CeBIT 2013 Opens

Europe’s leading tech event, CeBIT 2013 has officially opened. TechWeekEurope will cover the top news, and we also have a Tech Quiz, which will ease you into the show’s mood (or soothe your jealousy if you aren’t there).

As usual, Cebit 2013 featured a speech from German Chancellor Angela Merkel – but the conference programme also includes her challenger for the Chancellor’s job, Peer Steinbruck of the SPD party, who will set out his ideas for economic policies that foster the digital era.

All the fun of the fair

Other speakers include JP Rangaswami, chief scientist at cloud giant Salesforce, and Gary Kovacs, chief executive of Mozilla, whose Firefox OS was the talk of Mobile World Congress in Barcelona last week. The show ill also hear from Donald Tusk, the Prime Minister of this year’s partner country, as well as Dieter Kampr, president of the influential Bitkom tech induistry group.

The show aims to cover the industry’s top five hot topics – cloud computing, big data, mobile, security and what the CeBIT team calls “Iindustry 4.0”.

Open source has an increasing presence at CeBIT: this year it expands from a part of Hall 2, to its own space in Hall 6, next to the “WEbciety” part of the conference, which deals with web business models, and applications. CeBIT told ZDNet.de the move happened, because “open source is involved in many web solutions” and is a central enabler of modern dialogues on the web.

A day ticket costs €35 in advance, or €40 at the box office, with concessions at €18. A season ticket for all five days costs €80 or €90. Children and young people under 16 are only allowed in on Saturday.

If you are at CeBIT and want to have knowledge to impress your fellow delegates, we have just the thing. Alternatively, if you can’t get to CeBIT and are wishing you were there, we can also help.

In either case…

Try our CeBIT quiz!

And if you like it, try some of our others…

ZDNet.de‘s Florian Kalenda contributed to this artlcle.