impressions from Cebit

I am back at home and have time and internet access again so I can finally blog about Cebit \o/ (Nothing beats coming home after a week with barely any internet access to a modem with an LED indicating no connection.)

We had a lot of fun at Cebit and it is always great to meet your favorite KDE people. But boy, the fairground is huge! And now you get to guess how much I saw of it during the week I have been there. 😉 Not much, right. I guess about 200m in each direction from the KDE and Amarok booth and a trip to the Novell and Microsoft booth which was in another building quite far away. Yea that’s about all I have seen I think. But who cares. I had fun and was able to show Amarok and KDE to a lot of people. I stopped counting how many times I answered the question “When will Amarok 2 be released?”. I think we will have to release something soon 😉

I was particularly impressed by a very clever girl (maybe 13 or 14 years old) who was at the Amarok booth asking questions. Nice to meet the next generation of geek girls.

It was a little sad to see how alien the concept of free software is to a lot of people at an event like this. (“And how do you make money with it?”). Well now they know what it is and why we do it. In the end I think it was a great success though since we were able to show a lot of visitors KDE 4 and Amarok 1.4 and 2, introduce new contributors to the team and got a few offerings that look very promising. Be prepared for some nifty new things in and around Amarok (assuming it all works out).

And of course some photos:

When we arrived and gave back our rented car my guys forced me to take a picture of another car at the car rental. Ladies and gentlemen, I present you the uber geeky car:

Eckhart, me and Franz at one of the booth parties:

Harald and me at the Novell and Microsoft party (with free hugs *g*):

btw: Having internet access at the Amarok booth next time would rock 😉 Showing Amarok without it is a pain sometimes and takes away a lot of the wow effect.