Before deciding to attend a trade show for the promotion of your company’s product or services, lots of stuffs have to be considered very seriously. In fact, you need to decide upon quite a few critical aspects when the subject matter concerns to the marketing and success of your strategies.

At a particular point of time, if you decide to put up a trade show booths in a trade show, you need to have a crystal clear picture in your mind that why is this trade show display of your company for? The objectives can be multiple. For some, their trade show booth just really wanted to concentrate on their existing clients or customers. They want their existing customers to visit their trade show booth and would want the customer know about the popularity and acceptance those products have got over a period of time.

The secondary objective being the launch of a new product or service, the trade show displays of the respective companies would try to attract the customers in all possible ways. This provides an excellent opportunity to introduce the product with a bang in the international arena.

Another perspective of company in participating in a trade show is just to cement their position among the cluster of giants in the arena of business. They just need to announce loudly that they are very much around the frame and they cannot be overlooked by any means. These companies are often successful in achieving their objectives and project goals.

The ability of booth staffers lies in the best utilization of available time. Also, they should posses the skill to identify and concentrate on potential booth visitors. It won’t be wise to state that people who visit the booth after finding the banners and trade show displays of your company are necessarily potential visitors. There might be some who just wanted to have a look at stalls or trade show booths, who do not really wanted to purchase something from you. Here, the staffers should be good and smart enough to save their time by not spending time explaining and detailing the stuffs for them. Here, qualifying questions do play a pivotal role.

Qualifying questions can be thrown at customers to know their mentality. There is nothing wrong in giving away some polite questions like “what would you like to have from our company?” The answer would help you understand whether the customer is really looking for some stuff from your company or he/she just wanted to pass you by. If the trade shows staffers still can’t make anything from their reply, further questions can be asked to figure out, what they exactly want.

Booth staffers should properly be trained to attain this skill. When asking, questions should sound polite enough. The worst thing that can happen is to lose a potential customer when you are spending some time with someone who doesn’t really want anything from you. That can happen if the staff is not good in his business.

Environmental awareness has come to the race for patent bragging rights.

IBM on Monday will announce the creation of an Eco-Patents Commons–shared innovations geared at environmental sustainability–with the participation of Sony, Nokia, and Pitney Bowes.

The launch of the Eco-Patent Commons is timed with the yearly ranking of U.S. patent awards, which gives IBM the top spot for the 15th year in a row, with 3,148 patents in 2007.

The Eco-Patent Commons will start with the donation into the public domain of 31 patents that cover everything from a manufacturing process that reduces volatile compounds to a natural coagulant used to purify industrial waste water.

On Monday, a Web site that hosts the patents is scheduled to launch. The patent commons will be administered by the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, a Geneva-based organization devoted to promoting sustainability in business.

Co-founder IBM, which has a program called Big Green Innovations, hopes to encourage innovation in areas of ecology and benefit commercially through the venture, said Dave Kappos, IBM’s lead patent attorney.

“There’s no reason that environmentally sustainable activity cannot be commercially advantageous,” he said. “The patents come out of the IT industry–at least ours do–but there is cross-industry applicability.”

For example, communications company Nokia submitted a patent covering recycling cell phones into new electronic devices such as clocks, calculators, and remote controls.

Participants who submit patents into the Eco-Patents Commons pledge not to enforce these patents against others who use them.

They benefit from the commons by being able to use other companies’ patents. They also benefit from further innovations or cost reductions on their donations, Kappos said. The company hopes others will join and expand the patent pool.

Kappos said part of the motivation for the creation of the patents-sharing organization is the difficulty in establishing intellectual property licensing agreements across industries.

In the IT industry, cross-licensing agreements are commonplace, but in other fields, such as chemicals or energy, intellectual property tends to be hoarded, he said.

The electronics and IT industries are seeing an upswell of environmental awareness. Vendors are offering more energy-efficient products and other green technologies.

But the manufacture of electronics remains energy-intensive and involves harmful chemicals. Although there are efforts to boost recycling, electronic waste is a growing problem.

IBM and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development said they hope to attract innovations and address energy conservation, pollution prevention, better materials, recycling, and more efficient use of water.

The European Commission moved to simplify the nascent mobile phone TV sector by adopting a standard backed by Finland’s Nokia, but mobile operators said Brussels was acting too quickly.

The Commission said setting the Digital Video Broadcasting Handheld (DVB-H) as the preferred European Union standard would give the industry a boost.

“For mobile TV to take off in Europe, there must first be certainty about the technology,” European Telecoms Commissioner Viviane Reding said in a statement on Monday.

DVB-H is the only standard with a global presence although South Korea, Japan, the United States and China are embracing local rivals, such as one set by U.S. company Qualcomm.

The European Union executive said its decision sent “an important signal” to other countries preparing to decide whether to opt for DVB-H or other standards.

EU countries will now be required to encourage the use of DVB-H, the Commission said.

Some EU member states, such as Britain, Germany and the Netherlands, had been opposed to setting DVB-H as the single standard in the bloc.

But the EU executive said on Monday it was the one most widely used in Europe and is between trials and commercial launch in 16 countries.

The GSM Association, representing mobile operators in Europe, said it was staying neutral on mobile TV technology as it should be the market that decides on the standard.

“An official endorsement does carry weight but it’s not clear if DVB-H is necessarily the best standard,” a GSM Association spokesman said.

Broadcasters said the question of which standard is being endorsed was almost irrelevant as the fundamental issue was whether mobile television packages would pay their way.

“How do you design a compelling service that people will want? Even if it’s free and financed by advertising, how many ads do people want to see on a small screen?” said Ross Biggam, director general of the Association of Commercial Television in Europe.

Most countries have seen trials of mobile TV, such as sports, news and music videos although Italy is one of the rare EU states with a commercial-type service running, Biggam said.

The Commission hopes this year’s soccer European Championship and the Olympic Games will boost consumer take-up of television services over mobile phones, a potential new money-spinner for telecoms operators and broadcasters.

General Motors is investing in biofuels start-up Coskata in a bid to speed the flow of ethanol for GM’s flex-fuel vehicles.

At the North American International Auto Show in Detroit on Sunday, GM is scheduled to announce a partnership with Coskata, a year-and-a-half-old company with technology for turning wood chips, grasses, or municipal waste into ethanol.

It’s one of several biofuels partnerships GM plans to forge to promote E85, a blend of ethanol and gasoline that powers flex-fuel cars.

GM said it invested in Coskata, initially backed by high-profile venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, because its technology promises to deliver ethanol from non-food sources faster than others.

Coskata claims it can deliver ethanol at under $1 per gallon–cheaper than current prices. It intends to construct a 40,000-gallon-per-year facility near a GM test track by the end of the year and to have a full-scale 100 million-gallon-per-year plant by 2011.

“We are not going into the fuel business,” said Mary Beth Stanek, GM’s director of environment, energy policy, and commercialization. “But let’s be clear: we want consumers to have access to biofuels that are affordable and (that) lower greenhouse gases. That is in our interest.” GM did not disclose the amount of the investment.

The auto giant has committed to doubling its flex-fuel vehicle output to 80,000 cars by 2010, and to making half of its new cars flex-fuel-capable by 2012.

But the limited availability of E85 poses a problem. There are only about 1,400 ethanol filling stations in the U.S., mainly in the Midwest, which is far too few for GM’s flex-fuel ambitions.

During a press briefing at the Consumer Electronics Show last week, GM CEO Rick Wagoner called for a tenfold increase in the number of ethanol pumps.

“It has been remarkably difficult” to get E85 pumps installed, he said, adding that GM is “doing more work than I thought we would need to.”

“Greener” forms of transportation are expected to be one of the main themes of the auto show, a response to higher gas prices and growing environmental concerns.

Ford plans to show off a concept car with the EcoBoost, an energy-efficient turbo-charged engine that the company will start putting into sedans in 2009. Global Electric Motorcars, a Chrysler company, will showcase its latest low-speed electric vehicles.

Meanwhile, Fisker Automotive has chosen the conference to officially launch its high-end plug-in hybrid sports sedan, which will be able to go 50 miles on its battery and 620 miles on fuel. It hopes to bring its $80,000 sedan out in 2009.

GM is investing in several technologies. At the show, it is expected to show the hybrid Saturn Vue and its hybrid Cadillac concept, Provoq, which can run on hydrogen.

But flex-fuel cars are one area where GM, along with Ford and Chrysler, has staked out an early lead, even though the technical barriers are relatively low.

“GM has a competitive advantage in this sector. They’ve been pushing harder, faster, and longer internally,” said Nathanael Greene, a biofuels policy analyst at environmental advocacy group National Resources Defense Council.

Greene said the investment in Coskata appears to be a stepped-up commitment to biofuels, whereas the company’s previous efforts, publicized in its “Live Green, Go Yellow” advertising campaign, had an air of greenwashing.

Nearly all ethanol today is made from corn or sugar cane. Ethanol advocates say that cellulosic ethanol, made from wood chips, grasses, agricultural residue, and other wastes, is more environmentally sound and doesn’t compete with food sources. The Department of Energy is funding about 20 cellulosic ethanol trials, and the recently passed energy bill mandates that by 2022, 20 billion out of 36 billion gallons a year of biofuels come from non-corn feedstocks.

Rather than use specially designed enzymes for fermentation, Coskata uses naturally occurring micro-organisms it licensed from the University of Oklahoma to make ethanol.

GM’s investment is part of a second round of funding, which was originally backed by venture firms Khosla Ventures, Advanced Technology Ventures, and GreatPoint Ventures.

Its process starts by putting carbon-based materials into a gasification chamber where heat and pressure turn feedstock into syngas, a combination of carbon monoxide, hydrogen, and carbon dioxide.

That gas combination is then scrubbed to remove particulates and then moved into a bio-fermentation vessel where micro-organisms metabolize the syngas and turn it into ethanol.

Its process is flexible enough to work with a range of renewable sources, including grasses, wood chips, and even old tires. The company says its bioreactor uses plastic tubes, rather than dropping the entire mixture into a single tank, to maximize exposure to the microbes, a design which keeps overall costs down.

“Our calculations indicate that for virtually any carbon-containing feedstock handled in large bulk, we will be able to convert it without subsidies at under a dollar a gallon,” said Coskata President and CEO Bill Roe, who added that current processes are about twice as expensive. “We believe that’s what’s going to drive consumer interest.”

Coskata has a water-recovery step that allows it to use less than 1 gallon of water for each gallon of ethanol produced. That compares to 3 to 5 gallons of water per gallon of corn-based ethanol.

Roe said that Argonne National Laboratories measured the “energy balance” of its process and found that it can produce 7.7 times as much energy in the end product as it takes to make it. Its fuel produces 84 percent less carbon dioxide than gasoline, when measured from production to use.

Those numbers compare favorably to switchgrass, an experimental ethanol source. A recent multi-year study from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that switchgrass contains five times the energy required to grow it and produces 94 percent less greenhouse gases.

Coskata, named after a nature preserve near Nantucket, Mass., is one of several racing to bring cellulosic ethanol to market cost-effectively.

“It really points to the potential for this family of technology to be large-scale and really environmentally beneficial,” said the NRDC’s Greene. “There’s a much higher probability of success through this shot gun approach.”

Google has seen an acceleration of Internet activity among mobile phone users in recent months since the company introduced faster Web services on selected phone models, fueling confidence the mobile Internet era is at hand, the company said on Tuesday.

Early evidence showing sharp increases in Internet usage on phones, not just computers, has emerged from services Google has begun offering in recent months on Blackberry e-mail phones, Nokia devices for multimedia picture and video creators and business professionals and the Apple iPhone, the world’s top Web search company said.

“We have very much hit a watershed moment in terms of mobile Internet usage,” Matt Waddell, a product manager for Google Mobile, said in an interview. “We are seeing that mobile Internet use is in fact accelerating.

The growing availability of flat-rate data plans from phone carriers instead of per-minute charges that previously discouraged Internet use, along with improved Web browsers on mobile phones as well as better-designed services from companies like Google are fueling the growth, Waddell argued.

Google made the pronouncement as it introduced a new software download for mobile phones running Microsoft’s Windows Mobile software that conveniently positions a Google Web search window on the home screen of such phones.

Similar versions of the search software which Google introduced for BlackBerry users in December and certain Nokia phones in February have sped up the time users take to perform Web searches by 40 percent and, in turn, driven usage.

The software shortcuts the time it takes for people to perform Web searches on Google by eliminating initial search steps of finding a Web browser on the phone, opening the browser, waiting for network access, and getting to Google.com. By making a Google search box more convenient, mobile phone users have begun using the Internet more, the company said.

“We are actually seeing a 20 percent increase in the number of searches by people,” Waddell said.

Google’s mobile plug-in software lets users customize their phones to feature Google mobile services instead of relying solely on software features network carriers have pre-installed on the devices.

“Faster is better than slow, especially on a mobile device, where fast is much better than slow,” Waddell said. “Not only are we are seeing increased user satisfaction but also greater usage.”

Microsoft expects to have sold 20 million Windows Mobile devices by the end of its fiscal year in June, which together with Blackberry and Symbian-based phones represent upward of 85 percent of the Internet-ready smartphones sold in the world.

Users of phones based on software from Research in Motion, Nokia’s Symbian-based phones and now Microsoft Windows Mobile can download the software at mobile.google.com .

Google officials said in August that they had seen a similar surge in usage of Google.com via mobile devices following the launch of the Apple iPhone last year. The iPhone offers a full-featured Internet browser unlike many phones.

Waddell said Google had seen iPhone users perform as many as 50 times more Web searches on these computer-phone devices as users of standard mobile feature phones typically do.