"This year has been fantastic, it is a really, really good year," the managing director of Hannover Fairs Australia, CeBIT`s local representative, Jackie Taranto, said from Hannover. At the halfway point of the show, the world`s biggest annual IT fair, organisers announced a 10 per cent increase in visitor numbers over last year. This defied predictions of a slump because of fewer exhibitors and less floor space.

Ms Taranto said the extra numbers were translating into good prospects for the small but growing Australian presence at Hannover - 16 companies on the Australian stand compared with 10 last year, and double the exhibition floorspace. "We are going to do a lot of business out of this show," she said. Already, e-commerce payment gateway developer Eway had done well from its presence.

A CeBIT debutant, the Canberra company said its online payment technology had attracted the attention of three leading global operators. "We have met up with Barclays, Lloyds and the Royal Bank of Scotland and are now in the certification process with two of them," chief executive Matt Bullock said. "That is important for us, because it gives us a platform to offer our product to merchants and e-commerce companies across the EU. "Being at CeBIT, with the support of Austrade, has shown that we are serious players. "We are now talking to one large European merchant that is unhappy with their current payment provider and is looking to swap over."

Complementing this increased industry activity, Australia`s official public-sector delegates at the show are also reaping rewards, Ms Taranto said. Queensland IT minister, Robert Schwarten, for example, had lined up contacts to investigate management systems for the state`s huge car fleet, while representatives of the Australian Government Information Management Office had held talks with the likes of German software giant SAP on e-commerce technology.

Ms Taranto said the experience of such delegates this year had already led to the Victorian and Queensland Premiers, Steve Bracks and Peter Beattie, pencilling in visits to CeBIT next year.

In return, ministerial delegates from Germany, China, Malaysia and Thailand had confirmed at Hannover that they would be attending CeBIT Australia in Sydney in May.

"The premier of Lower Saxony, for example, will lead a trade delegation of 20 to 35 high-level business investors to Sydney in May," Ms Taranto said. "That is a tremendous coup for us."

By Roland Tellzen

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As if taking a cue from Helio’s ads “Don’t call us a phone company,” the rest of the mobile industry will try to rally the market around mobile data — mobile TV, cell phone entertainment, mobile social networking, and mobile ads - at CTIA which opens in a few hours from now.

Too bad, as analysts at Informa Telecoms & Media point out: “the vast majority of revenue growth – both for the operator and vendor communities - is coming out of developing markets where mobile is fulfilling a basic need for voice and text-based communications.” Yeah, but that’s not as much fun to show off in a demo booth. Anyway, on to the top 5 trends:

1) Mobile TV – Qualcomm’s broadcast mobile TV network is finally live in the U.S. and mobile TV vendors and video content companies now have a working platform to tout their efforts. Chip companies will showcase mobile TV chips, while media companies will announce content partnerships.

Verizon Wireless is the first US carrier to sell the service, and Cingular will follow soon. Hopefully AT&T COO Randall Stephenson will give us an update on the status of the rollout. Monday morning we’re picking up one of the handsets used for Verizon Wireless’ VCAST Mobile TV service. Yay.

2) Mobile Ads – Declining future voice revenues are forcing the mobile business to look at mobile ads as a way to give the bottom line a quick boost. Informa predicts mobile advertising will be around .3 billion by 2011. Which means, an announcement overload.

AdMob, a San Mateo, Calif.-based company will announce that it has raised million in fresh funding in a round led by Accel Partners. Other startups like Xipto are showing new mobile ad-driven services like their endorsement-driven mobile advertising platform.

3) iPhone and mobile UI:– We’ll see if the iPhone makes an actual appearance (or an update from AT&T’s COO), but its presence will no doubt be felt on the UI front. We should expect more companies to showcase the fluid user interface and prototypes of touch screen phones.  It looks like the much awaited iPhone and the LG Prada phone will have some new competiton.

4) Lack of compelling new handsets: Moto CEO decided to cancel his keynote, a sign that Moto’s having an uh-oh moment! But is also is indicative of how quickly winds change in the handset business. Cell phone makers can’t rest on the laurels of big hits like the RAZR for too long and are trying create the new hits of 2007.

We’ll search for innovation, but we’re not too optimistic. For some reason Chinese handset maker TCL thinks Alcatel-branded handsets are a good idea and Sprint’s getting a new music phone from Samsung, the m620 or UpStage.

5) Mobile User Generated Content – There is going to be a lot of buzz around mobile services that help subscribers create and share mobile content. We’ll be checking out StreamVerse’s MOJO service for creating mobile content like group chats and polling games. Mobidia is announcing its mobile application called CUBuddy that lets users create a real-time video call between cell phones. This is actually one part of the mobile ecosystem which could turn casual data users into 3G customers, and help goose up the carrier ARPU.

By Katie Fehrenbacher

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This exacerbates rivalries. As an example, the European Union has been particularly harsh on Microsoft . Whether you believe Microsoft`s attorneys (personally, I want to see their side of the argument, but it`s difficult for me to do) or the sense in the European Union (EU) that Microsoft`s practices have stifled competition isn`t relevant. Instead, there`s a sense that Windows is a bit like your mother-in-law here -- you married into it for better or worse when you bought your notebook. Still, Windows has become a love-hate relationship here.

The same can now be said of Apple Computer. There`s a sense that Apple`s inability to open iTunes formats amounts to a constraint of trade. The EU hasn`t really seen the business end of Apple`s controversial relationship with the RIAA, and there`s a fairly common feeling that Steve Jobs` claim that he`d prefer DRM-free downloads is hollow here, in Germany. Nonetheless, as a major and highly successful target the size of a barn, it`s easy to hit. Something more onerous is happening, however.

There`s an increasingly louder anti-American sentiment wrapping up distain for Microsoft products and Apple DRM controls with suspicion of other U.S. companies, even eBay and Amazon.com . Oddly, Google appears immune from criticism, receiving only praise -- for now -- a seeming champion of ideals. We in the United States were once good-guys and acknowledged leaders. Now there`s a common, even popular growl towards U.S. product groupings.

Bandwagons

One of the causes celebres at CeBIT Hannover this week is RFID policy. An EU minister spoke at the conference Thursday morning detailing the advances being made in RFID products, and in an unusual move, seemed quite disapproving of a need for immediate regulation. U.S. Undersecretary of Commerce and head of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration Robert Cresanti echoed the needs for privacy, and asserted the desirability of assessment before regulation occurs.

In an interview this morning, Cresanti also echoed Bill Gates` cry for an expansion of H1B visas, citing the fact that EU competing countries don`t have the same barrier that the U.S. faces in getting `best and brightest` recruitment efforts underway. The intellectual capital differences, he says, are beginning to have an effect on the competitive stance of the United States.

Separately, Bavarian-based Siemens has taken a page from Cisco and Nortel , refocusing its "solutions" approached to network infrastructure and protocol-based services, such as VoIP trunking and QoS-enabled infrastructure. This "solutions-based" approach seems to be the rule at CeBIT, as larger makers try to anchor expansive technology base product lines together, in entangling arrangements reminiscent of IBM and Digital Equipment of the 1980s. Fear, uncertainty and doubt-marketing methods were unusually prominent.

And it turns out that there are no more Taiwanese notebook computers being built, I found. Certainly there are Taiwanese designs, but manufacturing has been relegated to China for the largest part. What has occurred is the evolution of Taiwan to an engineering and design island whose principal rival is no longer Silicon Valley, rather South Korea.

The intensity of the Korean/Taiwanese rivalry has also driven (or kept) prices down, as each economy tries to outdo the other in terms of cost and distribution. Although major makers of machines are promontory, Taiwan has become the second-largest exhibiting country at CeBIT, despite its tiny geographic size. Dozens upon dozens of Taiwanese companies offer sexy if fragile notebook designs, home networking products, and networking gear ranging from small-business to near enterprise-class routers at prices that boggle the mind. Along the way, you can find MP3 players embedded into every conceivable imaginable design from watches and furry animals down to a coffee cup with an integral 2GB MP3 player, world clock and FM radio. I suppose there might be truth to the aphorism that he with the most toys when he dies, wins.

Yet as I walk the seemingly never ending floors of CeBIT, I doubt if I can get to all 280 million square meters in three weeks, let alone the day and a half that I have left. Never mind that the show directory is the size of the Manhattan phone book. Never mind that there are eight full-time buses for press alone. Never mind that the Euro is at US $ 1.33 today and on its way up. If you needed any health indicators coming from CeBIT, I`ll paraphrase the old Johnny Winter song -- still alive and well.

By Tom Henderson

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