I have already written once about a giant trade fair I visited in Germany, and how overwhelming it was, but that was small potatoes compared to CeBIT. The largest trade fair, period. It's a consumer electronics and computer show but you can find just about anything there that is in any way remotely connected to computers. I went with Levin from work to research possible partners for an upcoming conference, and to find a company to provide an internet connection for our office in the future if we decided to bring more of our computing resources under one roof. Unfortunately, we could only go for one day.
CeBIT is held in Hanover's giant fair grounds which have swallowed much of what was once Expo 2000's space. Indeed, some of the buildings are still left over from country displays from Expo. It's just outside the main city, and is more of a suburb than a fair ground. It is just enormous, they have shuttle buses that take you from building o building. the fair draws so many people to Hanover that the hotels are overbooked for kilometres, and in fact, the majority of CeBIT goers lodge with private citizens. Anybody that has any space, an extra room, a couch , anything will rent it out to companies that needed to house their armies of salespeople. Then there are the visitors. Several million during the week and a half run of the show. Levin and I stayed at a ex local committee president of AIESEC's house. It took us about 15 minutes to find even an illegal parking spot when we arrived. We then spent most of the day just walking from booth to booth, ticking off companies that we had on our list. We met with a couple and collected the information we needed, but we never really got a chance to see even a small percentage of what was on display. We did however stop at the IBM innovative research booth which was displaying a few prototype devices. One was a watch that ran Linux, had most of the normal organizer functions, and could be a remote control. It used blue tooth to communicate with other household devices, and could read he movements of your wrist and arm as commands, . Imagine yelling at your television and pointing so that the channel changed, or that the lights go off, or the fridge opens.
