electronica 2024

Dec 17, 2024

Article

For those of us in the electronic components business, every other year in mid-November means one thing, the Electronica tradeshow, which is held in Munich, Germany. Please pardon the typo, it should be “electronica” rather than “Electronica”. It is electronica with a lowercase “e”. You may be wondering, why do they use a lowercase “e”? I was wondering just that, so I reached out reached out to officials at the show and asked them. I received an email back from Ana-Marija Brekalo, Exhibition Coordinator for electronica. She asked around, but no one she talked to knew the answer. I ended up using the Wayback Machine (https://web.archive.org/) and was able to look at the electronica websites going all the way back to 1996. I found that even back in 1996, electronica was still using a lowercase “e”. Check out this graphic from that year’s archived website:

I also found the statistics for the show, so I thought it would be interesting to compare electronica 1996 to electronica 2024. Here are a few stats:


electronica 1996
electronica 2024
Number of Exhibitors23023480
Exhibition Space115,000 m2192,000 m2
Number of Visitors84,000
~80,000
Top Visitor Countries
Germany, Austria, Italy, France
Germany, Italy, Austria, France
Top Exhibitor Countries
Not Given
Germany, China, USA, Taiwan

While I’m not sure if Datakey exhibited at electronica 1996, I did find pictures of the Datakey Electronics booth from 2006. Also shown is this year’s (electronica 2024) booth we were in, the booth of our longtime distributor, Nexus Industrial Memory.

electronica 2006:

Datakey Electronics booth at electronica 2006



electronica 2024:

Datakey products being shown at the Nexus Industrial Memory booth at electronica 2024.

The big news for Datakey at the electronica 2024 show was the announcement of our new portable memory form factor, the Mini-Bar series, which is a scaled-down version of our Bar series. The Mini-Bar is more than 60% smaller than the Bar, making it ideal for small mobile/handheld applications. Check out the Mini-Bar press release for more information.

Finally, I thought I would share one more electronica-related item. It is over 4500 miles from our headquarters in Minnesota, USA to Munich, Germany. When we arrived at our hotel, we noticed a vending machine in the lobby that had a familiar item, a Datakey KC4210 key receptacle! The image below shows the KLIX coffee vending machine. The red rectangle shows the area that contains the KC4210 receptacle.

Lavazza KLIX Coffee vending machine in a B&B Hotel in Munich, Germany

Here is a closeup view of the Datakey KC4210 key receptacle in the KLIX coffee vending machine:

Closeup of Datakey KC4210 key receptacle on a Lavazza KLIX coffee vending machine.

This application has its origin back in the early 1990’s. This means that the electronica trade fair has been using a lowercase “e” for the approximate 30 years that you have been able to get hot coffee using a Datakey memory key!

To see a KLIX coffee vending machine in action (including how companies can provide employees with the ability to get free coffee using a KLIXKEY), check out this video from Lavazza.

Paul Plitzuweit
Senior Product Manager, Datakey
ATEK Access Technologies, LLC