Cebit 2009 – Sydney

As the Title suggests, I went to Cebit today… Oh yes, walking around for 5 hours hunting down useful and fun gadgets, software, hardware anything!!

Unfortunately, there was not much to be seen in the way of innovation throughout the 3 halls. I guess I was expecting a lot more, it feels as though Cebit quality has declined somewhat over the years and it does not compare in anyway to CES or even Cebit in Germany.

All in all, it was not the most tragic of days, there were a few things that caught my eye at this years show and I did meet up with Leigh a reporter with The Gadget Grill at which point we asked ourselves, How Much Crap Can You Get For Free at CeBIT? You can watch the video on Youtube the link is at the bottom of the post.

More for fun

• Digislide – These guys develop portable projectors, when I say portable I mean they fit in the palm of your hand. This is a very cool technology and is great for the travelling family where you need to keep the kids amused with their gaming console or the businessman when you need to do a spot presentation.Now Digislide Gaming a devision of Digislide were displaying their game console add-on devices.
  • The WeSii is one example – You connect the WeSii to your Nintendo Wii and then you plug your Digishow projector into the WeSii  and you have a portable gaming console!
    This is a great little gadget which is still I would say in its infancy as they were only demoing it at the show but still all in all very cool.

• CyberClean – This stuff is a cleaning Goop. Now it is a great idea how they have turned a humble kids toy into a cleaning revolution.I have to admit though it is great fun to play with only because I still bought this in toy form just a couple of years ago.
  Now I have an excuse to buy this stuff to play…. I mean clean with.

  They were certainly doing well because their stand had been cleaned out of samples in the first couple of hours.

  I have attached their marketing video to the bottom, I love those late night TV adds.

More for Business

• ThinLinx – These guys make Thin Clients; in the simplest way a thin client is a computer that is used to connect to a network server for most general functionality.
  They have low hardware specifications and low power consumption which brings down the cost of the units, they are all round a better solution for a business that has stations only using a handful of low requirement applications such as office, Point of Sale, or web apps.
  Apart from the obvious environmental and cost benefits, they are generally more secure and reliable than dedicated desktops.What was interesting this year is that ThinLinx are working at integrating hardware from Calista Technologies which is a company that were purchased by Microsoft.Calista are developing a technology that allows for more graphics heavy virtualisation over terminal sessions.
  This means that we will be able to utilise full virtualisation of an entire desktop including all the transparent window effects and more graphics heavy applications.

  Having used thin clients before, it becomes a bit of a slow process when just browsing a couple of graphical web pages. With the Calista technology integrated into these ThinLinx boxes, this will be an interesting development and hopefully there will be a great performance boost especially when it comes to Windows Terminal Server.

• Antivirus Software – I have had my eye on a few of the AV products out there, particularly for my clients in a business setting. Trend Micro and Avira. I am setting up a test server to trial the management console side and the client side of these products.A great benifit to the management console is that as a Systems Administrator we can monitor the user computers without having to check each machine individually. I have so far only used an older version of the Trend Micro managemnet console with the client side software and will be testing Avira’s solutions soon. There will be some more information about Antivirus products to come so keep checking up on the site.

Videos

How Much Crap Can You Get For Free at CeBIT?

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dW9mnTm1P9o&feature=channel_page[/youtube]

CyberClean

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGx0WxnWL1U&feature=channel_page[/youtube]