John Lamb's Week: Getting the CeBIT between your teeth

VISA Europe, the payment card firm, recently made a big thing about offering a E168m (£105m) inducement to card suppliers, merchants and banks to get them to adopt chip cards to cut down on fraud. The company, owned by the banks, is unveiling its annual results on Wednesday.

Although business is booming for VISA, so is credit card fraud. Counterfeiting is the biggest source of lost revenue, but internet fraud is gaining ground, as is mail order crime. VISA hopes that with chips in cards and new schemes for checking user identity on the internet it can reduce card crime.

Technology fixes for frauds are notoriously difficult to implement. Once anti-fraud technology gets into the public domain security experts and fraudsters get locked into an escalating cat and mouse game. Often it's the simple precautions that work best.

Also on Wednesday the Yeoman Group will be showing off the world's first mobile phone-based turn-by-turn navigation technology. The company is among the best performing UK technology stocks on the AIM (Alternative Investment Market) index and is in discussions with operators around the world with a view to a product distribution deal.

Its turn-by-turn technology enables drivers to receive instructions to reach their final destination with access to real-time traffic information. The technology works over existing GSM mobile phones.

Judging from the number of invites that this column has received to briefings and parties at the CeBIT show, the entire European IT industry has decamped to Hanover, Germany, where the exhibition starts on Thursday.

Now the largest computer fest in the world, CeBIT sprawls across a gaggle of hangers on the outskirts of Hanover. Despite its size - over 800,000 people usually visit the (real world) site - the annual digital pow-wow has a homely feel. For example, the low rise city lacks the usual quota of Hilton and Marriott hotels needed to host a gathering of this magnitude. Unfazed, the burgers of Hanover throw open their spare rooms to visitors.

With over 8,000 companies attending, there is a flood of product briefings. Announcements of hand-held devices, open source software and m-commerce services predominate. However, Hanover is as much about sealing business deals as it is about making customer announcements. Behind the scenes agreements on distribution, technology purchases and even mergers and acquisitions are likely to get the nod over the six days of CeBIT.

OmniSky, the wireless email and web service company, will announce its European roll-out plans and reveal services based on the PocketPC, Symbian and Palm OS platforms. The expansion follows the launch of its UK beta service earlier this month on the Palm OS-based Handspring Visor.

With Gartner's Dataquest unit forecasting PDA sales in Western Europe will increase from over 2.5 million units in 2001 to over 6.5 million units in 2004, there should at least be plenty of handhelds hooking up to OmniSky's technology.

The CeBIT show is usually a time to assess the state of the European IT industry. In the past, the talk was about how much government cash was going to be pumped into this or that ailing national IT champion. These days, the prospects are much more positive. Despite efforts by Intel to talk down the wireless revolution, Europe still maintains a technical league in a critical new technology area.

Indeed, Europe's long derided culture of state and company benefits may now help its high technology industry grow by providing a more stable business environment. However, the tendency towards state interference is still a stumbling block. The plan to make businesses trading over the internet confirm to the laws of all the countries in which they operate springs to mind.