Directories are fine, if they are terribly relevant to the niche and real people use them. They should be added slowly, no more than one per week. This particular offer, therefore, is a waste of money and a possible risk.

This is a friend's tool that has some more options.
http://incredibill.me/htaccess-rewrite-wizard

My preference is for the ccTLD if there will be a commitment to optimise that domain - usually the smaller countries are sales offices without a proper marketing complement, so they assume that "head office" will look after the website. Head Office usually doesn't have any budget to cater to the subsidiaries, so the ccTLD will be left to its fate.

Hence your choice of company.com/Country will do.

While Bing is not too important, note that its Webmaster tools has an option to mark off such country folders as being different countries. My suspicion is that Google automatically picks up such cues.

Being in Australia I tend to get a good share of multi-national SEO challenges.

Larger, established brands can break all the rules concerning TLDs because they get local authority through their local links and citations. A current client is a major bank with a presence in 31 countries. They just happen to be my bank, so I have observed them over 20 years. They started as a .com with an Australian emphasis and were multi-national for a while. Then they shut down some of the foreign offices. They then decided to populate their .com.au domain and left a complete, parallel copy on the original .com. Then they resumed their global focus and did NOT use their TLDs in those countries because a handful were not in their possession. These are the obscure countries that haven't signed up to the international copyright conventions. Branding is paramount for them, so no amount of SEO advice could budge them.

So their international locations take the format example.com/countryname. Does that work for them? Of course it does. I was in Singapore where I tested for myself from a local PC, so as to remove any hint of my personal history. They do very well. Despite having the duplicate content in Australia, they do very well among their peers.

A former client who has offices in over 60 countries also started as a .com and when they got more serious in the US they realised that they did not rank at all in that country. They had the usual IT-centric excuse not to make many sites, so I left that for them to resolve internally. Is sales more important than some technician's convenience? I hope they got that point. I did recommend a local micro site for the US that would display US-centric customer stories and local news events.

The takeaways here are that local content and local links can overcome any advantages/disadvantages of a gTLD for a multi-national site.

I have found that a 301 takes some time to take effect in the index, so I don't bother with a 302 first, There are many redirect tools on the web and I like this one: http://www.rapidtables.com/web/tools/redirect-generator.htm

You have to remove the images via Google Webmaster Tools. This support document has the instructions: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/181721?hl=en

watch?v=PDjOL73wkow

If the product descriptions are more or less copied from the manufacturer, then you may need to rewrite them and find ways to add user-generated content there, e.g. ratings and reviews, etc.

If you 301 the blog pages, then there won't be a blog to read and Google won't index the product pages.

Yes, doing a 301 redirect from your .nl to the .com site will be fine, but why are you doing that?

Are you going to advertise in Holland and show the .nl URL? If so, users might be unsettled if they end up at the .com site. If it is just 301'd and that's all you do, then hardly anyone other than a person guessing your URL will even use it. You might not even rank in Holland.

There are no bad SEO points for the .com site, but you could be losing the chance to rank on Google.nl. I don't think Google.nl will note the 301 and therefore show the .com as well as a well-SEO'd .nl site.

You could put English content on the .nl site, preferably a rewritten version of the .com site. The key is to get .nl links to the .nl domain (if not 301'd). Make it a Dutch site as much as you can - get listed in Dutch directories, get Dutch citations, etc.

I recommend getting to know in advance other people who will be going to the conference. You can ask in the community forum, on Twitter or Facebook some months in advance. This will enable you to seek them out in person and will avoid the common "hazard" of meeting someone with different professional interests.