CeBit Australia 2007 Part 2: Trendspotting

Welcome to part 2 of my coverage of the CeBit Australia 2007. If you have not already, do have a look at part 1 first. In this post we take a look at the rest of the show and some of my noted technology trends at the end. Please note there are quite a few images after the “jump” so it may take some time to load.


Even Google had a booth, selling guess what? Adwords.

Some cool looking kiosk designs.



USB Drive in a credit card?

Spinal checks for us geeks who sit too much.


Fujitsu going enterprise servers. Really nice design details.

I spotted about 5 booths with the Nintendo Wii installed, however to my disspointment, all the booths sold nieghter Wii software or perhperials.

Mobile PC for the consumer on the left, same product for hospitals on the right.

That is a video card heat sink, and I love looking at its over the top engineered details.

Sony projectors galore!

Where would a Sony booth be without a Blue-Ray player?

Sony is into survallance cameras and systems.


Panasonic’s 103″ Plasma TV. HUGE and all electronic shows will have someone trying to make the next bigger one.

Some techs doing maintainance.

I had a go at the Wacom Cintique LCD Tablet, very nice and the tactile feedback is good. This fellow attempts to draw over my sketch.

I Love it, but I think its nuts to buy one for spread sheets.

Surprising very few lifestyle products on show. This company has a few iPod look a like products. The middle PSP clone, looked promising, but the internal software was crap. That cone thing on the right is a speaker.

Its interesting to see the evolution of the design of a PC motherboard. Lots of design opportunities here, both in usability and visual cues.

One of the coolest things at CeBit. With this machine, developed by bcode, you can get your CeBit ticket SMSed to your phone, and when you get there just flash the text message on your phone screen and it will automatically print out your badge. That is amazing as the machine can even pick out the code from my colored phone theme!

Yep we say good bye! I leave feeling full but not very satisfied.
Top Trends Spotted at CeBit Australia 2007
1) Voice over IP. This looks like its going to be huge with many booths providing the systems and the supporting products like head sets etc.
2) Wireless everything. WiFi things are big business. Security, routers, systems, speakers, data transfer, consumer products and enterprise solutions. Its looks like it’s matured to a level that it can become an ubiquitous standard.
3) Big software presence. Strangely unlike the last CeBit I went to, there a lot of software companies present. Linux, Red Hat, Google and Anti-Virus et al. are all present. Interesting to see that software companies have left the virtual world with real money spent in an advertising effort that has been under utilized for a long time now, off-line real world marketing.
4) Social networking gone enterprise level. There are many designed for business collaboration, networking and publishing software systems available.
5) Building a presence in Second Life. Even though Big Pond island was completely empty when I was shown the demo, it seems companies are spending big money on building a presence in that virtual game world.