CeBIT 2017 Starts in Eight Weeks Time

CeBIT 2017 Starts in Eight Weeks Time
CeBIT - Oliver Frese

In just eight weeks’ time, the gates will be opening on CeBIT 2017. The show will feature a wealth of disruptive technologies, new business models and application scenarios. In short, everything needed for the digital transformation of business and government.

“CeBIT 2017 will make digitalization tangible for visitors in a way they have never experienced before,“ Deutsche Messe Managing Board member Oliver Frese announced in Hannover, Germany. In the exhibition halls, 3,000 companies from 70 nations will present real-life application scenarios, and a small army of startups will profile their disruptive business models, while at the CeBIT Global Conferences digital visionaries will explore the digital future of business and society.

On 19 March, Shinzo Abe, the Prime Minister of this year’s Partner Country, Japan, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel will officially open CeBIT 2017 in the presence of more than 2,000 VIP guests at the Welcome Night ceremony in Hall 9 of the Hannover Exhibition Center. The Partner Country, alone, is fielding around 120 companies to appear in every segment of the show.

“CeBIT 2017 will raise the curtain on the future of business and society. It will make digitalization a tangible reality,“ Frese told the audience of more than 120 international journalists at the CeBIT Preview. This year’s CeBIT is headlined “d!conomy - no limits,“ a lead theme that puts the spotlight squarely on the boundless opportunities of the digital transformation.

Among much else, the exhibits and presentations will feature a wide array of new applications for artificial intelligence and cognitive computing. Drones, too, will be there for all to see in a whole range of applications. Driverless car technology and many other concrete digitalization applications and showcases will also feature in the “discover d!conomy“ highlight tour of the show.

One of the big magnets of this year’s show is SCALE11 in Hall 11 -home base for startups at CeBIT. More than 400 young enterprises from 40 nations will demonstrate just how rapidly digitalization is sparking new companies and new business models. The startups will be joined at SCALE11 by numerous large, established corporations, who will be profiling their own startup development and support initiatives.

Another wow factor will be the showcase mounted by this year’s Partner Country, Japan, which is staging two high-profile group pavilions in halls 4 and 12, as well as numerous individual company displays in the other halls. All up, this year’s CeBIT will feature about 120 Japanese companies.

The CeBIT Global Conferences are a core part of the CeBIT experience, and this year’s conferences boast a truly stellar line-up of speakers. Among the big names are Google engineer and futurist Ray Kurzweil, the famed roboticist Hiroshi Ishiguro, and Stanford professor and social researcher Michal Kosinski.

An expert in psychometrics, Kosinski has developed a mathematical method that analyzes Facebook likes and other publicly available data to determine people’s personality traits. The speaker list also includes someone who is arguably the world’s most famous whistleblower Ed Snowden. He will be joining the proceedings via live stream from Moscow.