This was sent to me by Andrea a few days ago, and i apologize for only posting it now. He did a great job by the way, which you'll be able to see for yourself as soon as you click the link below.

As you'll read, Zeta's presence in WebbIT was a big success, and who knows what beneficts this presence will bring them in future.

Without further delay, here's the WebbIT report...

WebbIT Report.
by Andrea Scatena.

Hello, it has passed almost a week since Webbit.03 ended in Padova, Italy, and for The community it's been a great success.

The Italian BeOS Users Group, ITBUG, invited Bernd Korz to present Zeta to the Webbit audience, and let me tell you, it went beyond our wildest dreams.

Bernd arrived Saturday in the late afternoon and after preparing his PC, gave us a little demo of the Zeta capabilities so far. Then begun the presentation, or better the show.

I think there were about a thousan people in the pavillion, and the vast part run some *nix flavour on their desktops, servers and laptops. Some of them didn't have a mouse, because they do everything from the command line. Only a minority use windoze on their machines.

Everywhere Linux, BSD, Mac OSX and of course BeOS (but we were only about thirty people, and I'm a totally newbie here).

Then Bernd took the microphone and the show begins: no more than 1 minute had passed and a large crowd gathered to the stage where Bernd and his machine demonstrated the power of Zeta.

- Opening a folder with about 3700 songs in the media player was a matter of 1 second
- Playing simultaneously four or five of them? Done
- Playing the same song three times one after another? Done
- Ripping a DVD on the HD at the same time? Done
- Watching the movie during the ripping process? Done
- And just not to annoy oneself watching Batman for the Nth time, why not see four little movies made by Bernd on vacation? Done

I could go on for a lot more but you know what it's like, right? But people there did not and they stayed in awe, mouth wide open, watching almost with unbelief what was happening, saying that it wasn't possible, had to be a pre-recorded demo...

We were happy, for hearing such words coming from people who work with Linux everyday...

Every new app coming alive on screen was welcomed with applause and when Bernd finished the applause lasted for a good five minutes, and people were coming to our place to ask for a live CD, or how to obtain Zeta, or BeOS, or simply asking a confirmation for what they saw on the screen.

And I'm talking also of business people, and we are making arrangements to demonstrate Zeta in Universities... :-)

All this long rant of mine just to tell you that the interest in Zeta is growing, and that the Italian community is working hard to bring it to the masses, with good omens for a bright future.

Andrea "Hawksmoor" Scatena

And here are a couple of links for articles (in Italian, use Babelfish) one and two.

One more link, with photos from the event. Enjoy.