Holiday
for Gearheads
No, it is not Oktoberfest, even though this beerhall is as big and as festive as the suds and sausage emporiums of Munich. I am at CEBIT, the yearly monster expo of technology in Hanover, Germany. It is so big, it is like a city, with grocery store, pharmacy and quite a lively beerhall catering to people from all over. The rowdyness awards are shared by the Taiwanese, the Russians and the Lithuanians who stood on a table and sang Happy Birthday to themselves. I guess at least 1000 people packed into this frothy barn. For pie-eyed thrills, however, expos of any kind are not what they used to be. Imagine parking your horse and buggy under a buzzing arc light powered by a mystery force called electricity at the 1897 Chicago World's Fair. You could sniff the potential and the danger in the ozone. In comparison, the new pink mini-IPOD doesn't quite cut it. Even the pavilions of the World Expo 2000, held on these grounds, have gone from fantastical to phantasmal, abandoned to rust and sprouting weeds, testaments to a future that overtook itself like the rubbery cartoon roadster in Roger Rabbit. If there was anything world-altering to be seen at CEBIT I didn't see it, but there were so many incremental advances among the more than 6,200 displays, my brain felt as stretched as an overstuffed bratwurst. If there was anything breakthrough, it was the composition of this crowd, almost as many Asians as Germans and more than twice the Taiwanese and Chinese companies of those from North America. Yes, there is a message here. Some of the pavilions looked like Asian street markets, filled with digital doodads rather than stacks of shoes and brassieres.
A couple of things struck me: Silicon chips are quickly replacing mechanical parts: Pocket camcorders from companies like Sanyo are moving away from tape to the same sort of memory chips used in digital still cameras. One we saw offered TV-quality video, multi-megapixel stills and recording and playback of audio including your MP3s, all in a case about the size of a pack of cigarettes. Remember cigarettes? Traveling in Germany you would quickly be reacquainted with the deadly fag. Panasonic displayed a mockup of a high definition camera the size of a sprinkler head. HDTV is huge. JVC and Sony already make pro-sumer (short for not-quite professional) HDTV camcorders. In three or four years, HDTV home movie making will be affordable for all. Pores and zits will be big as pie tins on monster screens. All of these features, in fact, may someday be incorporated in cellphones, and they are changing the world. An editorial in the Economist a couple of weeks ago says that the digital divide will be crossed by the use of cellphones rather than computers as they will empower illiterate non-typists. (I know many illiterate typists, and they are already far too empowered). With new advanced 3G wireless systems, slow to come to the US but hot in Europe and Asia, video is becoming crystal clear. I watched a bit of a baseball game on a cellphone (in Japanese) and it looked quite good, stats, steroid-bulked hulks and all. Computer chips will be in almost everything, it is inevitable. Wal-Mart is using the dreaded the RFID wafers, the bane of privacy advocates, to track inventory, they will be in our passports and once they are adopted in the retail trade, in our food and our knickers. Unless there is a way to stop them, our shoes will talk to our belts, summoning up the notion of a digital catfight between Ann Taylor and Anne Klein II. RSA Security demonstrated a prototype of something it called an RFID Blocker Tag. It can be placed over an RFID tag on a product to block it from being read. That is, if you can find the damn thing. You may need a Monty Python suit of armor to hide yourself from the prying eyes of cops, insurance companies, terrorists, porno fighters and providers and other zealots and salesmen on a mission. Spookiness aside, some of the fun about CEBIT was the sheer variety of stuff, much of it non-electronic. The International Design Forum Product design awards, called by its founders, The Design Oscars, had a fascinating pavilion displaying everything from fashion-statement mp3 players to showerheads. Although the Sonys and Brauns were represented, the top money prizes went to design students for a breast pump, a grave stone, a suite of household articles and a one-handed electric sander. If you are passing through Northern Germany next March, and you are of the technical persuasion, CEBIT offers more tech with more variety than anyone could wish for, a godhead for gearheads. It is open to the public on the weekend it could be an interesting train stop between Amsterdam and Berlin or Hamburg. But you really should get back on the train and not try to hang around unless you want to sleep on a park bench. Organizers say more than 400 thousand people showed up so there is really no place to stay, in fact some people come all the way from Berlin for the day. But, they think it is worth it. I would agree. Prost.
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