Taipei, COMPUTEX 2019 closed today (June 1) with a huge success. In the last five days, 42,495 international buyers from 171 countries flooded into the show, a 0.5% growth from the previous year. The top 10 buyer countries are, namely, China, the US, Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Thailand, Singapore, Germany, Malaysia, and India. Once again, COMPUTEX established the role of a leaning ICT tradeshow that connects businesses along industry supply chains and opens up infinite possibilities in the tech ecosystem.

You couldn’t go anywhere in Las Vegas without seeing Google branding this year. The company even had a Disney-esque tram ride in its massive booth outside the convention center extolling the virtues of its Google Assistant. But it wasn’t just all bluster: The search giant unleashed a deluge of Assistant upgrades (see below), and nearly every other company at the show was boasting about Assistant compatibility in its products.

But weep not for archrival Alexa.

The new, revamped CEBIT show, which took place in Hannover, Germany from 11-15 June, enjoyed a successful premiere, as more than 2,800 participating companies, over 600 speakers on ten stages, and 370 startups from Europe, Africa and Asia turned Hannover into the world’s digitisation hotspot over a five-day period.

Achim Berg, president of the German Association for Information Technology (Bitkom) set the tone for the event during his welcome: “We are living in exciting times,