Saturday, March 24, 2001

By Dan O'Brien
Stars and Stripes

HANOVER, Germany — At CeBIT 2001 every pixel tells a story.

Walking through the exhibition halls of the world’s largest "information technology and telecom trade fair," visitors are confronted by most every gadget imaginable. People seem to move in slow motion, their eyes glazed by sensory overload, unable to escape the sounds or sights, or the machines they emanate from.

Colors explode from flat-panel plasma screens the size of big-rig trucks. Speakers blare the preachings of sales people programmed to repeat the same information over and over and over.

CeBIT is the future — a wild walk on the silicon side. It opened Thursday and will continue through Wednesday.

"This is crazy," said Jeff Burton of San Diego, Calif. "I just got here. It’s incredible. I know I have my work cut out, but I have three days. Hopefully I’ll see most of it."

Burton is surrounded by four women wearing bright red wigs and gray Spandex body suits. They smile and nod, thrusting their company’s product literature at him in a robotic manner. They accomplish this in a matter of seconds, before moving on to their next target.

Burton, who says he is a "gadget geek first and a civil engineer second," is not here to sell anything. He is a technophile who took a vacation from his job to attend CeBIT.

He says he is not put off by the strong-arm marketing practiced by some of the more aggressive companies. For him, this is fun.

CeBIT is big: 4.6 million square feet of exhibition space (roughly equivalent to 86 football fields); more than 750,000 visitors expected over its seven-day run; 12,000 internal telecommunications extensions for telephone, fax, Internet access, etc.; and more than 11,000 journalists from 70 countries.

This is no fair, it’s a mid-sized city built on a foundation of bits and bytes.

All the big players are here: Microsoft, Lucent, Unisys, IBM, Nokia, NTT DoCoMo — 8,106 companies in all. Walking into any one of these firm’s "booths" (the term seems so woefully inadequate) is akin to taking a hallucinatory plunge into a sea of technology.

CeBIT is also a high-tech version of Brigadoon: It rises once a year to become a temporary capital of the information age.

And its staging has a Broadway feel. At Nortel Networks, for example, a tribe of African drummers bang out a hynotic beat as strobe lights fire.

At NTT DoCoMo, Japan’s high-speed wireless carrier, a 6-foot tall robot talks to visitors.

Most of the big exhibitors have a stage and seating area to better showcase their products. Four times an hour, a sales presenter takes to the stage with wireless microphone in place. He or she will give the spiel, all the while directing the audience’s attention to the monitor that dwarfs the stage from behind. Many in the audience look like they took a seat only to rest their feet.

Although now a powerful force in the world of marketing high-tech products and services, CeBIT’s history is brief. It began only 15 years ago as an outgrowth of the "office equipment industry" area of the annual Hanover Fair. Its name is a German acronym which translates approximately into "Center for Office and Information Technology."

Each year CeBIT hosts approximately 500 U.S. exhibitors. Most of these can be found at one of the U.S. pavilions. Yes, there is more than one U.S. pavilion. There is one dedicated to memory and storage, another to document management and office automation, and others to networking, communications, multimedia, operating systems and more.

What are some of the coolest of the cool at this year’s CeBIT?

First of all, the trade fair is not limited to just computer technology. With that in mind, an Irish company is displaying its "silicon nose" that analyzes gases in human breath. More than a breathalyzer, it can detect such diseases as cirrhosis, lung cancer and diabetes.

Wireless home theaters also seem to be popular, with most companies offering a comfortable chair and snack to "fully appreciate" their product’s state-of-the-art advancements.

But computers, networks and their assorted spawn rule at CeBIT. In this category, portable digital assistants seem very popular.

At the Hewlett-Packard area, employees proudly touted the "new low price" and color screen of its Jornada PDA. Not to be outdone, Palm Inc., maker of the most popular PDA on the market, debuted two new devices, the Palm m505 and an upgraded version of its Palm VII.

But CeBIT is not about one or two products. It’s the sum of them all. It’s a beeping, flashing, fleeting, humming mecca for people who love technology.

CeBIT is ... a trip.

The CeBIT trade show is open from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. daily through March 28. Admission is 65 marks (about $32.50) at the door. Traffic is very bad to and from the fairgrounds. Public transportation is recommended, and there will be plenty of trains available. During this year’s show, all long-distance trains running north to south and vice versa will make an unscheduled stop at the Hanover Exhibition Grounds train station, the Hanover Messe/Laatzen. An average of 81 trains a day will be stopping at the station.

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