CeBIT: Golden State, Green IT and Purple Prose

California is the official partner state at CeBIT and its famous governor is everywhere, staring down at attendees from posters bearing his sunglass-wearing likeness. The Golden State is a big deal here, even if it's debatable whether Schwarzenegger is the state's "most famous export," as fair organizers insist.

More relevantly, it's the state's history of technological innovation and the posse of Silicon Valley tech titans that make it an ideal partner for CeBIT. The California-based companies being feted at CeBIT reads like a who's who list of the computing industry -- Intel, Cisco, Sun Microsystems, Adobe, Nvidia, McAfee, Symantec, Yahoo, Google, VMware, Seagate, Oracle and Mozilla, just to name a few of the bigger kids on the block.

Perhaps more interesting is to note who isn't at CeBIT. Companies that didn't make the trip from California include Apple, Advanced Micro Devices and Hewlett-Packard (HP is technically here alongside German printing partner Kisters, but we only saw a solitary Kisters rep at the partners' small booth in Hall 3).

The Germans don't seem to mind a few big names being absent. As eager as German officials like Chancellor Angela Merkel and Hannover Mayor Stephan Weil have been to praise the innovators of California while poor-mouthing Germany's own contributions to computing technology, it's a wonder some of the homegrown talent doesn't protest.

But the Germans aren't complaining. Instead, they're quietly inserting themselves into every sector of the technology industry, from RFID to telecommunications to social networking. Siemens alone seems to have a booth in every hall on the sprawling Deutsche Messe grounds.

They've also warmly embraced Green IT, the second major theme at CeBIT. Quite a few technology vendors have a green message these days, but only a select few were picked to exhibit in a special pavilion devoted to technology that plays nice with Mother Earth.

At the Green IT exhibition hall, Sun's energy-efficient car shares a stage with IBM's recycled silicon wafers. Both the Fujitsu and Nokia incarnations of Siemens -- there they are again! -- have flowery, eco-friendly booths, where concerned-looking people sit around and discuss the greening of public infrastructure.

At least they aren't tweeting each other, as far as we can see. Which brings us to the last big theme at CeBIT 2009, something the show runners call "Webciety." Now that's a made-up word if we ever saw one, but who knows -- maybe it'll go over big with the 'tweens.

"Webciety means social networking, wikis, cloud computing, Web 2.0 and so on, basically all of these things rolled into one," one CeBIT official told us. It's at this point that your humble narrator's eyes begin to glaze over, but as so many presenters at the show's Websciety forums are happy to inform us, this stuff is increasingly finding its way into our working and personal lives.

"We must pay attention to Twitter and Facebook," the official says. True, but we don't have to pay attention for very long -- call it the blessing and the curse of Websciety.