Google’s executive chairman Eric Schmidt cast a science-fiction vision of the future as the world’s top tech fair opened, with the German IT sector predicting record sales in 2012.
“Think back to Star Trek or my favourite, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. Much of what those writers imagined is now possible,” said Schmidt. “Translating, voice recognition, electronic books. The people who predict that intelligent robots, virtual reality or self-driving cars will soon be commonplace are right. Governments will be able to spot the economic makings of a crisis before they happen and doctors will be able to accurately predict the outbreak of disease before anyone feels it.”
The tech boss was speaking at the opening ceremony of the CeBIT, the world’s biggest high-tech fair in the northern German city of Hanover, with 4,200 exhibitors from 70 countries with their latest gadgets.
This year, the fair was to focus on the possibilities offered by cloud computing, the concept of storing data remotely rather than on individual machines, as well as “managing trust”, or the hot topic of internet security.
Declaring the fair officially open, Chancellor Angela Merkel returned to the theme of “managing trust”, saying it was especially important among world leaders as they battled to solve the global economic crisis.
Dilma Rousseff, the president of Brazil, this year’s “partner country” at the CeBIT, expressed the hope that “technology, when put to human interests, can certainly produce a true revolution for the well-being of the people at large”.
During the fair, tech giants Samsung, Sharp, Microsoft, Google and Facebook showed off the latest ultra-thin tablet computers and the smartphones of the future for work as well as futuristic, weird and wacky gadgets for fun.
Among the highlights is a robot that can make your lunch and a car that can change its length to slot into tricky parking spaces. Others include a virtual “eraser” for wiping out traces of potentially embarrassing mistakes on the internet, a system for protecting smartphones from eavesdropping, and a mobile device for asthmatics to assess air quality.
In the run-up to the fair, the German IT sector published new forecasts saying it expected to shrug off the eurozone debt crisis and register record sales this year.
IT industry lobby BITKOM said it expected sales growth of 1.6 per cent this year to €151 billion, pinning its hopes on the futuristic “cloud computing” technology.