Yesterday I went together with Marvin to Hannover. The 362 kilometer drive to the CeBIT - world's largest IT and telecom fair in the world - was a nice way to test my new Peugeot 308 car ;-). This year was the 4th time I went to the CeBIT, but this time it was different then before. Less exhibitors. From 6.262 exhibitors in 2006, this year the number was only 3.344. I couldn't find many big companies and (huge) hall 1 was even closed.
This blog post is a photo overview of the photos I took during the day.
My street on Sunday at 6.45am in the morning. Some party guys blocked the road.
Some random pictures
The Fed Ex has their own booth for mailing and receiving packages. Cool!
Me at the Belkin booth
As always, you can't miss the Asians. Many companies are from China, Taiwan, Korea, Japan. All looking for new partnerships, local dealer contracts and selling their cheap ass (low quality) products.
This year lots of Asian companies closed their booth early. Some of them even tried to sell their products for very low prices. I bought a 24-port Gigabit switch rackmountable (80 euro with free 1GB NIC) from TP-LINK and Wireless-N PCI-Card (20 euro). TP-Link is not so famous here, but it's the number 1 networking brand in China.
For a while I tried to become a Taiwanese sales guy... but without success...
The only really interesting company this year was Tobii. Tobii is world leader in eye-tracking solutions. Their solution is very cool. A sensor detects exactly where your eyes are looking at. Their customers are mainly marketing researchers and disabled people, but they hope their technology will be integrated in consumers products in the future.
Not sure whether I go or not the next year. I didn't see so much innovation and many products are reviewed and shown on internet sites.