Archive for CeBit
March 20, 2007 at 4:16 pm ·
Filed under Games, Video, Technology, CeBit
At CeBit, I met up with a few Belgian friends who were on a mission to find cool stuff for their gaming site. As we were walking around, we stumbled upon the Matrox booth. Over there they were displaying the TripleHead2Go technology, a small box to which you can connect your output from the graphics card and it’ll redistribute it through three slots to three monitors. It divides in fact the output into three sections, and turns it to one section per output each. The signal is digital, obviously. The maximum resolution of each display is 1280px by 1024px, which is nearly 4 megapixels. The coolest part is that you can cut off a little bit from one view, and add it to another, which -as you can see in the last frames of the interview- makes the entire experience really fluid. In the beginning of the clip, a few existing marketing oriented uses are being demonstrated. Most of the time, the three displays are being linked to each other to serve as an interactive billboard. In theory, you can connect a lot of screens to each other, more than there’s shown in the clip. Interesting take.
March 19, 2007 at 1:58 pm ·
Filed under Games, Video, CeBit
On CeBit, I interviewed Sean Charles - the marketing and PR manager from Commodore Gaming. Besides from being the coolest PC every made, the Commodore 64 has colored many souls throughout the 80s. Back then, it was the cream and the top, it was every boy’s dream. Right now they’re back with a new ‘ultimate’ gaming PC. To quote Sean Charles: “We went from 64k to 64bit”. This super tweaked PC sports Windows Vista Ultimate 64bit and runs 2 graphics cards at the same time to provide you with an unbelievable gaming experience. Apart from being an incredibly cool machine, Commodore is bringing the platform online and invites the members of the community to send in drawings and artwork for ‘their’ personally flavored case. The community can vote on the designs and the most popular ones will be taken into production for distribution. Awesome!
Features of the Commodore XX:
This is the starting point of what’s inside the Commodore xx. Most parts are customizable.
- Intel® Core™2 Extreme Quad-Core processor QX6700: 2.66GHz 8M Cache
- ASUS® P5N32-E nForce 680i SLI motherboard
- 2x 150GB 10000 RPM SATA Raid 1 and 1x 500GB 7200 RPM SATA Raid 0 hard drives
- 4GB Corsair® Dominator 2xTwin2×2048-8500C5D memory: 1066MHz
- Philips® DVDRW optical drive
- 1000W ICE Cube power supply
- Creative® SoundBlaster X-Fi Xtreme Gamer
- 2x NVIDIA® 8800 GTX 768MB graphics cards
The world’s first DirectX® 10 GPUs deliver a graphical experience that takes you as far into your gaming reality as you dare to be taken.
Site: CommodoreGaming.com
March 16, 2007 at 12:41 pm ·
Filed under MicroLife, Video, Technology, CeBit
Okay, the first movie still is a rough edit, and I still need to add the sound file, but if you turn down your audio (the cuts are really rough) you can have an idea of what’s going on here. The other video is short interview with a newly hired evangelist I met at the Microsoft booth. She’s from Idaho in the US, but moved to Munich, Germany, 7 years ago. She comes from Adobe and she wants to work on user interface related things or web programming. Good to know. :) Then there’s a little clip about NEC’s latest ‘Realistic 3D display’, a pretty cool prototype setup where they merge 2 large LCD screens and make graphics and images coherently shift from the horizontal one to the vertical one and back. Primarily defined audience is supermarkets and shopping malls. Looks cool. Doesn’t have any practical cases yet, unfortunately.
Video 1: Rough Cuts
Video 2: Lori Grosland
Video 3: NEC Realistic 3D Display
March 15, 2007 at 5:59 pm ·
Filed under Buzz, MicroLife, Technology, CeBit
Last night I took a direct flight to Hannover in Germany to go to the CeBit event. The world’s largest consumer electronics fair. I was a little late with booking the hotel (a year late, because I’ve heard people are booking a year ahead) so I ended up on 90 km from Hannover. The cab drive to the hotel took 1.5 hours from the airport, and it was 120 km. (75 miles)… I had a really retarded cab driver. In Germany, large parts of the freeway have no speed limit, but he kept driving 70 miles an hour. I ended up in some sort of spa, in the middle of nowhere. When I look outside my window I see trees. Trees as far as the eye can see. My hotel room has a 14 inch tv with 9 channels, all German. There is no bar in the hotel, and no internet access. Well, there is internet access before 8 PM, after that there’s no more access to the booth. Argh. My hands are shaking… Must Need Access…
Anyway, I had to unplug the tv and the night-light because I needed the plugs to charge my cam and the two laptops. I set the alarm on 7 am, took a shower when I woke up and went downstairs to order a taxi. 20 minutes later I was well on my way to the event. This cab driver was a little more relaxed at higher speeds, and we flew at 240 km/h (150mph) in the general direction of Hannover’s ‘Messe’. The weirdest thing ever I encountered was that, while driving at 240 km/h, the cabbie had to pull over to the right lane to let a series of cars pass us by. It looked like we were standing still. You gotta love the Germans.
I got dropped off at the main entrance, and met up with Hans Mestrum and Erik Van Roekel, two Dutch bloggers who’re experiencing some ‘wow’ at the CeBit fair. I gave Erik a private Vista demo, because he was a little disappointed when he installed it and he didn’t really ‘felt’ the difference with XP. I showed of some tools and we discussed the ‘best’ new features, and he said that what he missed the most was a decent tutorial when you buy it, because a lot of the things I showed him weren’t really known. (disclaimer: Microsoft sent me to CeBit to make a documentary). Then I gave Hans the Sony Vaio I brought with me, and with that, my influencers program kicked off. I showed off the goodies that came with the laptop and Hans actually started blogging with it almost right after we had lunch. He was really excited with the Vaio and impressed by what Vista Ultimate and Office 2007 Ultimate have to offer. He connected his camera to it and started uploading pictures to Flickr from the CeBit event through his Flickr client which he installed as soon as he got the laptop. With a fast internet connection and some funky reliable tools, life of a blogger is a small paradise.
Then I went on a booth tour with Erik to score some swag and see what’s new on the technology front. This CeBit event is HUGE. It’s a small city filled with vendors. Thousands of people walking around and every company with digital or electronic products is represented here. It’s geek paradise. I’ll edit my videos tonight at the hotel and hope to have them online as soon as possible. I’m already very happy that the Tulip booth has a lounge with network cables available, so I could post this :)
I saw a lot of cool things, but didn’t see anything revolutionary yet. I’ll keep my eyes and ears open to see what else goes down. There’s still so much to explore. We’ve been running around for hours on end, and still have done only 15% of the total event floor.
