Business Channel 2006-09-08&10

The IFA Consumer Electronics Fair is getting underway in Berlin. High definition TVs, next-generation DVDs and portable entertainment devices remain among the most talked about items, but this is the place where new products become talking points and then contend to become must-have technologies.

Chief Executive of Philips Consumer Electronics Rudy Provoost has come with a few new offerings.

Well, IFA is an exciting place, and we use this occasion to bring to market some real new innovations and, and clearly in the area of TV, er, we are right in the middle of the high definition revolution. It's starting and we are bringing to market a whole new range of, ur, high-definition flat TVs. Well, this is indeed another innovation, we see that Voice over IP becomes a very important er, new market, and in essence, Voice over IP is about reinventing the home communication category. So we are partnering together with Microsoft and Skype, and in essence we allow these consumers to use cordless phones to, to, to, to call eh, over the Internet, eh, in a way that they don't have to pay for it and in a way that it's very user-friendly.

Provoost is not alone in assigning a special significance to this date on his calendar. IFA, which is the world's oldest consumer electronics show, is benefiting from an upswing in the industry, and what had been a biennial 1 event is becoming an annual affair.

This year, there are over 1,000 exhibitors from 32 countries here to promote their products, some of which may surprise you.

This is a flash motion image synthesizing system.

Improving your swing through flash motion imagery may be fun, but it doesn't exactly fit the traditional definition of consumer electronics. But as Reuters' European Technology Correspondent Lucas van Grinsven explains, that is the trend.

Consumer electronics used to be just TVs, radios, hi-fi sets. But these days, you know, you can buy anything, you know, from navigation devices to mobile phones to Voice over IP products, and ah it can be anything. And it's really the technology touching 2 consumers' lives now. And the consumer electronics industry is growing rapidly, much more rapidly and much more healthily than the IT industry. If you look at the growth figures, the consumer electronics industry has grown by about 9 percent every year for the last five years.

As much as this is a showcase of new technologies, it is also something of a design exhibition. Call it the iPod effect or put it down to a technological 3 fetish, alluring 4 styles seem to do as much to stimulate 5 sales these days as anything else, a fact not lost on the makers 6 of these goods. Senior Research Designer for LG Electronics Olivia Kim translates for LG's VP of Digital Display Jae-Jin Shim.
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IFA used to be just a form in the structure of the product, however, now, it try to be one step closer to the customer, just like in fashion. We're er, able to do a design that is er, more, er, that'll lead to their life style or that'll be in their environment, worn with the environment.

The show opens to the public on Friday and continues through the sixth of September.

Matt Cowan, Reuters, Berlin.

vocabulary
1. upswing---noun. a marked increase or improvement: an upswing in stock prices.

2. biennial--adj. happening every two years: biennial games.

3. fetish--noun. An object of unreasonably excessive attention or reverence