Impressions of CeBit, Zeta, and Germany.

Well... where to begin?

I guess I'll start by covering the five W's.

Who. YellowTab, developers of Zeta, lead by Bernd Korz, with investment funding by Yollo.

What. CeBit 2003. It is THE event for computers, the world's largest, and is absolutely huge. So huge, I was forced to cover just a small overview using the digicam, which also features a bus ride. ;)

Where. Hannover, Germany, Europe, Planet Earth, Sol system. ;)

When. CeBit itself runs from March 12 - 19, 2003, but I was there from the 13th to the 15th, (saturday nite I simply HAD to come home.) and really enjoyed my stay.

Why. Because dammit, computers can be fun too. But seriously, there was -so- much excitement at CeBit, it was verging on insanity. Every hall on campus was jam packed with visitors, developers, investors, and even yes.. members of the German Government were in attendance. (They passed within 15 feet of the YellowTab booth, with full entourage. ;-)

So, "more details please.", I can hear you asking... It was a hectic couple of days while I was there, so if I start to ramble on, forgive me. ;)

Since I currently reside in the Netherlands, I decided to take the train to Hannover, costing me 118 euro round trip, since I purchased the ticket just the day before. A small error on my part, but c'est la vie. I arrived at Hannover HBF (Hauptbahnhof, think central station.) just after 12 noon, on thursday, the second day of the event, and took stock of where I was, and how far away CeBit was. Fortunately, getting to the event was not much trouble, as there are several metro and suburban trains that run to the CeBit grounds (pdf document.), at regualar intervals.

So, imagine this... All around me are travellers heading for CeBit, thousands of people per hour making their way, just as I am, almost as hectic as an airport. The train station just outside the CeBit grounds is over 700 feet away, but fortunately there is a pedway/moving sidewalk system that spans over the road, from the train station to the front of the grounds, which makes the walk FAR easier on the poor feet. Heading in the other direction, however... That's another story. ;) (I had to walk this, I'll explain later. ;)

So, I'm now situated in front of the enourmous Hall 13, I pay for my ticket, and make my way through the crowds, vainly hoping that I won't have to travel too far to find YellowTab. I had forgot to bring the info about where YelowTab was, but I figured later, that I could just look them up online... Nearly 90% of the booths in every hall have some form of internet connection, and they will allow you to puruse the CeBit website if you ask them kindly. Did I mention that nearly everyone speaks a good smattering of English? This is most helpful to me, as I speak -no- german. ;)

YellowTab's booth was in Hall 11, D05, so I headed for it, just a few halls away. Upon finding them, I was pleased to see a fair number of people already attending the demonstrations, as was to be the case for the next few days, with myself even giving some demonstrations to various groups, allowing Bernd to take short breaks. (His voice went on the third day, poor guy... ) (edit: Heh.. short story shorter... I walked from Hall 13 to Hall 1, then walked back to Hall 11, and finally found them. Then discovered bus system. Went, 'DOH!', and tried to make peace with my poor feet. While carrying all of my gear. Luggage. Tired. The things I do for the community. ;)

The YellowTab booth was in the "Future Markets" pavilion, situated near one of the major entrances to the hall, and visible to anyone walking past, so this was good in my mind. Shortly after I arrived, a tech news tv station asked Bernd to give a demo at the open podium pavilion just 100 feet away, and they would film it, live. No problem.. moving the BeOS machine over, hooking it up to the beamer, and all was good. Bernd gives a great presentation, with topics ranging from networking, using GoBe Productive, system wide features like the locale kit, and more. The presentation was received well by numerous people in attendance, those walking past, and people whom later came to ask and see more of the system, at the booth.

Zeta has come a long way since I saw it at BeGeistert 009, and even the beta CD I received a few months ago. Most notable is the smoothness of the entire system, the Tracker, the locale kit, and finally, the bundling of several new applications and preferences, such as a DomainManager, and NetworkBrowser. More on these small but important things in a later review, I think, to do them justice. A notable aspect of the system is the inclusion of several new window themes, such as miniXP, which is -really- close to resembling windows XP, for those that like that sort of look. I myself liked using Zeta in either traditional R5, or the currently tweaked Zeta themes.

I had the pleasure of meeting two of the members of the investing company, Yollo, who were travelling along with Bernd, and a new YellowTab developer, whom I can not name at this time. Yollo has invested quite a substantial amount of money into YellowTab, and this has made possible the realization of several key developments with Zeta, most notably the new Installer, various bug fixes for system components, and of course, licensing agreements with companies whom, unfortunately for you, I can not name at this time. I'm sorry, but I must keep the details secret, until YellowTab makes mention first. However, I can say that there are some exciting developments taking place this year, and this has re-affirmed my faith, and belief that BeOS has a viable future with Zeta.

It must have been the slight chill in the air, causing people to really appreciate the warmth and comraderie present inside each hall, but it really seemed to me that the entire atmosphere of the event was one of jubilee, and forward-looking expectations held with baited breath. Every booth that I saw, no matter how small or complicated, had people swelling it's presene all day, every day. The YellowTab booth was no exception, with the usual contingent of geeky and casual-dressed onlooker, but what struck me as most fascinating was the fact that very business-like, well dressed, and corporate officials were standing in awe, as they observed the demonstrations. Not only did they seem to enjoy the presentation, but they were one of the first to respond when asked for more questions, namely in a technical manner, such as how well does Zeta handle multiple languages, does it perform well in a LAN, and how good is its' device management. The kind of questions that normally are fielded by the tradionally clad hacker extraordinaire were being asked by corporate representatives from just about every industry that uses a computer.

This proved positive to me that great things are just now starting to turn in the cogs of development that is at YellowTab, and afar in the BeOS Community. It is not longer an issue of name recognition, but now it is becoming a question of "How best can I use this new OS in my company?". This was further reinforced by the very positive feedback given by onlookers who were heard to mutter the magical words, "That's a feature I'd love to see in windows.". A feeling most gratifying to my ears, to be sure. And it happened quite a number of times, during my stay.

I was fortunate enough to use the digital camera that Bernd brought to the show, and decided that filming his presentation would be a Good Thing™. ;) With that in mind, I'm going to say that at this time of writing, we are still arranging the divx encoding of all of the footage that I shot at the event, including YellowTab demonstrations, and I will attempt to share this via BeShare, as it will total somewhere in the neighbourhood of 600 megs. My apologies to any dialup users, but perhaps something can be arranged in the form of stills, or a photo gallery. Please contact The BeOSJournal if you desire such alternatives.

On the friday of the event, the BeOS machine started to suffer from serious debilitating crashes, causing our demonstrations to take a small hiatus. We hastily went through the system, and started to pull cards out in attempt to determine the cause of the malfunctions. Powered down, and tried booting. Nothing. Hrm... our brains go tick, tick, tick... pulling cards out, and rebooting worked. Ah.. After switching the soundcard to another slot, we finally determine that a bad PCI slot was the culprit, and think we're homefree, when it happens again. Sigh. Prognosis? Bad soundcard. What does this mean for us? No audio to demonstrate one of our key strengths. Hrm. Time to take a trip to find a new soundcard, as all we have at the moment are 3 other laptops, and those are not even hooked up to the CeBit LAN, since the booth was only assigned one cat5 cable.

Bernd can not leave, nor should the Yollo executives, so this leaves the developer, and myself, to go find a store, in Hannover, and purchase a replacement soundcard. That's right.. the only two english speaking members of the entourage have to brave finding their way in unmarked terroritory. ;) So we do... Remember how I said earlier how far away the train station was? Well the metro stop we took was even farther away, and we walked the entire way to it. We made our way to the store, purchased the soundcard, and also a switch and some cat5 cable so we could create a small lan at the booth. This proved most helpful later on... but I digress.

We finally make our way back to the booth, an hour and a half later, just in time to see a rather sizable crowd that was waiting to see the machine working. Inserted sound card, fixed up networking cables, and booted. Big surprise? Everything worked perfectly, with absolutely no changes made to the system or BIOS. It was brilliant to see it work, and demonstrated to everyone present just how good the system is at resolving new hardware changes. A really good feeling. Bernd continued his demonstrations, and all was good.

I want to thank the various members of the BeOS Community who made it to CeBit, namely, MicroNuke (from BeShare), and the italian individual, whom I've of course fogotten his name, who helped enourmously by spending several hours walking the crowds and handing out flyers. Way to go man! Also, I want my Be shirt back. ;) Perhaps you can come to BeGeistert and bring it?

I'll close by saying that overall, I had a splendid time at CeBit 2003, and really enjoyed the time spent with Bernd, YellowTab, Yollo, and other members of the BeOS Community who made the trip. It's an event I will be looking forward to next year, with hopefully by then, even more exciting things to write about in this space. Here's a toast to that time, and to everyone involved.

Till next time, this is Chris Simmons, signing off.