Miami International Boat Show 2015

The Bad Elf team recently attended the annual Miami International Boat Show at the Miami Beach Convention Center in Miami, Florida.  It was a welcome change in weather from the mountains of snow we received at our headquarters in Hartford, CT.  More importantly, the trip allowed us to visit with familiar faces and meet some new friends in the marine industry.

We were welcomed by our partners at Snow Lizard Products and spent a significant amount of time at their booth showcasing the integration of their rugged cases and our GPS technology in the forthcoming SLXtreme.  Based on the feedback from the show, the marriage of our products will be an exciting option for boaters needing protection, backup power, and GPS in a single iPad or iPhone case.

Right next to the Snow Lizard booth, we had the pleasure of meeting some new developers in the industry who are local to Miami.  BoatDayApp has a great product and website with the ability to request space for yourself, for a group, or to reserve an entire boat for fun, fishing, watersports, and more.  We also had the opportunity to meet with Get My Boat, who are the self-proclaimed AirBnb of the boating industry with over 26,000 boats available in 110 countries.

Some familiar faces we visited were Jeppesen, who showed us some detail into their C-MAP systems, Sea Pilot/True Heading (all the way from Sweden) who demoed their new app for iOS/Android/Windows, Fugawi who showcased their new partnerships, and of course Navionics, who won this year's Innovation Award for their SonarCharts Live software.

The Bad Elf team was invited to attend an outing out on the water with the teams from Snow Lizard Products and Navionics.  We had the opportunity to boat around Biscayne Bay and test drive an iPad running Navionics projected by the SLXtreme case and connected to the Vexilar Sonar Phone.  In the end, we all decided that forthcoming meetings should always take place on the water with plenty of food and beer.

We would like to thank all of our friends, partners, new teams of people we met, and especially the Miami Boat Show for their hospitality.  We can't wait to attend again next year at the new Miami Marine Stadium Park & Basin at Virginia Key, February 11–15, 2016.