Impressions of the Hannover Messe

Hi, Habr!
Our team PeacockTeam (GoodRoads), fortunate enough to be at the Hannover Messe - the world's largest industrial exhibition held in the city of Hannover, Germany. Industrial subjects, perhaps, are not quite suitable for Habr, and we ourselves do not have a special attitude to industry, so the look at the exhibition will be somewhat general and will mainly concern Russian stands. Photos from this exhibition and our impressions under the cut.

The exhibition runs from April 7 to April 11, and at this time the small, in general, city of Hannover (population about 500 thousand people) is filled with numerous visitors. These days it is very difficult to find a free direct flight to Hanover, even from Moscow, and hotel prices start at 200 euros per night. Until the last moment we decided who could go to the exhibition, so everyone ordered the last day. We ourselves from St. Petersburg did not find any direct flights to Hanover, so we decided to take the tickets to Hamburg, we rented a car there, we flew to Hanover in 2 hours via the German autobahn. We were very lucky with housing, instead of a hotel, we rented an apartment (and a 2-storey one!), For only 49 euros per night, quite close to the center, as it turned out, the owner simply forgot about raising the price due to the exhibition.

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The preparation for the exhibition was carried out for a whole week, but we had nothing special to install - we used only two monitors for the demonstration, so we arrived a day before the opening, everything was quickly deployed in a few hours. The next morning we went to the exhibition by the very opening - by 9 am, and it would seem that at such an event with so many guests we could not do without traffic jams, and they really were, but only on a small section before leaving the track, after passing this section moved rather quickly, because the Germans guessed to organize movement on the Messe and the oncoming lane in the morning because of such an event, the situation was similar in the evenings when everyone was leaving. It would seem an obvious solution, but I have never come across this with us.

The exhibition consists of 27 huge pavilions, between which free electric cars and taxis supervise, and public buses are also let into the Messe area. You can walk between the buildings for about 20 minutes, so the first time we parked badly at the other end of the Messe, and walked to our building.

We were located - in the first building - Metropolitan Solutions, in which companies were represented that create solutions for large cities. As far as I understood, this complex was an initiative of Russia, which was a partner of the exhibition this year, as the billboards located everywhere repeatedly reminded. Therefore, for the most part, Russian companies such as the Government of Moscow, St. Petersburg, MinTrans, Russian Railways, UralVagonZavod, etc., were provided in this building. Apparently, in connection with this, and even with the fact that this building is located on the very edge of the Messe, it was not particularly crowded, unlike the rest of the exhibition.

I'll tell you in more detail about the stand of the Moscow government, because they were the ones who invited us (despite the fact that we are a St. Petersburg team). The concept of the stand is “Smart” Moscow, which consists of 6 “smart” areas: transport, power networks, hospital, school, shop and office. The main attraction of the stand, which seems to have been spent 80% of the budget was a giant multitouch screen, made up of 40 interconnected panels, which showed the map of Moscow, which can be rotated, and there also occasionally appeared a yellow smiley, which was proposed to catch visitors . Next to it, the most photos were taken, especially girls liked to be photographed there.

Among the projects presented at this stand were both interesting and rather mediocre. I’ll start with the good - second place in popularity after the interactive panel was taken up by the MagLev “air cushion” mock train, as far as I understood, the guys are making 3rd generation semiconductors, and in Japan only 2nd generation is used for such trains. There is a small road on the stand, along which a toy train is tacking, for which it is periodically watered with liquid nitrogen, it looks spectacular.

Also on the stand were 3D Builder - in fact, a Russian 3D printer, real-time license plate recognizer, sensors for open parking lots, searching for certain people from video recordings, and some others. Such projects were a bit disappointing - as a smart school, where flash games for schoolchildren were demonstrated, for example, how to cook borscht, and this project was most often demonstrated to German schoolchildren visiting the exhibition. “Smart” valves - allowing you to close the valves on gas pipes in automatic mode, without the use of people, it seems to me that only in our country could there be pipes that need to be closed manually for 40 minutes (judging by the story of the author of the project). “Smart” payment systems turned out to be just Russian-made terminals for payment by bank cards.

Our booth consisted of a road map from our website and a presentation. Our team specializes in the processing and visualization of data coming from the sensors of mobile devices. Our projects are based on this - GoodRoads, automated monitoring of the quality of the road surface and GoodDrive - monitoring the driving style of motorists for insurance companies. Although we are not particularly concerned with the industry, quite a lot of interested visitors approached us.

The booth participants were also given the opportunity to present their presentations on the big screen, listeners, unfortunately there were very few, as a rule, they were limited to their neighbors in the booth.

A little about other Russian stands:
The stand of St. Petersburg followed the concept of a safe city, I, frankly, did not quite understand what things belonged to security there, on the stand were presented light bulbs, an LED flashlight, surveillance cameras, etc. The information panel was for some reason in Russian, the impression was that they didn’t particularly expect that anyone except our compatriots would be suitable there.

Quite funny on the stand looked the machine that reads the aura on the arm, and displays information about the state of the chakras of a person, for his work required to feed him 100 rubles, which fortunately gave the developers of this complex.

The stand of the Moscow region occupying about as much space as the stand of Moscow could boast only two pretty girls sitting next to the monitor and smiling visitors.

We really wanted to talk with someone from the authorities of the stand of the Ministry of Transport, because they are one of those organizations that are responsible for the state of the roads in Russia, but alas, after the first day of the exhibition there was no one left there, only cute girls and the model of the Murmansk transport hub .

Stand UralVagonZavod, located together with the stand Bomabrdier, the main attraction of the stand was the concept of the subway car, with folding chairs, this was done specifically for people in wheelchairs.

Against the background of the Russian stands in the Metropolitan Solutions building, the Siemens stand was very prominent, it looked both simple, stylish and spectacular. The space on it was distributed very functional. There were presented as real technological objects - industrial switches, equipment for power grids, electric motors and their parts, as well as monitors in the format of presentations and video demonstrating actually functioning objects - hydroelectric power stations, wind generators and more. Siemens stands were found in almost every building of the exhibition.

In the neighboring building were the stands of the Ministry of Education of Russia. Exhibited on it, some universities related to industry, the stand of the university was its description in English. A quadrocopter, a 3D printer and a racing machine were presented in the common part of the stand.

The main stand of Russia was located in the 26th building, it was the president of Russia who visited him. In addition to the feminist campaign, one could meet protesters chanting Putin - not legetim.

I was somewhat surprised by the contents of the booth, who would have thought that the main exhibits at the Russian booth would be cars, with “supercars”. It is not particularly clear who is the creator of these concepts, and why they are exhibited there, but as I understand, they were exhibited in order to demonstrate Russian design solutions in the automotive industry. The second supercar is depicted in the first picture.

In the evenings, all the Russian exhibitors gathered at the Russian stand, and everyone who was somehow connected to Russia was treated to pancakes with caviar, and music was playing. On Wednesday, when we were leaving, someone there even decided to celebrate their birthday. Most of all, these buffets were similar to the events of “Russian House” at major sporting events.

At this point I’ll finish the review of Russian expositions, the booths of ExpoForum, Kaspersky met, by the way, but the booths are unremarkable, after all, this is not a target exhibition for them. The general impression of the exhibition is positive, one can find a lot of interesting things there, especially those who are really related to the industry. In my opinion, compared to the rest of the stands, the Russians looked rather boring, they lacked some interesting advanced technologies, and tried to leave only at the expense of beautiful cars / girls, etc.