Joe was kind enough to invite me (using his flying points and hotel points) to Hannover and to spend Monday and Tuesday visiting CeBit. CeBit is Europe’s biggest Information Technology and Communication Technology Fair.
Impressions
- I’ve seen Joe after few months
- There were no big technological surprises (equally possible, I was not intelligent to notice them)
- Fair was bigger then I expected, and it was tiring
- We did not know anything about Hannover, so our night life was modest
- Overall I am very satisfied and grateful to Joe
I did hear about fog screens before (I don’t know who manufactured the one in the photo). Fog screens look more spectacular in reality though, when they are brighter as shown in photo, and one can walk through the screen.
The last thing we saw at CeBit was a really funny dance performance of 6 small robots of Robonova of Germany. These small robots were much more impressive than Robosapien robots available in toy stores. Robonova robots had much bigger number of degrees of freedom in joints, were much quicker and were very flexible (number of possible movements).
Mini-PCs
This site is powered by Fanless Mini-ITX PC which I assembled early Automn 2005. Joe shall assemble his kit in short time. Together with lower prices of motherboards and being silent, we thought about possibility of building (or as it would turn out later reselling) fanless Mini-ITX computers for web-servers or Media Centers. Below are the exhibitors having related products:
- Joe got quite interested in distributed client application using Citix protocol : Chip PC. The small socket-like initerface did cost about 300 euros. We wondered about high-price and tough graphics demand on server
- Yellow Sheep River had an extraordinary Mini-PC with price of 130 euros only (though they would not sell me one at the moment). I will contact Mr. Kim who is designer of Municator (and trying to help non-developed world). The microprocessor used is Godson, chinese own microprocessor. Municator is also using 40 GB hardisk and 256 MB RAM.
- Very interesting solution for hotels of thin clients is from Mr. of Acropolis of Netherland. Beside thin clients together with LCD monitors, Mr. Vries is also manufacturing fanless mini-PCs and Linux boot-USB sticks or PC Cards. I plan to contact Mr. Vries soon regarding possibility of selling thin clients to hotels
- Digital Logic of Germany had done excellently designed Multi-media centre. They are also doing mini PCs for military (hard waterproof casings) which could also be built in yachts. Very thorougly tested (I was watching very tough vibrations tests) could be very good thing for yacht installations (price 3.5-4.500 euros). They still don’t have representative in Croatia. I plan to contact them.
- Gentleman of VIA is supposedely delivering nano-itx motherboards for over a year now. In Car solution was provided by Tragant
- Very broad range of industrial and home mini-PCs (at least 25 models) from ipc2U of Germany. Many of them fanless, though I am not sure of form factors, and why almost all use Intel Processors. But interestingly they are also using nano-itx powered by VIA. Definitely something I would like to have and will check.
- AOpen from Taiwan has beautifully designed mini PCs, mainly based on Intel processors. It is not clear whether they are fanless, but they are advertised as silent. AOpen also sells components and barebone systems.
- Unfortunately, no Linux drivers for this nice indicator panel for Mini- from Korea.
- Very nice designed though not fanless xpc
- Mappit of Germany had very nice casings and solutions for fanless mini-PCs
- Thin clients, maybe fanless from Zettabyte of Taiwan.
- LexSystem embedded solutions
- Unimpressive thin clients of Neoware
- Just as unimpressive mini-PC of Synology.
- Cases
Wireless-telecoms
- t.com Mr. Mlynar gave some information on IPR in (W)CDMA. Supposedely, Mr. Mlynar paid early 90’s 5 million $ to Qualcomm to allow chipset production. Now… it is ‘astronomical’, and ‘half’ of Qualcomm emplyees are lawyers. The royalties per product are about 30% of product price, and license to use (W)CDMA is in the range of hundreds of thousand of dollars (this is different than chipset production). Mr. Mlynar sees chance in niche applications, and has kindly offered further contacts. Jonathan Gilmor is the main engineer.
- LinkSys which is Cisco’s company, has a lot wireless based product. I will have to check their UMTS routers, as in the end, I would like to build one.
- RedDot wireless is offering WiFi and WiMax chipsets
- I am not sure why the data transfer of power lines is not more widely spread. One thing might be lack of standardization, which is now corrected through Universal Power Line Association. Netgear already has some products.
- Some Czech multiplexers (E1/E3/Ethernet/ISDN/Fibre) are done by ath systems. Main interest here is just price range.
- Joe was briefly interested in RFID producats. In retrospect I am sorry we did not check better. Here is Promag of Taiwan.
Speech Engines & Dictionaries
- I was quite pleased with voice readers which are immensely better than Microsoft Sam reader. I will buy one from linguatec and will also check if they would be interested in building Croatian library for theis product. Which, by the way, is not expensive at all, and I have a special offer :). I only have to decide which languages do I want.
CMS (Content Management Systems)
- I was very interested in SemTalk where gentleman new about Tim Berners ideas of semantic web in details. Also he knew about SyCorp. Altough their software is only editor file for ontologies (OWL) and not very impresive (simple Visio script), I was referred to Ontoprise as a company that implemented semantic web protocol stack. I forgot the name of the second comapany. And we did not find a company that is trying to connect wiki and semantic web. To this connection, I predict a great great future.
- In Acolada I got interested as it appeared they implemented a bit of Java. Especially, they used JGantt. I was not impressed by their back-end database, which was supposed to be string based.
Power Units
I am planning to buy power source for electronic lab, so I was intrested in comapnies manufacturing related products (PSUs… though, distantly related).
Other
- Carl Ziess from Germany had a wonderful glasses (mono-projector) stand. I spoke with Mr. Brodsky, who by mistake had forward me to Mobile Optics GmbH (which produce aide-products for visually impaired). My next contact is Bettina Egger whom, I hope, can made interested in glasses/ mobile mix.
- Global solutions seems to be able to deliver any electronics component
- Chi Mei Optoelectronics of Taiwan presented the LCD monitor with the highest resolution in the world. Its 54” diagonal and crisp picture drove my attention for good 10 minutes. The pictures viewed were some fractals and some Van Gogh’s pictures. I think Van Gogh would be extremly pleased.
- Surprisingly from Russia there is a great fashion collection for Mobiles (for girls). In catalog, the model looks fabulously. For man, coming from Turkey: Hakan Ersan. I will check if something similarly exists in Croatia.
- There has been a great number of Linux exhibitors, together with lectures from people like Jon Maddog Hall, Klaus Knopper… of all stands we took info from Linux Professional Institute that provides certificates.
- Creatoor is slovenian company. Joe and I had a good lough with Matjaz (young fella) who was explaining how their software judges team-like qualities and needs of a person. Matjaz, though, gave unsatisfactory answer on the criteria sofware uses (half their own investigation, half un-named reference literatur). But, I was pleased with them… The stand was nice, and they were entusiastic.
- Some good german books can be checked at emedia and franzis(which has an excellent coverage of themes. There was also a book with a thorough chapter how to setup web-server from home). Definitely worth of check.
- Vivicom presented on-line meeting tool. These tools are going to ‘explode’ once BBC puts open source of new video codecs. One can check Vivicom for free until 31st May 2006 with the codes
- Moderator: CHYQ/7HC7N8
- ISJA/8E5550, PHIV/G67VRQ, VVRZ/PV5JM0
- A beatufil German girl was a hostess for karaoke system… I panicked when she asked me to sing.
- I don’t remember why I collected Cowon korean business card. They have very nice MP3 players, but I am not interested in them, now.
- SuperMicro is server solution provider (producing motherboards and chasis separately). They also brag with the best price/ performance abilities.
- About the end of our visit, we talked to the LifeService helicopter pilot, who kindly explained (in German, as his English was poor, sic!) how LifeService are going to locate survivors if they use mobiles. The system is provided by Bjoern Steiger Stiftung
- It would be nice to find something similar for english tax laws, as it is done for german.
- From Sun’s stand I took free CD with netbeans
- From Mindjet stand free MindManager Pro 6 trial version. Their competitor from OpenMind were not very happy when I asked about open source products as FreeMind. OpenMind had small stand and I bet it will not grow.
- From Symantec’s stand free Internet Secuirty 30 days trial version