but you still have to jump from website to website to get all of this information.

The team at Convention Center Place has over 30 years of combined trade show and event experience.  With this deep experience across all facets of tradeshows and events, they know how attendees and exhibitors think.  And, together with the other members of their team, they have set out to create a "portal" website that will become the standard for all things events.

The Model

Convention Center Place looked at what exists in the market and asked the question:  "Is the market taking full advantage of all that the web has to offer?"  The web is moving towards "portal" websites that provide an integrated set of services targeted towards specific vertical industries. Upon investigation the team at CCP found that while there are 22,000 promotional product vendors, only 10% of those vendors have shopping carts.  On the tradeshow display side of the business, there are over 1500 display companies, and of those only 20% have shopping carts.  Analysis of the current market trends indicates that the next generation of users rarely uses the phone, works virtually and wants to use the internet as much as possible to do their job.  The current business model for tradeshows and events is not prepared to serve this market.  Convention Center Place is positioned to bridge that gap and lead the way to serve the market the way it should be served.

CCP has recruited partners to provide the products and services that an exhibitor would need to stage an event.  With this "portal", CCP has established a model of efficiency for the trade show industry in utilizing the web for business services.

The Overview

Convention Center Store www.conventioncenterstore.com (CCS) - CCS is a "Shopping Mall" that features the most popular tradeshow displays, promotional products, trade show accessories and event resources to plan a tradeshow or event.  The site offers vendors who specialize in trade show displays and exhibits, promo products and trade show booth accessories for tradeshows and events.  The vendors have "cherry picked" a range of trade show products in each category so as to not overwhelm the visitor. Whether searching for pop-up booths, table top displays, modular exhibits, literature racks, table covers or shipping crates, Convention Center Store has the visitor covered.  Visitors can also check out the Trade Show Calendar, a helpful tool to reference the tradeshow list for the year.

"As event budgets are tighter than ever it's critical for exhibitors to quantify returns for time, money and effort," said Vijay Thakur, co-founder of the Convention Center Place. "CCS eliminates the current state of inefficiency and fragmentation and replaces it with a planning and shopping experience that is not only ultra convenient but is also easily repeated."

Convention Center City www.conventioncentercity.com (CCC) - CCC is distinguished from other websites that provide city resources by the Convention Center City "dashboard", which identifies the most frequently searched items an attendee may search for related to a convention facility and the city. CCC's simple layout presents those city resources in the same location on the landing page of every convention city - providing ease and efficiency with its familiar, reliable, and uniform structure.  The customized dashboard allows the user to "know where to go" to find the same things in different cities.  An attendee may be searching for restaurants, hotels, or parking areas close to the convention center or may be looking for things to do in a city.  CCC saves the convention attendee time and creates a familiarity that leads to efficiency.  Whether one is visiting Las Vegas, Boston, San Francisco, Chicago or New York City, the CCC dashboard is organized and designed to be fast, efficient and one click away.

Busy business people and convention attendees can face a difficult time hopping from website to website in search of basic necessities like office services, restaurants, hotels, parking or transportation for each new city they have to visit. They now have a new resource designed to make their lives a little easier.

Conventional Wisdom www.conventionalwisdom.us (CW) - CW offers all the ingredients to grow to be THE community website that exhibitors and marketing professionals can rely on to plan successful trade shows and events.  Building a community has always been the smartest and most efficient way to share knowledge with others and with CW one can find answers, suggestions, and recommendations from one's peers on the most efficient and effective solutions to stage a successful event. www.conventionalwisdom.ushas recruited several well known trade show and event industry consultants to provide content to CW.  The Resources tab on CW allows one to source information like trade show tips and tricks, event checklists, trade show industry articles and event planning tools. 

"All show organizers should consider putting a link to Convention Center Place on their websites since it will help both their exhibitors and attendees," said Skip Cox, president of Exhibit Surveys, Inc. www.exhibitsurveys.com