CeBIT 2004 Recap

Now that I am back home again and took some time to catch some sleep, it’s time to tell about the CeBIT experience. It was my first time at the biggest technology fair in the world, and the first time ICG was present with their own stand. Therefore I did not really know what to expect. I assumed to see many new things, but not in the area where we have our stand. The POS world is a niche market after all. Since we never did this before, we did not spend huge amounts of money on the stand. We simply ordered a basic stand and transported all other materials ourselves. That meant that we spent two days on the autoroutes and autobahn and one day constructing the stand. As a result, we were already tired before the show started, and looked very jealously at all consultants freshly arriving at the Microsoft stand and finding their cup of coffee already prepared. Like I already said, our stand was situated in a specialized POS corner, so the big public did probably not pass our stand. However, the people walking around in that particular section were exactly the people we wanted to talk to. We made many good contacts, and we have very good hopes on a good number of dealer wanting to distribute our software. What surprised us was the change in visitor types by day. On the first two days (Thursday and Friday), the audience was very international. We attended people from all over the world, but did not see many Germans. In the weekend, many students and families visited the show, which did not bring us many contacts. Monday and Tuesday suddenly the Germans and Dutch showed up, while the foreigners seemed to have gone home. On Wednesday the only visitors to the show were some teenagers begging for goodies, so it was very quiet. This made the Wednesday a perfect day to visit other exhibitors, and they also visited us. What I really missed at the CeBIT was the new technology buzz. I did not notice any excitement, did not see a single new gadget. It was even very difficult to get internet access. I expected it to be a lot more on the forefront of technology.