Photos: CeBIT Australia 2007

On during May 1 - 3 at Darling Harbour, Sydney, CeBIT includes an exhibition, keynote addresses, conference streams and forums focus on topics covering communications, government and commerce. The Exhibition spans four halls at the Sydney Convention and Exhibition Centre.

Keynote addresses and conferences are a valuable resource for IT professionals. Speakers include Mitchell Baker, Mozilla CEO, Dave Girouard, Google's vice president and general manager, enterprise and Jim Steele, Salesforce.com president.

Sony had a range of business projectors on hand, including the VPL-EX4 (shown on the middle row, left), boasting 2100 ANSI lumens and three seperate LCD panels for red, green and blue colours. The VPL-EX4 is available now, priced at AU$1,895.

Also on display, was Sony's IPELA IP-networked videoconferencing products. Local customers include the University of Queensland and Seven Network.

Sony also took the opportunity to spruik the benefits of Blu-Ray as a storage medium. The BWU100A internal IDE burner (AU$1,099) and VGNAR38G Blu-Ray- equipped notebook took centre stage at Sony's booth.

ELO digital demonstrated its range of document management products including ELOprofessional, ELOenterprise.

Panasonic's monstrous 103-inch plasma, being touted as the largest available to date, overshadowed the rest of their stand. The plasma display is designed for business use in areas such as TV production, digital signage, exhibitions and private theatres and is priced to suit. If you have a spare AU$105,000 it can be yours!

Panasonic's Toughbooks also made an appearance. The CF-19 (shown above) is a new shock, spill and dust resistant notebook. Priced from AU$6,099, it can survive a 90cm drop, Panasonic claims, has a battery life of 8 hours and a 10.4-inch anti-reflective screen.

Motion Computing offers mobile devices for specialised fields such as healthcare, manufacturing and hospitality, displayed two new devices. First announced in February, the C5 mobile clinical assistant (shown above with charging dock) has been co-developed with Intel for use by health professionals. Shipping in May, it's priced at AU$3,399.

The LE1700, available now, is the company's latest tablet PC. It sports a Core 2 Duo processor, Windows Vista and support for up to 4GB of RAM. Pricing is yet to be confirmed.

Customer relationship management provider, salesforce.com's president, Jim Steele, gave a keynote address on Tuesday, entitled "The Business Web".

Security vendor Grisoft was promoting the latest release of AVG, version 7.5. Products being promoted for businesses includes Anti-Malware, Internet Security and Anti-Virus, File Server and e-mail server software for Linux and FreeBSD.

Not to be outdone, open-source vendors including Red Hat made a splash. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 was released Down Under on March 14.

IBM's Mary Ann Fisher, linux program executive, public sector, presented at the CeBIT e-Government Forum on the use of open-source in government.

BitDefender had popcorn and "human firewalls" on hand for all delegates.

Web conferencing vendor, WebEx's visually contrasting stand complete with bouncy balls and a giant overhead inflated balloon.

CSIRO featured local-grown technical innovations at their stand, including an impressive looking underwater exploration vehicle. Sadly the organisation's air guitar shirt didn't make an appearance.

Symbol, purchased by Motorola earlier this year, had a range of devices aimed at field sales support. Staff manning the stand demonstrated the durability of ruggedised devices by hitting them against the bench and throwing them in the air.

Their latest device, the MC35, is a ruggardised Windows Mobile 5-based PDA (referred to as an EDA -- enterprise digital assistant). The handheld has in-built GPS capabilities, Wi-Fi, bluetooth and a camera. Pricing starts at AU$800.

No tour of the CeBIT Australia 2007 expo would be complete without a visit to the CNET Networks Australia stand. If you're lucky you might find ZDNet Australia journalists such as Munir Kotadia (centre) publishing stories from the event. Nick Gibson, assistant editor for our sister site Builder AU (left) and video editor Matt Oxley (right) were also working furiously at the event.

ZDNet Australia is presenting, in conjunction with CeBIT, the 2007 Emerging Technology Innovation Award on Wednesday. The award, open exclusively to CeBIT exhibitors, recognises technical achievements that have made an impact in the last 18 months.

Google's search appliances also made an appearance. The rack-mountable Mini Search Appliance, shown here, allows businesses to index and search up to 100,000 internal documents in more than 220 different file formats, including HTML, PDF and Microsoft Office file types.

Its big brother, the Google Search Appliance, can search up to 500,000 documents and starts at AU$74,486 (ex. GST).

Google's vice president for enterprise, Dave Girouard, presented at CeBIT Australia 2007, on May 1.