Google boss shares vision of the long run at CeBIT

Google's executive chairman Eric Schmidt cast a science-fiction vision of the longer term because the world's top tech fair opened, with the German IT sector predicting record sales in 2012.

"Think back to Star Trek, or my favourite the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. Much of what those writers imagined is now possible," said Schmidt.

"Translating .. voice recognition, electronic books. The folk who predict that intelligent robots, virtual reality or self-driving cars will soon be commonplace are right," he added.

"Governments would be capable of spot the commercial makings of a crisis before they happen and doctors can be ready to accurately predict the outbreak of disease before anyone feels it," predicted Schmidt.

The tech boss was speaking on the opening ceremony of the CeBIT, the world's biggest high-tech fair within the northern German city of Hanover, with 4,200 exhibitors from 70 countries expected to wow punters with their latest gadgets.

This year, the fair was to spotlight the probabilities offered by "cloud computing", the idea of storing data remotely instead of on individual machines, in addition to "managing trust", or the recent topic of Internet security.

Declaring the fair officially open, Chancellor Angela Merkel returned to this theme of "managing trust", saying it was especially important among world leaders as they battled to unravel the worldwide economic crisis.

Dilma Rousseff, the president of Brazil, this year's "partner country" on the CeBIT, expressed the hope that "technology, when put to human interests, can certainly produce a real revolution for the well-being of the folks at large."

Throughout the fair, tech giants Samsung, Sharp, Microsoft, Google and Facebook might be showing off the most recent ultra-thin tablet computers and the smartphones of the long run for work in addition to futuristic, weird and wacky gadgets for fun.

Some of the highlights is a robot which can make your lunch and a car that may change its length to fit into tricky parking spaces.

Others include a virtual "eraser" for wiping out traces of doubtless embarrassing mistakes on the net, a system for safeguarding smartphones from eavesdropping and a mobile device for asthmatics to evaluate the air quality.

And inside the run-as much as the fair, the German IT sector published new forecasts saying it expected to shrug off the eurozone debt crisis and register record sales this year.

IT industry lobby BITKOM said it expected sales growth of one.6 percent this year to 151.0 billion euros, pinning its hopes at the futuristic "cloud computing" technology.

If confirmed, this is able to be a major improvement at the 0.5 percent gain seen last year inside the sector and the primary time sales have topped the 150-billion-euro mark.

"The debt crisis in Europe has not been capable of touch the German high-tech sector yet. Companies' order books are filled nicely," said Dieter Kempf, the body's president.

"The IT sector is doing far better than the final economy and is therefore acting as a stabilising factor," Kempf told reporters, presenting the recent forecasts.

The positive trend within the sector should feed through into the labour market, BITKOM added, predicting an extra 10,000 jobs will be created this year.

Essentially the most meteoric growth was more likely to be registered by "cloud computing", which has proved to be a "complete change within the way the field operates", he said.

This sector was expected to enjoy growth in Germany of 37 percent per year on average until 2016. This year, the "cloud computing" business was expected to grow by 47 percent to five.3 billion euros.

Despite the bullish forecasts, BITKOM said that the IT sector in Europe would underperform other parts of the arena.

In China, the arena was expected to grow by 9.7 percent, inside the United states of america by 3.1 percent, within the whole 27-nation EU by 1.8 percent and in Japan by 1.1 percent.

At a world level, the arena is predicted to grow by about four percent this year, consistent with the BITKOM forecasts.

- AFP