KDE was present at CeBIT 2008 in Hannover, the world's largest IT fair. The booth was located inside the LinuxPark in Hall 5, where Linux New Media had given KDE, Amarok and other open source projects the opportunity to present their work. Read on for more details.
On Thursday (when the exhibition started) we occupied booth F52 and F16. Fortunately, this year our network situation was quite good as all of our Notebooks had WiFi. We attracted a lot of visitors and it turned out that the booth was a bit small for us.
Thanks to our great community the KDE booth was always very well staffed, both by experienced KDE contributors and our friends in the Fedora community, but also by users who volunteered and so made their first-time contributions to the KDE world. It's nice to see such enthusiastic new contributors coming to KDE!
We had a lot of interesting chats with visitors. There were very different groups of visitors. Some of them were experienced KDE users and maybe we were able to motivate some of them to contribute to KDE themselves. Then there were also visitors completely new to Linux, we could show them that nowadays Linux with KDE is a viable (if not even more powerful) alternative to the commercial offerings. The most asked questions were "How stable is KDE4?" and "When will Amarok 2 be released?". For these visitors, we could show some bleeding edge KDE 4 applications and were able to convince many visitors that KDE 4.1 and Amarok 2 will truly be impressive.
During the event, members of the KDE projects gave a couple of talks in the Linux Forum. On Saturday, Franz Keferböck talked about graphic effects in KDE4 and Sven Krohlas gave an introduction to Amarok, while on Sunday, Carsten Niehaus and Frederik Gladhorn performed a live demonstration of KDE4 and its applications.
Until next year...
Comments
That looks all very profesional.
lol, yeah the baby tee hanging on the wall looks very professional.
I think that is an Amarok logo on it. So, yes, it is very professional - merchandise and all.
Oh, well as long as its merchandise then that makes the world of difference. You understand I'm just joking..right?
Which effects? That would be interesting to know.
Hope you guys dont mind me when I ask something about CeBIT.
In the german news, it was rather said that CeBIT loses importance.
I.e. got smaller, less bouts and exhibitions and also less visitors.
The report here also "feels" a little bit isolated... like disconnected from
the CeBIT somehow, dunno. Maybe CeBIT is more hardware-oriented?
Or lets ask in another way, what *should* KDE focus on to *feel* more central to something like CeBIT? (I know, its not the goal, but i think its not a bad thought if you continue it, because "showing off" means to incite interest of people in something too)
I havent been to CeBIT this year, but drove the 300km over the last years to go there. IMHO CeBIT somehow doesnt feel like one of the largest IT-fairs in the world. It is really large, but perhaps because of that, I found that even large companies like Adobe or Microsoft occupy a comparatively small space. It's its disadvantage and advantage at the same time. Disadvantage, because sometimes you dont get that big-presentation feeling as a consumer like say on the IFA. Advantage, because you can often have interesting one-on-one talks with developers etc. The KDE booth intergrates well with that IMO. If you want a large consumer-oriented fair, perhaps CeBIT isnt the place to go, but there aren't that many large IT fairs within driving distance so you dont have a choice unfortunately.
Then there is the issue that so many things at CeBIT are in German only. It gives the fair a really provincial and small town feel.
Germany is by far the most important market in Europe (80 million inhabitants) and the fair is in Germany. In addition, all Austrians speak German, as well as a large part of the Swiss (and a minute portion of the Belgians). It is actually the most common native language in Europe. Why would some things not be done German in Germany? Unless you want to address customers who do not speak foreign languages, it makes sense to use the language that one knows best.
I assume you speak fluent German, so this article may interest you: Porsche has a strict German-only policy internally:
http://www.sueddeutsche.de/wirtschaft/artikel/331/162877/
Or is your comment only reflecting your small town inability to speak any language besides that strange melange between Romanic and Germanic without a proper grammar, that seems to have become the new lingua franca (how ironic).
Pretty funny, coming from a German, very impartial opinion, congratulations!
But yes, I really thought it was quite rude to have it all in German, even though, yes, I speak German and am married to a Swiss-German person.
So? Who cares what Porsche does? Besides, Germany dwarves in comparison to the rest of Europe.
And yes, I expect my fellow Germans to speak English at an international IT exhibition.
Is that a fursuit head on the shelf in the second picture? o.o
Yeah, that's Mike's head I believe :)
Right. It is ;-)
It is indeed :) Mike, the Amarok Mascot, as envisioned by the rokymotion team and created by Coyote Moon Studio ( http://www.freewebs.com/coyote-moon/ ). He was originally presented to the world at FOSDEM, and he was even in the KDE group photo there :)
Some friends of mine were there - as we all are computer geeks and they live their so I got their impressions.
Would the information from the event would be made available online?
http://www.mylinuxgang.com/
Would be sweet if some of these talks could be posted as streaming media.
http://streaming.linux-magazin.de/archiv_linuxpark08.htm