Ce-Bit Sydney 2007
Each year for Ce-Bit the Queensland ICT purchases a stand to help small Queensland business show off their technologies. Imagin8 has taken advantage of this for the last 2 expos, managing to secure ourselves a small slice of floor space in the vast expanse of the Sydney Exhibition Centre.
Last year, it was just 2 of the guys representing, however this year with a few more staff to hold the fort, they decided to take me along for the ride.
It was great fun, lots of work though, so many people to talk to. I was amazed about the number of people there who were interested in our CMS and didn’t have one already running their website. It seems that although the CMS stuff is kinda old-skool, there is still a fair bit of demand for an easy-to-use system.
Anyway, I did manage to get a bit of a look around from time to time and check out what other people had on display. There were a couple of cool things worth mentioning. The Samsung 103″ plasma high-def TV was pretty impressive. There was also a tough-book that was in a Perspex box with a button that let you spray water on it to demonstrate how durable it is, only the laptop inside was no longer working… When I returned the next day, they had the laptop working again and had disabled the spray button, so I guess it is not that water proof after all.
There was also a nice little linux box being developed on the Sunshine coast, just a few inches in size but capable of running an x-server and acting as a thin-client. The next release will be powerful enough to run animation (700 MHz) and will boast up to 2 gig of RAM with a flash Hard Disk. It will retail for about $400 AU, so one should be able to load up a flash movie on a SD / CF card, screw it to the back of a touch screen and have themselves a nice, cheap kiosk setup. That’s my plan anyway.
The most interesting stand was the company selling condoms for your phone. It got a heap of attention, mostly because it had a couple of chicks in a hot-tub. The idea is you roll it over your phone (no need to squeeze the tip) twist the base and then pull it over the top to keep it in place. I’m not sure how well it would work, I don’t think you can use the phone while it is in its wrapping, it is single use only and it seems pretty easy to rip or tear the latex.
One thing that was a bit of a joke was the internet connection. I don’t know if it was the massive amount of traffic, or the number of wireless networks competing for bandwidth, but we hardly had a sniff of internet access in the venue for the entire time there. Thankfully we had a local version of the system setup so we could still give demonstrations, however others were not so lucky.
By the end of the 3 days, my feet and lower back were rather sore thanks to the massive amount of chair sitting I do on a daily basis, but it was good fun and a great experience.
 North |
 South |
 imagin8 stand |
 Girls in Hot Tub |
 Phone Condom |