Impressions from CEBIT 2018 - SPOTSHOT

The CEBIT developed to one of Europes most important tech fairs and as they changed their image lately claiming to be a „festival for digitalization and innovation“ I was very glad that I got an invitation. This blogspot is about my personal impressions on tech trends, the scenes players and new policies.

Impressions Conference Day:

The conference day Auma Obama: From Aid to Trade. Empower children. Digital needs to be connected to the real world in order to not isolate people. “Poverty is no excuse”. Konstantin Gerlach (strategy consultant) on digital leadership. „how to lead in a digital world“....team responsibility, virtual co-working, share knowledge, transparent working. All in all it was an inspiring and nice start into the week.

Impressions Day 1:

The digital revolution is there but it is chaotic. There is a digital elite (big corporates) that push it forward thanks to endless resources. Smaller companies try not to miss out the wave. But this fear is gold to service providers with no clear value add for customers. They just promise „The most efficient big Data analytics“ or „AI for your business intelligence“ without being able to name a clear value proposition based on real use cases and real numbers. Time will show how that will develop. Also there is a difference between companies of the German „Mittelstand“ and startups. While startups are born out of a digital mindset, Mittelstand companies face the challenge to digitalize - and it seems to be a long and painful process. As there is more money to get from them, providers focus and tickle their balls starting a „digitization for dummies“ communication approach rather then focusing on the most innovative players in the game: The startups.

Impressionable Day 2:

A lot is about IoT in the startup space and big data in the corporate space. These technologies seem to be the cloud computing of 2010 promising holistic adaption.
Data is key, but the challenge is not to develop data based business models, but to be compliant to the laws like data protection and data storage while doing so. The governmental handling of data, tech and startups in a broader sens is somehow outdated. The reason might be that due to the political context, the people in charge are overwhelmed. The rule that is true for companies is also true for states: who moves last, loses.

Impressions Day 3:

Consumer hardware is 90% Chinese! Great stuff, no idea about the quality though but I heard from a lot of people that the quality reached western standards. There are a lot of small cool gimmicks like wireless chargers, next gen. Earphones and e mobility devices. The problem is branding and sales. It will be hard to build a quality brand out of china.
Huawei is pushing hard in cloud computing and business solutions.

Impressions Day 4:

Think like a corporate. Hire professionals. I heard these sentences quiet often during the last days. Basically there is a wave of „professionalism“ while bootstrapping. This starts with influencers hiring sales people for their channels and goes on with higher funding rounds of startups in order to grow teams faster.

Big companies do actually use influencers a lot. Sixt for example has the Sixt Moments program. They also have an own Salesforce platform and influencer database.

Salim.