Hanover, Germany - Exhibitor bookings for a major computer-industry trade fair, CeBIT in Germany, have slumped 25 per cent as the worldwide recession bites, the main organizer said Friday.

Ernst Raue, a director of the Deutsche Messe company who has oversight of CeBIT, told Deutsche Presse-Agentur that 4,300 booths had been booked at the March 3-8 fair, which in the 1990s was the world's biggest computing show.

Hanover, Germany- Some 2,000 teachers stayed away from school Tuesday and demonstrated in the city of Hanover for more pay as part of rolling strikes against Germany's 16 state governments.

Ilse Schaad, the chief negotiator for the teachers' union GEW, told the protesters, "The states are not as poor as they pretend. The have a hoard of tax revenue which they can use to supplement pay."

Hanove

Hanover  - Technology that once seemed best suited for unintentional comedy is now ready for practical application. Software for text and speech recognition is now sufficiently mature to be considered for general office use, say the editors of the Hanover- based iX magazine.

Text recognition or optical character recognition (OCR), requires just a standard multi-functional scanner with 300 dpi performance or better to produce decent results. None of the programs tested by the magazine showed any glaring weaknesses.

The results do depend primarily on the quality of the original. Laser printouts in standard fonts are almost all read perfectly. Not surprisingly, poor photocopies of exotic typefaces tend to produce more errors.

Hanover, Germany - In a sign of strain, Continental, the German supplier of tyres and electronic components to the car industry, is contemplating a 1-billion-euro
(1.3-billion-dollar) equity issue, a spokeswoman said Thursday in Hanover.

She was confirming remarks by chief financial officer Alan Hippe outside an investors conference in New York.

Hippe warned it was possible Continental might have to write down the value of companies it has acquired by up to 1 billion euros.

The spokeswoman said an issue of new shares on the same scale was being propounded as a solution.