LAS VEGAS - We're in the air now - a team of technology journalists has been dispatched to Sin City for the 2006 International Consumer Electronics Show, pretty much considered to be the biggest trade show in the industry. They say the show has moved beyond gadgets and is getting into the cool stuff that's really grabbing your interest - mobile video, satellite radio, wireless technology and more. We'll see if they're right.
Technically, CES is headquartered at the Las Vegas Convention Center, just a mile or two off the flashy Las Vegas Strip. And sure, there will plenty to see there. But don't be fooled - CES takes over the whole city during this first week of January. Keynote speeches will be delivered at the Las Vegas Hilton Hotel. Product demonstrations will be offered in hotel suites up and down The Strip. Invitation-only parties will be held in some of the bigger-named nightclubs. And plenty of the CES attendees will be trying to get an Access Pass to some great entertainment events, including performances by the Black Eyed Peas, Stevie Wonder and others.
Come and join us in Las Vegas - via this Washingtonpost.com blog page. We'll be posting pretty much morning, noon and night on everything that is CES and Las Vegas so be sure to check-in regularly for updates.
Our CES team includes:
Tech columnist Rob Pegoraro writes a weekly tech review column called Fast Forward and produces a weekly e-newsletter.
Columnist Leslie Walker returns from a three-month leave of absence and jumps right in to the big story in Vegas. She pens two weekly columns - Dot-Com and Web Watch.
Consumer tech reporters Mike Musgrove and Yuki Noguchi team up to tackle the news announcements and track upcoming news for Washington Post readers in the weeks and months to come. Though their news stories cover a wide range of tech topics, Mike's specialty is video games and Yuki is our ace reporter on all things mobile and wireless.
Technology Editor Greg Schneider is helping to bring it all together, coordinating coverage and helping manage the stories that we'll be offering the readers this week.
Finally, Web expert Chet Rhodes will be carrying around a voice recorder, digital camera and camcorder to try to capture all of the sights and sounds of CES and deliver them to you.
CES 2006 is gearing up to be one wild ride. Buckle up and hang on tight. We'll be landing soon...
I am packing for the CES and wonder if I even need to bring my MP3 player, laptop, digital camera and several other electronic devices. After all I have been told that this show in Las Vegas has all that and the kitchen sink. I am excited at the chance to see what will be out in the stores over the next year and to see what gear will never make it. One of our members of our technical staff already has me on a mission to check out a new cell phone that may (or may not) be released, several others including my kids have made suggestions of what to look for, so here I go. I hope my feet will be up to the task.
LAS VEGAS - The most basic drive of every company exhibiting at the Consumer Electronics Show is this: Invent or adopt a new technology—or at least a technology that looks like it’s new—and get as many people as possible to pay a premium price for it before this technology becomes a mainstream, boring, commodity product.
This doesn’t happen at the same speed with every new gadget, though. Three anecdotes to illustrate that: On the first of two flights taking me from National Airport to Vegas, the 20-something woman sitting next to me in Row 16 casually flipped open a Motorola RAZR cell phone—an impossibly thin, camera-equipped, Bluetooth-enabled marvel that would have been unthinkable two years ago. But at the airport in Denver, the bar where I grabbed some dinner couldn’t muster up a single lousy HDTV, even though those have been around since 1998. And my hotel in Vegas, for the ninth year in a row, does not include a digital TV either. (Then again, my home doesn’t feature an HDTV either, so who am I to carp about other people being slow to buy into this technology?)
I, along with my colleagues Mike Musgrove, Yuki Noguchi, Greg Schneider, Leslie Walker and Chet Rhodes -- will be spending our waking hours over the next four days trying to take the measure of these technological transitions, whether it’s HDTV, satellite radio, digital photography and camcorders, home networking, wireless data or some other type of gadget that will finally show up on everybody’s radar at this year’s CES.
Stay tuned...
Rob and I just left the “Cherry Picks” exhibit at the Venetian Casino, a madcap event in which nearly 100 vendors were given one minute apiece to stand on a ballroom stage and tout their latest gadget.
My personal favorite was the SkyScout, a handheld device you can point at the sky to identify celestial objects. It uses GPS technology and has a database of about 6,000 objects visible to the naked eye of us mortals, moste of whom have no clue what we are seeing when we look skyward. It weighs less than a pound and has the bulk of a small camcorder.
In the what-will-they-think-of-next category was the StashCard. This skinny doohickey is about the size of a credit card and slips inside the PC slot on your laptop. What for? To stash stuff, that’s what.
Its maker, Wireless Garden Inc., explained that you could hide coins, cash and maybe your compact flash card inside your laptop. Go figure. AT least it’s cheap — $9.95.
Equally comical was a new portable mouse for laptops that comes equipped a kickstand. Yes, a kickstand. It’s called the MoGo Mouse. I have yet to figure out why I would pay $70 for this Bluetooth-enabled wireless mobile mouse. But I’m seeing a trend here. It, too, is designed to be stashed inside your laptop’s PC card slot.
More intriguing was Kodak’s new dual-lens camera, the EasyShare V570. It’s tiny, really tiny, and has two built-in lenses, an ultrawide and a zoom. Rob is testing one here at the show and will tell us how good the pictures are. He'll also be chiming in soon on what he liked best out of the "Cherry Picks" event.
At Cherry Picks, the event that Leslie and I attended earlier today, dozens of vendors tried to give a quick pitch for their products (punctuated by the organizer barking “next!” at the end of a presentation and “louder!” at the start of the next).
Some highlights of this motley assortment of hardware:
Algolith’s Mosquito HDMI, a $2,995 silver box to remove compression artifacts from HDTV footage. (I felt like a rube for initially wondering if the presenter had said “$29.95.” Never underestimate the ability of enthusiasts to shell out insane sums of cash for something to soup up their audio and video experience.)
NextLink’s Bluespoon 5G, a wireless headset that fits in your ear (like a hearing aid). A marketing guy showed me how you’re supposed to cram this in your ear, using a little plastic whip to prop it in place. It’s due in the spring for $399.
HopScotch Technology’s B.O.B., an $80 box (due this spring) that limits the time one person can spend on a given TV or computer. Yes, you can now buy an electronic device to stop you from using all your other electronic devices!
Gibson’s Digital Guitar. When Bruce Springsteen sang “I got this guitar and learned how to make it talk,” he probably didn’t have in mind a $4,000 six-string with an on-board digital-analog converter and Ethernet port. (The Gibson marketing guy ended his pitch with a succinct invitation to a later reception: “I’d like for you guys to come by, drink our alcohol and check this out.”)
A $40 tripod from Davis & Sanford that hides a second, miniature tripod in one of its legs.
The EnterTrainer, a $99 gizmo that adjusts your TV’s volume up or down based on readings from a heart-rate monitor you wear (it cranks the volume up if you slack off, lowers it if you’re stressing yourself too much).
A Vienna, Va., company is making a splash here with a rooftop antenna designed to provide mobile Internet access and live satellite TV to tour buses and emergency vehicles.
RaySat Inc. lugged a demo version of its new SpeedRay 3000 — a big round dish with its cover stripped off — to exhibits Tuesday and Wednesday in Las Vegas.
(To see video of the exhibition, click here.)
The device goes on sale in July at about $7,000, so it’s likely to be limited to high-end commercial uses.
Screen on your iPod too small to watch those "Desperate Housewives" episodes you downloaded? A company called eMagin Corp. has just the thing--3D visors you slip over your eyes.
Suddenly what you are viewing on the iPod (or on your PC, laptop and various mobile media players) has a much wider look. Plus, you're in the center of the action.
But dudes, you are going to look so weird in that digital pirate hat!
Panasonic made a big fuss at its press event of its new partnership with Comcast to make high-definition digital video recorders. It even invoked the magic words "one remote control" -- you'll be able to control every other Panasonic home-theater device with this DVR's remote.
But one piece is missing from this DVR: a way to take your recordings with you. Although Panasonic plans to sell a Blu-Ray high-def disc player this year, it has no plans to ship a Blu-Ray recorder that could allow just that.
CES unofficially starts sometime after you step on a plane pointed towards Las Vegas this week, as people in the surrounding aisles somehow recognize each other as fellow CES-goers and start making noise about the show and engaging in small talk about “whatever happened to COMDEX?” - a reference to the onetime rival tech shindig.
Even in a bright, loud town like Las Vegas, CES makes an impression. At the airport, Intel has put up banners between the usual advertising for Wayne Newton and the Blue Man Group, encouraging attendees to visit its booth at the show.
The line outside the airport folds back and forth five times stretching across much of the front of the terminal — a 50-minute wait (for a 15-minute cab ride) in a line filled almost entirely with people who are obviously going to CES. The crowd is packing a "who’s who" of the latest slick cell phones and smartphones pressed to their ears: the Motorola RAZR, the Treo, some gadgety Sony Ericsson number.
One visitor takes a picture of the line with his flashy-looking Konica digital camera; another is blissfully tuned out with his iPod and his Bose noise-canceling headphones. It’s the suckers looking down at their Blackberrys who keep running into people.
There’s another convention in Las Vegas this week, dedicated to the adult entertainment industry - this is Sin City, after all. “You definitely know who’s going to which convention,” says a cab driver.
At the hotel, the woman at the front desk is patiently explaining the hotel situation to a couple of confused German tourists. They usually pay much less for a hotel room when they visit - like half of what they're paying this week, sometimes even less.
The front-desk clerk can only offer one explanation: “There’s an electronics show in town.”
Frontier Airlines flights from Reagan National to Las Vegas were sold out Wednesday, a woman at the ticket counter said. All she knew was there was some kind of big electronics show out there.
Washington techies packed the plane, hauling out laptops en route and browsing electronics trade publications.
During a layover in Denver, airline workers offered $400 travel vouchers to anyone who’d drop off the flight to Vegas because it was overbooked.
There were plenty of clues this wasn’t your run-of-the-mill, cup-full-of-nickels, prime rib buffet Vegas crowd. The middle-aged guy in a ball cap reading Batman comics was one tipoff, as was the occasional tech company namedropping. “Let Seagate pay for it -- hahahahahaha!” one guy barked into his cell phone upon arrival at the Las Vegas airport.
Late last night, eating burgers and turkey sandwiches in the Luxor casino, tables of clean-cut men paying no attention to the Rose Bowl on big screen TVs was another sign the Consumer Electronics Show was cranking up. Blah blah blah Microsoft, blah blah blah Corvis, blah blah blah patents, went the conversation at one table.
At check-in, clerks at the Excalibur Hotel were handing out photocopied information packets with information about CES shuttle service. Almost everyone in the long registration line seemed to grab one.
The show is about to start. My press badge allowed me to walk through the convention center this early morning, where the main devices in use are low-tech - dust cloths and vacuum cleaners are sprucing things up as exhibitors get ready for the crowds.
I took a cab from my hotel and rode past the "New York New York" hotel. The early morning sun made for a nice photo. Hotels in Las Vegas are nearly full for the CES show and the rates are high for what rooms you can get.
I watched the local television news last night and the big story was the announcment that the Stardust Hotel will be torn down to make way for a new four-hotel complex. CES was also covered - with a traffic reporter in a helicopter warning Las Vegas residents to stay away from the area around the convention center for the next two days due to the heavy traffic.
The gates are opening so it's time to hit the floor.
After thumb texting my way through a news story about the Bill Gates keynote last night, I headed to Pepcom, aka Digital Experience, a sort of show-within-a-show that purports to hold some of the best stuff that will be appearing on the show floor today.
The drinks and the eats were free, but by the time I got there I was a bit too pooped to completely take in what the booths for TiVo and start-up companies offering digital photo management tools were up to.
The buzz both inside and outside the mini-show belonged to SlingMedia, a company that says it has come up with a set-top box that can be attached to living room cable TV boxes or streaming TV programs to a cell phones. That could be cool but could also be a major bummer for companies that have spent millions trying to do this trick by changing the existing network infrastructures or changing the way today's cell phones are built.
Outside Pepcom, I ran into Timothy Shey, an exec at Proteus, a District-based mobile applications developer. I'd quoted Shey in a recent article about tech guys getting drafted into doing tech support for their families over the holidays. We'd text messaged each other over the course of the day, but basically had given up on meeting last night.
As a CES vet, he knows how crazy the show gets--he'd booked his room a year ago. Shey was slightly jealous of my press pass, I was jealous of his room. Thanks to the weird economics of Vegas during CES, I'm paying more for a room that, ahem, doesn't even offer wireless Internet access(!).
Greetings, by the way, from the floor of a smoky casino where there are four computers chained together off to one far side; the Boardwalk casino had a sign on the street advertising this as an "Internet Cafe."
I am walking in a sea of blinking lights and cables and more screens than I thought could be powered, then a set of what look like small cedar walk-in closets comes up in the side area of the convention center.
They are saunas.
I have to find out why they are selling saunas. The answer, it seems, is that they use infrared technology which the company claims can improve your your health. I've got to say that these look a bit out place but when you open the door the heat rolls out.
(To see video of my interview with the sauna guy, click here.)
Two pleasant surprises from XM: First, new Samsung and Pioneer portable receivers no longer require you to clip a separate antenna wire to a lapel, shoulder, lock of hair, ear or other high-up portion of you or your clothing — they have a much smaller built-in antenna, not much bigger than what you’ll see on many cell phones. (These receivers can also play MP3 and Windows Media files; if you hear a song on XM that you like, you can add it your shopping cart at the Napster music-download store.)
Second, it introduced a thumb-sized module called the Passport -- a miniature, $30 tuner that lets you pay for just one subscription but listen to it on multiple devices (but not at the same time), instead of having to get one subscription per receiver, the current state of affairs. It plugs into a $30 adapter that links to existing XM hardware; future XM receivers will have internal slots for Passports.
Whoa. This is seriously overwhelming.
I've been to the big auto shows in Detroit and New York, and to the bi-annual aerospace show in Farnborough, England, so I thought I knew what to expect at CES.
I was way off.
Even the side halls here are bigger than anything I've ever seen: booths, people, gadgets, screens, boops, bleeps, music, pounding bass, and marketing types with headset microphones literally as far as the eye can see.
What's especially confusing is that there's no cohesiveness to it, no neat displays of Hyundais over here and Ford trucks over there.
Here, it's one booth with headphones and some kind of handheld device, across from another booth with flashing whirligigs, down from another booth with speakers and sound systems, next to... something with cords and glowing screens - hard to say what it is.
It's difficult to take it all in in a meaningful way.
So what is Viiv, anyway?
The new Intel product -- it’s a chip, it’s a system, it rhymes with “five” -- is one of those “convergence” technologies that defines this year’s CES.
Merlin Kister, a consumer PC marketing manager for Intel, gave me a quick tutorial this morning.
“We want this to be an entertainment device,” he said, picking up an ordinary looking TV remote.
The Viiv chip is at the heart of a system designed to marry the computer and the TV. It’s designed to put into products that look good in the living room (same idea behind the curvy new Xbox 360) but also can serve as the heart of the home entertainment/information system.
First, Kister showed me a big LCD flat panel TV that looked ordinary enough but actually had a Viiv-enabled PC built into the back of it. You’d never know; the thing was no more than 5 inches thick. But with the remote, you could watch HDTV and then switch over to computer functions and call up a downloaded videogame, for instance.
Intel has worked with more than 40 different companies and service providers to create a community of products around Viiv. The TV he showed me was a Elonex brand that will be available in the U.K. early this year. Next to it was another flat panel TV connected to a Sony Vaio box that looked like a high-end DVD player. Instead, the box contained the Viiv chip.
With another remote, Kister turned it on instantly -- Viiv makes the computer function as simply as a TV -- then scrolled through a Windows Media menu screen. He picked AOL Music On Demand and could call up videos from that Web service; then he chose “my music” and had access to dozens of CDs ripped into the Viiv’s hard drive. The Sony device contained a 200-disc CD changer, and coupled with the Viiv system you could click on the remote to rip all those discs directly into the hard drive, then access them anytime through the TV screen.
The Sony box will be available in the U.S. in the next few months, Kister said. And with it, mankind will be on its way to the next stage of evolution -- in scientific terms, the Lazboyopithecus stage.
“I don’t have to go to the mailbox, I don’t have to go to the store. I don’t have to leave my couch,” Kister said.
I learned from Palm's Joe Fabris that I am his biggest challenge.
I have an old, what he calls a "12 button phone" and he wants to convince me (and all of you, too, I'm sure) that the new Palm Treo 700W phone will let you do more. It is a cool looking phone, takes photos and video, but I think it will be the integration with Microsoft Outlook that will be the attraction for users. The phone is not cheap, though - almost $400 with a two-year plan with Verizon.
Watch my interview with Joe Fabris here.
I met Sony's latest robotic dog, a friendly creature named AIBO ERS-7. (Aren't these alphanumeric acronyms silly?) AIBO has sensors in his paws and a display on his head that flashes green lights when he's happy and blinks white lights when he's thinking.
AIBO flashed green when I patted his head and white when I told him he was cute. I guess "cute" isn't one of the 100 words and phrases his owner told me he understands.
One gadget I saw today won an award for being female-friendly -- a sports-oriented MP3 player you wear as an armband. Called the PSA612, the device is made by Philips and looks like a blood-pressure monitor.
Along with an FM tuner, it has a whopping 4 gigabytes of storage. It recently hit the market at $179. I'm too much of a slug to buy it, but if I was a workout queen I might consider it.
Continuing the march of ever-larger high-definition TVs, LG Electronics is showing a 102-inch Plasma model here ... but it's just a prototype, like the giant one Samsung showed last year. LG hasn't announce pricing or a release date for its 102-inch monster, which has top-of-the-line resolution at 1080-P.
The biggest HDTV plasma screen on display here that you can actually buy appears to LG's 71-inch model. Then again, every time you reach the next exhibit in the main convention center here, something bigger appears!
From the turning-the-tables Department:
During a demonstration of the Media Center edition of Windows Vista, designed to allow users to enjoy movies, music and pictures from their couch, I asked Microsoft’s Greg Sullivan what he thought of Apple’s new Front Row—which offers some of the same functions on the iMac.
“I think that really sort of validates what we’ve been doing,” said Sullivan.
I’ve heard that before—but only from Microsoft competitors, right after Redmond has announced an upcoming product that duplicates the features of their own software, and which may very well nuke their business model in the bargain.
I just got out of the so-called Smart Home, a modular house set up here in the convention center parking lot. Our videographer Chet and I saw the new line of tap-me faucets Delta Faucet Co. is releasing this year under its Brizo brand.
The kitchen model ($800 to $1,000 when it hits stores in April) lets you control it three ways. First is usual usual joy-stick like wand that you tug on. Next, you can wave your hand under the faucet, which has a newfangled sensor to detect your hand more precisely and turn on the water. Then--this is the new part--it will let you tap the faucet on or off.
I found I had to learn how to tap it just right. Basically, your hand has to linger a second on the faucet -- with a deliberate, not a light touch.
(To see a video of the product being demonstrated, click here.)
A similar tap-on faucet was on display in the lavatory, where there was also a new wall-mounted shower control that lets you heat up the shower water before you get in the shower. (I still don't see what's wrong with waiting 10 seconds for your water to heat up!)
CES is where the electronics stores of the world come to figure out what they’ll be displaying on their store floors in the near future.
“This is the most important show I come to,” said Mike Khalfey, a buyer for an electronics retailer in Britain who has been coming to this show for 20 years. Khalfey said that he’s glad that a onetime rival to the show, called COMDEX, has fizzled out because it means that every company that he wants to check up on comes to this show now.
“Everybody talks about convergence,” he said. “ It’s here, really.”
And how. While major manufacturers take up the largest booths here, every gadget appliance or doo-dad that can be plugged into a wall or attached to something that plugs into a wall is here. In one corner, iPod covers and car stereos, in another electric guitars and keyboard players.
Brothers John and Brandon Stephens had already been at the show a couple of hours before they’d collected about three bags of freebies between them.
Plenty of vendors have freebies at their booths and it's not uncommon for some attendees to hit the show floor in search of free stuff. They mostly had t-shirts so far, but they are hunting bigger game: Last year Brandon, a programmer and consultant, won a $1,000 shopping spree from Creative Labs and John won a Microsoft SPOT watch, which wirelessly downloads weather reports and sports scores from the Web.
“Every year I come here and I can’t believe the things these guys sit in a room somewhere and come up with,” he said of the odd innovations he’s seen in some of the booths here.
He just saw some service that wirelessly connects a home’s lamps to its burglar alarm to the kitchen to just about everything else.
“I mean, really,” he said. “How do they come up with this stuff? These guys must have no lives.”
Paul Otellini, CEO of Intel, unveiled the chipmaker's new dual-core processor for laptop computers, the Centrino Duo, during a keynote speech Thursday. Dual-core chips use stacks of smaller processors, requiring less power and generating less heat than traditional chips.
Otellini said the new Centrino line would be 68 percent faster and use 28 percent less power than the original Centrinos, extending laptop battery life by a full hour.
He and executive vice president Sean Maloney demonstrated a top-of-the-line traditional Centrino notebook versus one with the Centrino Duo; the new one handled simultaneous chores of streaming a TV broadcast, downloading music and downloading digital photos simultaneously, while the older chip froze the TV and digital photo functions (though it sure looked like the old Centrino was downloading the music faster than the new model).
Dell Computer chairman Michael Dell, who was in town to speak at an industry insider session earlier in the day, made an appearance to talk about a new line of Dell laptops that will use the chip to blur the line between desktop and laptop computers.
With all the talk of media coming together, companies coming together and mobile and desktop computing coming together, CES is shaping up as some kind of digital Woodstock - except louder and more confusing.
Internet telephony has quite a presence at the show.
Vonage, an Internet phone service provider, set up free Internet-based phone booths all around the main convention center, but the one I tried in the North Hall was out of order -- and the model hired to bring people into the booth complained she had nothing to do.
There was a lot to see elsewhere. Philips Electronics is among the big companies adding Internet-calling capabilities to cordless telephones, while an assortment of start-ups came touting newfangled Internet calling products.
One $20 device called the Chatterbug should be hitting stores in February. About three inches long and half-inch wide, it plugs into your home phone line (remember those ancient wires everybody used to have in their homes?) and automatically sends any long-distance calls you make to the Internet, diverting them from the traditional phone system. Chatterbug will require a $9.95 a month service fee, too. It claims its selling point is that everything happens automatically, so consumers don't have to do anything but plug it in and dial regularly.
I ran into analyst Roger Kay at an event called ShowStoppers at the Wynn Resort last night -- I mentioned him in my pre-CES articles as being a guy who rents a bike at the show every year so that he can actually get around to all his meetings. Well, it seems that a West coast paper also mentioned this colorful little item and the bike rental shop was overrun with rental requests. They had no idea what was going on, evidently.
In retrospect, Kay said, maybe giving away his trick for getting around town wasn't a great idea. Argh!
The great thing and the frustrating thing about this show is that there are so many things going on. I got a text message yesterday afternoon that Snoop Dogg was about to perform at the XM Radio booth, but I was too far away to get to it in time. No Snoop for me, alas.
I also dropped by Caesar's with the intention of hitting a Microsoft party, but I couldn't deal with the line, especially as I wasn't positive that I was on the guest list and lacked the energy to do the full "Yes, I AM on the list" trick.
The only act I ended up seeing last night was a Prince cover band at my hotel, a band that did the least crazy version of "Let's Go Crazy" that you could ever imagine.
I am not sure how I missed this Thursday, but they have an entire hall filled with cars and any possible electronic device you can put in one. GPS seems big, along with fold-down LCD video screens.
Several companies are showing systems that handle car multimedia. Amps, switchers and all the cables one needs to hook up every device that you can use while sitting in traffic on the Beltway.
Most of the LCD screens are standard definition but I did see a few companies display HD screens for the car and RV.
Our photo editors have pulled together the best photos from the show so far into a gallery. Enjoy!
I haven't made it to the Seiko booth yet to see its new Spectrum watch with a bendable display, but I did see another implementation of E-Ink Corp.'s flexible display technology in the Philips Electronics booth. The Dutch electronics giant is showing two early concept designs of how E-Ink's digital display might roll up and down, or wrap itself around a smaller hard object (see photo at left).
Sony made a little splash here with its new digital book reader, but I think these bendable displays are the ones to watch.
A lot of companies that showed products here last year are back again with improved versions. Like Powergrid Fitness.
Last year, the company showed off gaming exercise machines that gave you a workout while you played video games. They were massive and priced at $1,600.
This year, Powergrid Fitness came toting a slimmed down version -- and announced it will retail for $199 when it hits stores in March.
So what gives? How did Powergrid Fitness slash the size and price so much in one year?
Chief executive Greg Merrill said his company reengineered the machine after BestBuy took an interest -- but said it would have to be a lot smaller and cheaper.
"A lot of the cost was in the structure," Merrill said. "So we re-engineered it, and now we use the player's own body weight as the base. You lift your own body off the chair."
Makes you wonder how much other stuff could benefit from a nudge by a retailing giant, no?
----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- EXCERPT: ----- KEYWORDS: ----- -------- AUTHOR: wpnices1 TITLE: Sony Finds a New CES Hot Spot STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: 0 ALLOW PINGS: 0 DATE: 01/06/2006 02:28:00 PM ----- BODY:At a dinner with some Sony execs Wednesday night, I asked about the company’s new spot on the show floor. After years of taking exhibit space tucked away in a rabbit warren of conference rooms along the central aisle of the convention center, it now has a sprawling area toward the back of the airplane hangar-sized Central Hall.
I was told that getting a good spot in the convention center involves both tenure and money. Spots are given out first to companies that have been there before, making it difficult for Sony to move into one of the prime spots near the center’s entrance. So instead, it took a newly open area toward the back -- but close by the back entrance, where many limos and buses roll up.
Sony apparently expects that traffic to increase, eventually making its new home a bit of a hot spot. It was exactly like talking to somebody who had just bought a row house in a neighborhood on the verge of gentrification, and who has big hopes for what a great place the 'hood will grow into.
I talked with Stephen Keeney from Honda about why they have built the Robot Asimo. They have hopes that the Robot can be sold to the public in about 10 years. They have the Robot moving well but still need to add in more artificial intelligence.
Shortly after my interview, talent and crew from HGTV did a demo with the Robot.
Watch my interview with Stephen Keeney and the Robot Hula Dance here.
Finding a Wi-Fi signal here isn't easy, nor is finding a place to sit. That's why three of our laptop-toting journalists flopped on the floor outside the press room to do a little blogging.
From left to right, they are technology editor Greg Schneider, tech columnist Rob Pegararo and tech reporter Mike Musgrove.
Yahoo honcho Terry Semel flexed his Hollywood muscle during his keynote speech this morning. Talk show host/comedienne Ellen Degeneres came out for some jokes, riffing on how hard it is to use and keep track of all her gadgets. And actor/excited guy Tom Cruise showed up to ... um, I’m not sure why he was there except to plug his new Mission: Impossible movie (they showed the trailer twice, for some reason).
I guess Cruise was supposed to illustrate the Hollywood content that Yahoo offers its users, which Semel emphasized as he announced the new Yahoo Go service.
In keeping with the recurring theme of this year’s CES, Yahoo Go is aimed at helping people manage content across many types of devices, from cell phones to PCs to televisions. And that’s how Semel explained why an Internet guy was speaking at a gadget conference: delivering entertainment and information to make all those gizmos indispensable for consumers.
“Yahoo does not aspire to make gadgets,” he said. “Our aim is to partner with you.”
Many of the mobile audio (and video!) exhibitors in the North Hall have what you could call, putting things as politely as possible, a slight sexism problem.
Few car stereos are too humble to be advertised without a picture of some remarkably healthy-looking young women wearing as little spandex as possible -- or a live model matching that description.
A friend and I were discussing this, and we decided that these companies had obviously been inspired just a little too much by Spinal Tap's "Smell the Glove" album cover.
The Post's Rob Pegoraro and I met at the Panasonic booth, he had a chance to show me the largest plasma TV at CES.
The TV is not for sale, but Rob talks about the current state of the art in plasma TV at the show.
Watch his interview here.
As I walk the show floor what stands out are the things that are low-tech. Yesterday I found saunas. Today as I walked past wall after wall of LCD and Plasma screens, my eye is drawn to a booth featuring old-style phones and radios.
Watch my interview with Vincent Lau of Technosonic here.
The showfloor is a humbling place, particularly if your job is to make sense of all that goes on there. And believe me, there is much that goes on there.
Google took it a step further by testing the self-esteem of some techies here. At its booth, it's offering a scratch off quiz on Google arcana (i.e., "The Gmail feature most recently released was: Free POP access, Mobile interface, or customizable RSS feeds within Gmail"). The quiz is printed on a round paper with six questions, and if you get them all right, you win a Google T-shirt. If you get two correct, a magnet. Below two: nada.
The booth overflowed with people lining up to claim their Google tchotchkes -- compelling me to take the challenge. After all, I write about Google. As a matter of professional pride, I should settle for nothing less than the Google T-shirt. The thought of qualifying for a mere magnet -- or worse, nothing -- put me in private torment.
So I dug in: "Google Video gets content not through submissios of video files, but by crawling the Web." That's false. Otherwise, anyone's uploaded cache of personal home videos might make it to the searchable Web.
One that nearly stumped me: Calculating the year of Gmail Mobile's launch, minus the year of Google's first Mobile launch, divided by the number of ways to access Google Local on your phone. The answer: 1.618.
The most recent Gmail feature, by the way, is mobile interface.
The good news is that I got them all right. (Thus, I get to keep my job.) The bad news was that apparently so many others did, too, that the T-shirt line wasn't worth the wait.
Right across the aisle from Google’s booth was D-Link, a hardware company that makes wireless routers.
“It makes sense for the industry as a whole to bring all the parts together” at the show, said Dan Kelley, director of marketing at D-Link. “All of us hardware guys can get together and make a great connection device, but its guys like Google and Yahoo that drive a lot of things on the consumer end.”
D-Link’s products let consumers wirelessly stream media across their homes. Without services like Yahoo Music, consumers might have less reason to buy their products, he said.
Gracenote, a music download company, has been coming to this show for six or seven years, said the company’s chief technology officer, Ty Roberts.
“Web companies like us want to be built into the gadgets now -- the TV sets, music systems, cell phones — the only way to do that is to have a direct dialogue with the people who make the gadgets,” he said. “That’s what we do here.”
It was the Larry and Robin show.
Google co-founder Larry Page, with his Kermit the Frog voice and shy professor demeanor, used star comic Robin Williams as a personality crutch tonight in his keynote address at the Consumer Electronics Show.
Page's speech was one of the most anticipated events of the week; crowds were turned away from the large theater at the Las Vegas Hilton.
The stage was notably sparse compared to other speeches from earlier in the week, with only a few colored balls for decoration and a couple of tables holding various computers and props.
Things kicked off with a giant video screen featuring a satellite image of the Earth from Google Earth, and as music pounded, the image zoomed in with dramatic detail to landmarks such as the Eiffel Tower, buffalo and egrets on the delta in Zambia, and finally Las Vegas and the very building where the speech was taking place. An impressive display of Google’s ever-expanding power.
Page himself rode out in a robotic car engineered by students at Stanford University. He wore jeans and a white lab coat with the Google logo.
Clutching a crumpled sheaf of notes -- instead of reading from a teleprompter as other speakers had done -- Page began by lecturing the electronics industry for making devices that are complicated and don't work together well.
Why does every gadget have a separate power adapter? Why can't digital cameras zap photos to one another? Page said the industry should learn a lesson from the Internet and allow consumers to make fixes that can improve all devices, governed by a set of common standards.
"We really want to get all this stuff working together. It's just sort of a passion of mine," he said. "I'm gonna just sort of plead with all of you: Let's get the power-supply problems fixed, let's get these devices talking to one another. I think you'd be amazed at the innovation" that would follow.
Page also made pitches for expanding Internet access to the developing world, and for the new Google Pack service that lets consumers download a free package of software for a variety of tasks, such as managing digital photos and online security.
Then the real show got started. Referring to his partner, Sergey Brin, Page said, "It's always been Sergey's fancy that we would have Google integrated with your brain." Now, he said, "we have a human prototype to illustrate this."
A shadowy figure emerged wearing a colorful gadget on his head; it turned out to be Robin Williams.
Acting like a human search engine, Williams riffed on terms thrown out by Page. Most of the schtick was too rapid-fire to take down in a notebook in a dark theater (or too profane for a family blog), but some of it went like this:
"This implant allows me to sync with mobile phones ... I can take a picture" -- he tapped his head -- "and I'm also receiving a fax” -- and Williams reached for the seat of his pants.
Brin: "Firewall." Williams: "It's a condom for your computer."
Guess you had to be there. The crowd ate it up.
Page went on to talk about the new Google Video Store, which allows people to sell video content at their own price, and was joined by CBS chief Les Moonves to talk about the network’s offering of TV shows on the site.
Eventually Williams came back to help Page field questions from the audience. First up: Someone asked when Google will come out with a line of personal computers and an operating system. Page, feigning ignorance: "Is there a rumor about that?" The questioner asked for a date and a price. Williams interrupted: "But don’t you give your things away for free?" The question never really got answered.
Another questioner mentioned recent comments by the head of SBC, the telecom giant now known as AT&T, that it might be necessary to charge companies such as Google a fee for using broadband lines to reach peoples' homes. Page didn’t avoid that one.
The great power of the Internet is its openness and lack of gatekeepers, he said. "Google would've never gotten started if there was an Internet that worked that way. ... I think it would really stifle innovation and be a horrible thing for the world if the Internet worked that way."
Another questioner wanted to know when Google would offer free wireless Internet access nationwide, as it has in its hometown of Mountain View, Calif., and has offered to do in San Francisco. Page said the company considers that effort experimental and will just keep playing with it and see where it leads.
Williams kept questioners on their toes. One guy remarked on Page's casual attire. Williams shot back at him, "Nice haircut," and, "That Gap sweater is sure kickin'."
Another questioner said, "The last guy stole my question." Williams: "That's the Internet, my friend. You think you’re talking to a 24-year-old bisexual named Susan and it's really Ted, a postal worker."
He also ribbed Page, telling him to "hit 'em, Mensa Boy," and commenting on Page's stiff fidgeting: "That was the best white boy dancing I've ever seen."
When another questioner wanted to know if Google would offer more language translations, Williams said the company has "an English-to-English translation available for the president, which is working very well."
A few audience members got up and left as the show ran well past an hour, but Page and Williams kept taking questions until Page noticed he was being flashed a big sign saying time was up. Now, Williams said, it was time to "bring in the show Siegfried and Ted."
All in all, an odd, rambling, unpolished event compared to everything else at CES, suggesting that the consumer electronics world is going to have to brace itself for Google's increasing prominence.
Just in case you'd like to check out all the videos sent from Las Vegas, here are the links:
Pegoraro Discusses Giant Plasma TV
The Hula Honda Robot
Retro Radios
Smart Faucets
Palm's Fabris on the New Treo 700W
Cedar Wood Saunas in a Sea of High-Tech
Rob Pegoraro Talks About CES
Your RV Can Talk to Outer Space
Kodak V570 Camera
Wa-a-a-ay at the back of one of the halls at the Las Vegas Convention Center is a booth for that high-tech consumer electronics powerhouse, the U.S. Postal Service.
"If you click it, we will come," a placard announces. Also, "Prepaid priority mail flat rate envelope."
Exciting stuff.
Looking for slightly unexpected booths is one of the fun parts of CES. Taser International is on hand with a big-rig truck touting how its stun guns are "Saving Lives Every Day."
Brother has a display of cyber-age sewing machines under the in-your-face banner, "#1 in Embroidery." On-hand is a notebook full of home snapshots that have been transformed into intricate embroidered portraits; they are impressive, though the embroidered people's features have a slightly muddied, post-trauma look to them.
Nearby, Excalibur Electronics is showing off an inflatable floating chair that can motor around a swimming pool controlled by two joysticks. Who says high-tech geeks have to sit inside all day?
Toshiba and Canon are demonstrating a new flat-panel TV technology they’ve co-developed, called SED -- short for “Surface-conduction Electron-emitter Display.” It’s supposed to provide flat-screen displays without the issues that LCD and plasma manufacturers have had to work to overcome -- refresh times (the time needed to change the image on the screen), contrast and color depth that can be slower, lesser and shallower than those of old-fashioned cathode-ray-tube sets.
SED does this by adopting the basic technology of a CRT, in which individual phoshor dots on a screen are illuminated by an electron gun at the back of the TV cabinet — but here, each phosphor has its own emitter right behind it. (These emitters came out of Canon’s work with bubble-jet color printers.)
I watched a demonstration of SED that attempted to illustrate such advantages with a series of short clips. For instance, SED’s 100,000:1 contrast ratio and ability to display blacks as true blacks, not dark grays was on display in a shot of a cruise ship steaming along at night; text rapidly scrolled across an image to show off SED’s less-than-1 millisecond response time. (By comparison, a Sharp LCD I saw yesterday had a 1,200:1 contrast ratio and 6 ms response time.)
This video looked impressive -- although I would have liked to see a good plasma and LCD set displaying the same set of clips for a side-by-side comparison. The attendee to my left, however, kept blurting out his appreciation during the demo (“Wow!”). And W.R. Hambrecht analyst Peter Kuo, who researches Asian electronics manufacturing for the San Francisco investment firm and watched the video with me, pronounced it impressive.
Toshiba marketing vice president Scott Ramirez touted one other selling point for this technology afterward: He said it uses one-third to two-thirds less electricity than plasma or LCD sets. Ramirez said the first SED set—a 55-inch model—will arrive sometime this year at a “very premium” price. The technology should get much more affordable in 2007, when Toshiba and Canon move into mass production and plan to introduce a smaller screen.
I finally made it to the Sands Expo area of CES. This is where some of the fun toys are being demonstrated.
One that caught my eye, (and I am sure it is not because we just purchased a piano at my house), is the Piano Wizard. The product teaches you how to play the piano with a video game like interface.
Watch my interview with the David Sipple, president of Allegro Rainbow, the developers of the Piano Wizard, here.
Piano Wizard has been out for over a year for the PC platform but the news from this booth is the interest in this product by Apple computer. Sipple said that Apple has pushed them to get a Mac version out. They plan to release the sofware for the Mac in April.
In the something for everyone category: A Los Angeles company demonstrated the next generation of herbal vaporizers at the show's more techincal section. Vapir showed me how you can heat herbs (that would be eucalyptus, ginger, camomile), then suck the fumes through a clear tube. The eucalyptus, I can report, clears out the lungs. A Vapir representative tells me smoking camomile is calming before bed. The handheld device sells only online, for about $150.
In another corner of the floor, next to the exercise games, I took off my shoes and socks and boarded a combination scale and body fat measure. This is not something I'd recommend doing in a place as public as a trade show. But I am a glutton for punishment, so to speak, so I set down my Diet Coke and -- remembering the chocolate mousse I consumed last night -- set my feet on the metallic tabs, and grabbed hold of some metal handlebars with both hands. The scale, made by Korean firm Jawon Medical, essentially sends a mild electric current through the body. It feels a little cold to the touch, but otherwise ouch-free.
Cool as it may be to break down how many butter-stick equivalents one is carrying in one's body, no wonder Jawon wasn't winning as many spectators as the Dance Dance Revolution interactive game booth and Vapir.
The Post's Leslie Walker told me to check out a new remote controlled helicopter from Interactive Toy Concepts, but by the time I made it to their booth the helicopter had been actually been flown to Hong Kong for another show.
I did get some footage from the company of the new model as well as a demo with James Elson of Interactive Toy Concepts watch as he demonstrates flying the helicopter here.
Sometimes this job is just all about fun. The Post's Yuki Noguchi and I met at the Sands Expo for a few minutes today and she graciously agreed to try out one of the treadmill video game interfaces.
It looks like a lot of fun and I will let you watch Yuki describe it here.
I got a demo of the Slingbox from Jeremy Toeman of Sling Media. It allows video to be sent from almost any device in your house to a PC or, soon, a cell phone anywhere in the world. Sells for about $250, but I can see all kind of neat applications for this box. It worked fine in the convention center but I would want to see how well it works on the congested Internet.
The cell phone app was very slick, but I can see an interesting problem for wireless companies. As they provide high-speed data, anyone with this box and the correct cell phone could bypass the entire video offerings of the cell companies and just watch video straight from home.
This is another technology that can cross the traditional boundaries of market and competition. The CES was filled with them.
Watch my interview with Toeman here.
The Washington Post's Yuki Noguchi has written about cell phones aimed at kids over the past year. As we walked around the Sands Expo Center of the CES, we found a phone that will allow parents to track the location of their kids by sending a simple SMS message to the ChitterChatter phone.
Watch Noguchi explain in this video.
Several people said one device I needed to see was the SkyScout from Celestron. I walked into the Celestron booth Saturday afternoon, just minutes after Jennifer Adams had returned from her presentation at PC Magazine's Last Gadget Standing contest. The SkyScout was one of two devices that won and Adams was very excited about taking top honors.
The device can help you locate one of almost 6,000 objects in the sky using GPS and other technology. She explains what the SkyScout is all about in this video interview.
-- Chet Rhodes
Technology is about saving time or having something that is cool or in some cases both. I think the Scooba from iRobot Corp. is in the last category. The robot can mop a 250-square-foot area, according to iRobot's Matt Palma.
The robot seems to do a pretty good job on the test floor they have set up. I think the main drawback of this robot is it lacks the auto-docking feature of the Roomba vacuuming robot.
IRobot wants you to change the water. That makes sense, but takes some of the fun out of it. So this robot will need some care in adding the cleaner and water and keeping it charged.
Watch a video demonstration of the Scooba by Palma here.
One bit of news for the Roomba Robot hacker community is that iRobot released a guide to hacking your Roomba Robot in December. It only works on more recent Roombas but it will make personalization much easier.
This was my last stop at the show and I am already looking forward to seeing what will change by next year.
Here's an update with links to all the video reports submitted from Las Vegas, including those sent over the weekend:
Mop Robot
Celestron SkyScout
A Phone That Tracks Your Kids
TV Straight to Your Phone
Gaming Treadmill
Interactive RC Helicopter
Piano Wizard
Retro Radio
Pegoraro Discusses Giant Plasma TV
The Hula Honda Robot
Retro Radios
Smart Faucets
Palm's Fabris on the New Treo 700W
Cedar Wood Saunas in a Sea of High-Tech
Rob Pegoraro Talks About CES
Your RV Can Talk to Outer Space
Kodak V570 Camera
