As promised earlier in the year, I’m here at CeBIT Australia 2008, “reporting” with my colleague Tom Wilkins.

We don’t want to spend too much time couch-potatoting on the bean bags here, but we’ve seen a lot of interesting tech so far. Lots and lots of router tech; but some great new water-cooling technology through vendors like Altech computers – beast gaming machines, above A$5000.

Panasonic’s here again, I’m about to go see if their double-bed sized plasma is back this year!

Photos will be up on Flickr soon!

I was at the SEM / SEO conference at CeBIT today. There were a range of both business and technical sessions and an audience who seemed really eager to find some gold SEO nuggets. Question time was fairly active and one keen bean had to have the microphone practically wrestled away from him after asking one question too many. Well done to Fred Schebesta who handled the barrage gracefully. One of the speakers, Anne Costello, talked about business blogging and commented on the concept of trust in marketing…

“Today people build trust in a fundamentally different way. They increasingly distrust institutions and trust people like themselves”

This resonated with me. People are increasingly using the web to educate themselves and others regarding purchasing decisions. Wether its in the form of email, blogs, forums or wikis this sophisticated consumer savvy must be changing the marketing/purchasing landscape. The web consumer knows what works and what doesn’t because they’ve found a reputable and independent voice that has written a review; or it may be the consumer that posts a review after making a bad purchasing decision (taken a hit for the boys as a good friend calls it). This “consumer networking” we are seeing is probably only in its infancy but as this sophistication penetrates the masses surely traditional marketing is set for even more shakeup.

Was marketing 1.0 all about positioning the company and product in a way that made it look and feel great, even if it wasn’t? Marketing today should be about having an honest relationship with the customer and delivering on the promise.  Consumer networking will increasingly push businesses (in some cases kicking and screaming) into dealing with the consumer in a transparent, ethical and “organic” way and that’s a major plus if you’re a consumer.

Is this what the Google guys meant when they said  “don’t be evil”. Technology compelling businesses to educate themselves, improve their offerings and be honest with consumer because the world is reading and posting.

What happens when you put lots of tech heads in comfortable room surrounded by the latest technology, and good supply of coffee and food? I’m sitting in the BloggerZone this morning the brainchild of Gilad Grinbaum and Microsoft MVP Hugo Ortega, a dedicated area in hall 4 of CeBIT Australia for bloggers to write about anything and everything. It a great idea and should generate plenty of reviews, opinions and comment in what has become Australia’s premier technology event.

Google has always impressed people with the quality of the search results it produces. It gives you what you want quickly with little fuss or confusion; a recipe for success in any business model. One assumes that this attitude permeates everything that Google does and as far as I can tell from the non-core offerings such as mail, analytics, photo management and the earth, it seems this assumption would be correct. I can’t help but wonder if there are teams at Google that just slack off and take long lunches and smoko breaks? I doubt it. The pace and quality of new releases tend to indicate a workplace of creative, intelligent and most importantly, hard working individuals.

I think this is illustrated well by a service being offered at this year’s CeBIT expo at Darling Harbour in Sydney. Google is offering a free one-on-one Adwords sign up session with a $50 credit or an Adwords optimisation for existing Adword customers. Now this might sound like a standard expo ploy to generate traffic and bring leads but in this case, and to use Google’s own jargon, it’s an instant conversion. But what really impresses me here is the personal attention that Google is giving businesses for what is a massively high volume activity. To even consider, let alone tackle the multitudes of businesses that either use this service or would like to use this service in this way is impressive and they should be commended. I booked the service because our Adwords campaign can do with some tweaking but what really interests me is to observe how Google manage the potential traffic given that CeBIT are expecting more than 300,000 people through the doors over three days. Hopefully it will be much the same as they process search queries – fast!

UMPC Origami al CeBIT Australia 2006 con Hugo Ortega……..

Fonte:ubertablet

Panasonic al CeBIT Australia 2006 Live….

Fonte: CeBIT Blog

Hugo Ortega presenta il Blog Ufficiale del CeBIT Australia 2006.

CeBIT è la più importante manifestazione IT mondiale. Si svolge ad Hannover in Germania, ogni anno in primavera ed is a barometer of information technology.

Dal 1999 lo sponsor di CeBIT :Deutsche Messe AG ha organizzato dei trade shows con il nome di CeBit fuori dalla Germania: uno si svolge in questi giorni a Sidney CeBIT Australia

Sul Blog ufficiale tutte le novità della manifestazione….

The United Colors of CeBIT Australia

Hugo Ortega has waxed lyrical about Origami (Note to Microsoft: I am not calling it the four letter acronym) at CeBit Australia.

Where can I buy one in Australia, and how much?

Could I use this as a smartphone?
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