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It's the year 2008 where the people in Hannover Germany are getting slightly nervous. It's the week that over two million people will come together in the massive CeBIT exhibit at the "Deutsche Messe" fair ground. Roughly 30 Halls with sizes of a couple of football fields loaded with the latest technology and software applications. The biggest "Messe" in the world, but sometimes also just "mess". The place where we parked our car, close to a helicopter platform for the VIPs, the place where little shuttle busses will drive you from the parking spots towards the entrance. The place with dozens of stores actually on-site at the fair-ground.

Yes, the CeBIT is probably the biggest exhibit in the world, and yet each year we see things get a little worse. It's big, it's expensive .. and a lot of companies these days figure hmm. Let's just book some meeting rooms and forget about the 500.000 EUR we need to spend on building a nice booth. Rumors where that the Foxxconn stand for example invested over a million dollars into their stand. Can you imagine that ? Apparently they can afford it, yet where's the return of that investment to be found ? And that's a bit of the problem with the CeBIT these days .. we notice a lot of big names moving away from the concept as overall costs for them aren't funny any longer.

It's weird, I mean it's the biggest IT exhibit in the world .. yet NVIDIA was no-where to be found, except in closed meeting rooms. AMD/ATI definitely had some presence, yet a little chilled out as well. Each year one of the biggest (graphics cards wise) stands to simply look at (okay it where the sexy booth babes) was XFX .. no stand this year. Point of View every year had a nice stand .. missing as well. And that list goes on and on ..

So this is a worrying factor to the CeBIT organization I think. It's just getting too expensive for the exhibitors. The CeBIT should probably also return to it's old roots. Channel, corporate, business people and press only and then perhaps one or two days the exhibition should be open for consumers.

None the less, we had a very busy agenda at the CeBIT, presenting themselves or not everybody was there alright. This article as usual will dive into a huge pictorial. Loads and loads of photo's off products we noticed, and most of all products that stood out from the rest. The funky stuff you guys like to see so much. There still was a lot to see and experience.

Mind you that for the first time we are splitting this article up in segments over a couple of days. We ended up with over 600 useable photo's. And while it's mind boggling to show the majority of that ... we'll do so.