Tech Stream

CeBIT at the end of Day 2

14 May 2009

Day two has wrapped at CeBIT Australia 2009 and you get the feeling that there’ll be less talking and more wheeling and dealing going on tomorrow.  I had hoped to spend more time in the conference section today, listening to sessions on mobile advertising, website innovation, Green IT, government ICT implementation and international initiatives in e-government. It’s just impossible to be everywhere at once with an event this big, and luckily I’ll get to go over some of the more interesting ideas from these sessions with someone who was there, Christopher Hire. He’s been twittering prolifically from the conference, you may have seen some of his posts being retweeted in our feed, but you can follow him yourself @christopherhire. We’ll be chatting tomorrow, but you can hear this thoughts in the Tech Stream program on Friday.

I spent a lot of today meeting people and listening to their stories. They’re here from all over the country and the world to soak up the ideas on offer and contribute some of their own. People like Austrade’s representative in Papua New Guinea Simon Tundua and Gary Haora from TE-PNG who is here checking out IT technology. I also met Dr David Skellern from NICTA, Australia’s national information and communication technology research centre. His organisation had just been given more ongoing funding from the government to the tune of AU$185 million. He also told me about some of the new high speed wi-fi technologies they’re developing and shared his thoughts on the future of mobile services and R&D funding in Australia. I’ll post the audio from our chat very soon.

And I met some fellow technology journalists and local web startup teams in the Webciety area and finished on the couch with self proclaimed “change agent” Tim Parsons, co-founder of Mobile Mondays Sydney (among other things). We had a fascinating chat (which i didn’t record!) about the ideas on show at CeBIT 2009 and the changing way we think about mobile, culture, economies, the internet and doing business in the Asia Pacific region. He’s someone I hope you’ll get to meet in the Tech Stream soon.