Internetrix Managing Director Geoff McQueen has spent the last week in Hannover, Germany, the site of the largest IT show in the world.  With almost half a million visitors, more than 6,000 exhibitors and now in its 20th year, Geoff reports on the insight and experiences of this paramount event.

CeBIT was born 20 years ago as a spin off from the still popular Hannover Messe event, which started in Hannover in 1947 in the ruins of post-war Germany as a way to stimulate economic activity. In 1986, the “office equipment industry” had grown into such a large part of the general Messe that it was split off into its own event, called CeBIT.

As an exhibitor at the 2005 CeBIT Australia, Internetrix was thrilled to be invited to attend the much larger Hannover event this year as a guest of the Australian organisers. While not exhibiting, the event has provided significant business opportunities as well as a unique chance to sample the best developments in technology in one very big place.

The 2006 event has continued the upward and optimistic trend in the IT sector following the hangover from Y2K and the dot com crash a few years ago. In a heartening sign of the strength and maturity of the industry, this year’s show has been more about the perfection of technology in the business and home, as opposed to impressive yet speculative inventions that are cool but not particularly useful.

This theme is probably best evidenced in Microsoft’s new product launch, the Origami, which is profiled later in this newsletter. With a lot of pre-launch talk about the product, I was pretty excited to find it was being shown first at CeBIT. After a lengthy chat with Microsoft’s people and a test of the new device, it was refreshing to see that it is more of an adaptation of existing laptop and tablet PC technology for an ultra-portable device rather than the creation of yet another class of platform. By bringing together the best parts of Windows XP, and adding improvements like a touch-screen interface you use your finger to navigate, Microsoft has ensured the new product will have thousands of potential uses from day one.

Of course, it wouldn’t be the biggest technology show in the world without some exciting new toys, and on this count CeBIT didn’t disappoint. Included on the list of cool stuff was a robotic natural vision system which allowed the robot to learn and recognise new items – such as a blue cup – and describe them to you. Also in the robotics field, a German University demonstrated a human-like robot that copied your movements in real time. Hardware manufacturers – particularly Toshiba, LG and ATI – spent the budget of small nations during the show with stands and give-aways that defied belief. In the software space, I was particularly impressed by the efforts of a number of companies to reduce the hassle associated with using Linux in an office environment, with two particularly good products I’ll be trying out to make configuring a small office server a snap.

Also in the coming-soon category are a vast array of location-based services, often included in mobile phones, which are lining up to take advantage of the Galileo project (the European equivalent of GPS). It won’t be long until we don’t need to call our friends, family or co-workers to ask them where they are – simply looking up their number in your phone will be able to show you a map (and usefully for me, a time zone, so you don’t call them in the middle of the night!).

From a consumer perspective, a lot of progress in the last year has been made with the continuing convergence of media, entertainment, information and communications in the home. While it is now possible to have a computer in the lounge room you can use to watch and record TV, DVDs, as well as surf the internet and check emails and listen to internet radio, there isn’t a standardised and perfected way to do this yet. The ideal setup – the software (perhaps Media Centre by Microsoft), hardware (perhaps the new PlayStation or a TiVo) and user interface (remote control or keyboard; Windows or something specific) – is still to be settled on. Whichever way things go, it is clear the traditional media companies – including newspapers, TV networks and movie studios – are in for a lot of change into the next few years, and for once, I think that consumers will be the winners.

In technology developments closer to home, I was interested to see the continual refinement in CRM and ERP technology; two areas where Internetrix has strong experience with our Affinity and Gravity products. Encouragingly, there are still a lot of companies that are yet to catch up to using the web as a platform, and those that are doing well in this area gave me a lot of comfort that we’re still ahead of the game on an international scale.

Currently finishing up my last day at the show, I’m off tomorrow to Northern California for three weeks, where the weather will hopefully be a bit nicer (it has snowed every day here) to continue work on the Omnidrive project covered last month. We’re hoping to have some exciting news to announce on that front shortly.