CeBIT 2009

The world's leading trade fair for IT and telecommunications, or ICT industry - CeBIT 2009 in Hanover - took place from March 3 to 8. This year there were about 4300 companies from 69 countries, exhibiting their products, and about 400,000 visitors. However, these numbers showing the scale of the event are much smaller than that of the peak 2001 year with 8100 exhibitors.



IBM, MSI, Panasonic, Comarch, Intel, ASUS, Microsoft and... beautiful women at CeBIT fair 2009:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAhq9YjEbu8&fmt=18

The absence of many traditional leaders of telecommunications market, both in the case of manufacturers and telecoms, and a very weak representation of companies supplying products for banking industry - were the main symptoms of the crisis. Among German operators we saw Deutsche Telekom and Vodafone, but couldn't find E-Plus and so blatant before O2 stand.

But the greatest sensation was caused by Samsung, not having its own stand but only being represented by distributors. It was a stark contrast in comparison with last year, when the corporation fascinated everyone with a grand scale, as well as with the number of new products. The sponsorship of World Cyber Games (WCG), with thousands of StarCraft, Counter-Strike, and Warcraft III gamers, was a thing of the past. It raised questions about the corporation's financial condition - the end of the sponsoring "e-sports" could be a real blow to the image of the tycoon among young people.

Japanese companies were modestly represented by NEC and Sony Ericsson; Toshiba, DoCoMo, Motorola failed to show up. There were no stands outside - last year's AMD show with off-road vehicles promoting new AMD processors was just a memory - the company was absent as well.

We couldn't find exhibitors presenting new technologies, probably the manufacturers didn't believe in possibility of profitable implementations in the near future (for example - lack of promising LTE technology). There was only one word for the pavilions promoting Green IT - boredom.

Was the fair a failure? - No !!!
More about CeBIT.

CeBIT 2008

New concept of CEBiT - a success? This year's CEBiT in Hanover - the world's largest trade fair for IT and telecommunications - took place between 4th and 9th of March.

There were about 5900 companies (by 5 percent less than last year). For the first time in the history of the fair, China had the largest representation, surpassing in numbers the previous leader, Taiwan.
Among the notable absentees were Sony, Sharp, Philips, Lenovo, Dell and Nokia.

After several years of decrease of the number of exhibitors, the organizers decided to increase the number of conferences - to attract professionals, and shorten the event by one day - to cut the costs of exhibitors. But probably the main focus was to define the objectives of the exhibition.

Unfortunately the organization efforts didn't seem to refresh the event. They couldn't eliminate the feeling of deficiency, a want for new technologies and for an impulse to stop the decrease of investments in European telecommunications.

During the trade fair we could see a steady factor in European industry - expansion of red tape. The organizers, using subsidizing, invite national exhibitors that, instead of products, are showing travel brochures, and grassroots movements - promoting projects like Green IT.

In this situation the most interesting trends seen at the fair were network and mobile solutions for television - as an extension of offers of telecommunication operators. The solutions are based on technologies that improve data transfers, especially those of mobile telephony. The example is LTE technology presented by Sony Ericsson and T-Mobile.

LTE (Long Term Evolution) is the newest transmission system for mobile applications, developed according to the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP). The specification accepted in January, 2008, adopts theoretical limit of 326 Mbps (practical speeds reach 100 Mbps).