You have to pay eternal attention to developments that could become a 10X factor in your business - Andy Grove - Only the Paranoid Survive
"WE ARE GATHERING IN CHALLENGING TIMES," boomed California Governor Arnie Schwarzenegger at the opening of mega IT trade show, CeBit, in Hannover tonight.
Standing next to tiny-looking German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, the Terminator told his audience it was time "to stand up and refuse to fail". Fighting words from the former Austrian bodybuilder against a backdrop of economic gloom the likes of which haven't been seen since the dot-com bust in 2001.
The governator was officiating at the tech fair after California was chosen to be a 'partner country' of CeBit 2009, back in October. This is apparently because California's economy is big enough to be counted as a country, and because hey, they have a movie star as a governor, so why not?
Flashing his muscles, Schwarzenegger quipped CeBit was "all about pumping up your business" and boasted about California's advanced computer technology. He then proceeded to wax lyrical about technology as humanity's greatest asset, saying it was tech which would most help in the battle against climate change.
Merkel, doing her bit as VIP opener extraordinaire, said she would take it upon herself to ensure three quarters of German households had High Speed Data Links (HSDL) of 50 Mbps by 2015. She also appealed to owners of radio frequency spectrum to free up chunks of it for wireless data connections and begged broadband and optical fibre networks to compromise with each other and play nicely.
Despite shlepping Schwarzenegger all the way to Hannover to open the show, however, CeBit seems to be just a shadow of its former self, shrinking some 25 per cent in exhibitors compared with last year owing to the global recession and sharp slump in PC sales. Only 4,300 companies will be displaying their wares at CeBit 2009, but organisers are quick to point out this means more limelight for those who have made the effort.
Some 200 new vendors are said to be attending this year's show, alongside giants like Dell, Microsoft, IBM, Intel, HP, Hitachi, Panasonic, Adobe, Alcatel-Lucent, British Telecom, Oracle, Samsung, Yahoo, symantec and many others.
What kind of a show CeBit will actually turn out to be, we can only postulate at this point, but in the words of the governator himself "Hasta la vista, baby", we'll Cee and keep you posted. µ
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Has all the pioneer Inquirer editorial team left the site? How low can it get?
I miss the old chaps.........really!!!