E-Commerce
What a difference secure transactions make. Already humming along at some $11 billion a year, global internet commerce is projected to mushroom to a stunning $223 billion annually in the next three years, $30 billion of that in Europe alone, a s the population of Web users on the Continent quadruples from 14 million to 56 million and consumer confidence in secure Web transactions grows. By 2001 an estimated 68 million Internet shoppers around the world will be buying everything from books, clothes and records to flowers, air tickets and cars.

At CeBIT, thousands of products, from companies as large as IBM (occupying 4,000 square m of floor space at the show) and as small as a flock of startups selling encryption software, will be showing off the security features that are helping f uel the growth of Web transactions. Example: an Israeli company named Aliroo (the Hebrew name means both "they cannot see" and "they do not fear"), whose founders have military and intelligence backgrounds, will demonstrate a new fax encryption technology .

IBM will showcase its network community solution, which enables home users to access local public services, check the movie schedule downtown, pay bills and order their groceries delivered online. Many other exhibitors will be talking directly to business: Forrester Research, a U.S. firm, projects that global business-to-business E-commerce will grow from 1997 levels of $8 billion to $327 billion by 2002, thanks to the dramatically lower costs and processing time and superior information flow on the Web.

Road Trip!
It had to happen. Millions of people spend as much time commuting these days as they do online. If you've got to be trapped in your car, why not stay connected to the rest of the world? IBM is giving new meaning to the term mobile computing at CeBIT, where it is unveiling a van, developed with the help of Sun Microsystems, Delphi Delco Electronic Systems and Netscape. The Network Vehicle features a voice-activated Web browser, telephone, television and video game player in the dashboard. Add g lobal positioning satellite technology with a liquid crystal "heads-up" display on the windshield similar to those used by fighter pilots, and drivers can sit back, talk to a vehicle with a larger vocabulary than most of their relatives, check E-mail and enjoy other features of this "rolling communications/entertainment center"--while, one hopes, keeping both hands on the wheel and eyes on the road. "It's new age," says IBM spokesperson Cary Ziter, "but it's coming."
--With reporting by Michael Goldfarb/New York