CES2008
I have some assorted CES links I neglected to share the other day but I'm trying to catch up on my Web reading (that is what Clicked is about after all) so here's a bit of what I clicked.
Gizmodo's stunt at CES would almost be funny if the stakes weren't so high. They used some of those universal TV-turner-offers to randomly shut off videos displays at the Consumer Electronics Show. I can understand the urge since there is probably no other more gratuitous display of video screens - imagines millions of square feet of the Best Buy TV section. But the whole point is the TVs and what they're displaying. And more than that, companies have
paid a lot of money to be there to display them. And even more than that, they stand to make or lose a lot of money depending on how those displays are received. And on top of it all, thousands of people have very limited time, energy and attention to spread around the show so any down time is especially costly.
I like the idea of using those universal turn-off remotes for when you walk into a bar and no one is talking and all eyes are gobbed on the TV - when TV is infringing upon what should be a social situation. Even interrupting sports viewing makes a statement of sorts. I'm not sure I see the statement in the Gizmodo stunt.
How to actually win a fist fightMr. Potato Head makes octopus pal - I know animals in zoos are given stimulation like this to keep them healthy and active but I wouldn't have guessed an octopus would have the capacity for play.
How to talk to girls at parties - (There's an audio link at the bottom if you don't want to read it.)
NOTE: Usually it's a pain in the butt that I often skip over obvious instructions and introductions when I see a page of text and just jump into the reading. In this case it worked well for me because it gave the piece extra intrigue. If I'd noticed the big banner at the top I might not have bothered. I'm trying not to say more so you have the same chance. It's a relatively long piece of text so click it when you have ten minutes or so and yes, "girls" can click too.
What I was expecting from the above link was something more like this: How to Have Less Awkward Conversations:
Assuming Rapport - "Assuming rapport" is such great advice for doing anything social I can't recommend it highly enough. "You simply pretend that you are meeting one of your best friends." Of course, don't act like you're closer than you are and kiss a stranger on the mouth and ask to borrow money, but if you trick your brain into thinking you're talking to a friend, you'll relax a lot, your mind will loosen up, and the person you're talking to will feel more comfortable. That's the best "how to talk to girls" advice I know.
Every now and then I click something that gives me the sinking feeling that I've been out of the loop on a major Web development. I'm embarrassed to say
I hardly know anything about ARGs. And even knowing what I don't know isn't going to help me much in explaining it. ARG means Alternative Reality Game and from the descriptions in this entry it sounds like the kind of viral advertising that leaves you interested in the content but not quite sure what they're promoting. Like remember that video of the UFOs that turned out to be a video game promotion? Imagine that with multiple parts and fake sites and blogs that keep the questions going. That's the alternative reality. This piece is full of links to examples - almost none of which are familiar to me so I'm going to have to spend some time clicking in here to get caught up.
You suck at Photoshop is a Photoshop lesson with a twist. If you don't use Photoshop, give it a try anyway.
Number 2 is also funny (in the same way, so that's assuming you thought the first one was funny) but
NOTE: a curse or two.
"Do blacks actually spend more on
consumerist indulgences than whites?" The inspiration for this piece is Bill Cosby's criticism of black people buying expensive sneakers but what immediately came to mind was the Chris Rock bit on buying fancy rims for your car. The short version is that people keep up with (and try to impress) the Joneses as part of human nature but if you're not living next to any Joneses and instead you have the more wealthy Smiths for neighbors, the Smiths are so far out of your league that you don't try to compete or impress them and therefore you spend less on conspicuous "signals" of wealth.
"As of November,
Countrywide was the second largest online advertiser spending a whopping $57.6 million on online advertising, according to Nielsen/Netratings." I've seen seeing the CNBC breaking news banner about Bank of America getting ready to buy Countrywide for what seems like two days now but the significance to me didn't resonate until I read this piece. It's a good illustration of how bad financial news can cascade through the economy.
At the rate people are dropping out of the primary races
this game may be obsolete soon. I thought it was just a silly video about the candidates doing Kung Fu but the video is actually an introduction (which you can skip when it gets annoying) to a Street Fighter style game.
Welcome to Clicked. If you're not familiar with this blog, usually I post links and descriptions of sites around the Web in an effort to track online trends. But for the next 26 entries I share my picks of what I saw that was interesting at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week. The posts stretch across the next three pages so don't stop when you reach the bottom of the page.
For all of my cynicism about the press event after the first day of the show, the exhibitors were not corporate conspirators but interesting and enthusiastic up-and-comers. One of my favorite items of the whole trip was the Arantix bike frame from
Delta 7 Sports. It's made of carbon fiber and kevlar but draws its strength from the geometry which they call
IsoTruss. This frame is so light, I swear my cell phone is heavier. The rep said the frame itself would retail for 7 grand and a complete bike will cost $12,000. I'll never own one but as I said to the rep, if they get picked up in something like the
Robb Report they'll sell them faster than they can make them and be jillionaires by this time next year.
Technologically enhanced furniture was everywhere at CES. Lots of massage chairs and gaming chairs with built in speakers. There was also a segment of interactive chair (more
real virtuality) that was meant to make your television viewing more immersive by shaking you with bass notes.
The Buttkicker is an external system you can put under the leg of your couch that will rumble you with every explosion and gun shot. I sat in a chair that had the system built in. It was comfortable and kind of fun but I'm not sure I'm missing not having one.
I took this shot of the
i-Fi chair because it reminded me of
the Maxell ad (at the time it was blasting Led Zepellin's Black Dog). The rep roped me into sitting in it for a while. This uses the audio signal as opposed to a motor like the Buttkicker. It also has a range of twirly knobs set into the arm rest to control how much and in what manner you want to vibrate when the jet plane flies across the screen.
Something I've seen as a trend in tech generally is an effort to unite our various toys into a single interface/login/controler/phone number/e-mail address. There were a few examples at the show but one that had an impressively flashy display was the
X Lobby. it's really billed as an entertainment system because it can control all of your various media inputs but the screen that caught my eye shows live video of each room in your house and lets you control the temperature and lights. It has a touch screen or a remote control and it all works through that black box there in the lower right. The guy told me they go for 4 grand but you get a thousand bucks off if you buy at the show before the end of the week.
I mentioned the volume of video cameras being offered at CES in an earlier entry but here are a couple of stand-outs:
In case you were curious how they do those "street view" maps, one look at the Tele Atlas truck should answer all of your questions.
The shot below is of a subsidiary of GE. I remembered the GE part so I could disclose the relationship (GE owns NBC) but I forgot to note the actual company. That's not the point so much anyway. The point is the extent to which video culture is being pushed at CES. The idea here is to put these cameras up all over your house and yard, even in the dog house. You can then monitor everything from that small screen on the second shelf.
The celebrities at CES are a large part of their marketing but I only ran into a few and half the ones I did see were NBC people. Then again, I wasn't really looking for celebrities and I still managed to find a few so that's a pretty good hit rate.
There was a massive throng gathered in the LG area with their attention turned toward a large box draped with a red sheet. Wow, I thought, an actual, literal unveiling of something. so I wormed my way closer and waited for the big reveal. Then the marketing lady got on stage and told us there'd be a special guest.
And theeennn they played the trailer for Iron Man. I thought for sure Robert Downey, Jr. was going to walk out. No such luck. It was
Jon Favreau, the movie's director. And the unveiling was of the first Iron Man suit in the movie.
Later in the day I wandered into the
Gibson tent. Just as a performer was coming on stage.
Natasha Bedingfield. (
MySpace) I was surprised at how easy it was to just walk right up and take pictures.
It's cheating (and usually not allowed) to take pictures of famous NBC colleagues but since the NBC Universal booth was out in the open and I wanted to show you what it looked like anyway, here are the people I ran into while I was there:
Nancy O'Dell was there to participate in the launch of the
new Access Hollywood site.
CNBC's Maria Bartiromo might be the hardest working media person down there. It's easy to forget that CES is as much a business show as it is a tech show. She was interviewing business luminaries in the late afternoon on Monday and when I came in at 9 a.m. on Tuesday she was already there doing more interviews.
Ring mouse! (I have no idea.)
Not only did a lot of the attendees have accents (indicating a strong international presence), but some of the presenters barely spoke a word of English. I'm not the kind of person who gets angry over that but it did make for some awkward exchanges.
It's a little hard to make out but the shot below is of electronic cigarettes and cigars. I asked the guy what they were for and if they were meant to serve as an aid to quit smoking. I asked the question three times, three different ways in as simple language as I could but the best I got was, "It's similar like smoking." So there you go.
Another one that still has me stumped was an amalgam of companies who put together a remote house-monitoring system that allows you to check on your house and have a robot perform tasks for you in response to a call from your cell phone. There are four sites listed on the info sheet (I'll upload a picture later tonight):
Toshiba,
Roboporium,
Transvirtual, and
FTL but what I don't understand is if you can already control your house through Toshiba's Feminity, what does the robot do?
The crowd around the LG cell phone watch display was so eager you'd think they actually did something. My own interest wasn't really piqued until the employees started turning away people with cameras. "No photos please, no photos please." I guess because it's a concept product they don't want to spread too many details? -or it was just a game of simple showmanship.
Later an NBC colleague named Scott Budman came by to interview an executive about the watches. I pointed out my NBC affiliation to a publicist and was allowed to photograph the interview.
The folks at
Holide had no problem with me photographing their mp4 watches. Eight gigs of flash memory and remarkably light.
The coolest watch technology I saw at the show was a GPS watch from
Garmin. The functionality is impressive enough, tracking your path, guiding you on a pre-set course, tracking your pace, etc. but what's really neat is that it doesn't work with buttons. The bezel feels your touch (it reminded me of the touch pad on a laptop) so depending on how you touch it you access different functions and menus.
You may recall my occasional complaint about the materials used to house electronic devices. Usually, the only time we see wood used in the construction of a gadget is when it's a personal modification or kit. So I was keeping an eye out for alternative materials as I wandered the show and did find a few examples.
Wooden frames on digital photo displays were common.
Though I don't have a photo, what reminded me of this whole category was seeing a display of
USB 2.0 ExecCams. Some are even made in marble. The hardware comes from
ANC.
Below, wooden headphones and ear buds from
iNN.
SanDisk was displaying a line of flash drive jewelry made with precious stones set in gold. Hand made and heavy as heck.
Interestingly, a class of gadget using natural material housing is what might be called "nostalgia," a name I saw on one booth. More like "retro" than "steam punk," there were a number of examples of digital audio systems built into an old-time-looking radio or cabinet box.
Burning records to CD is part of the point of these units.
I wonder if the nostalgia theme for audio equipment is rooted in a the general audiophile snobbery that says music sounded better before digital. On the extreme end of audiophile throwback I found a few booths using
vacuum tubes. The first time I saw it I thought it was just a cosmetic gimmick and like a fool I reached out and touched one of the tubes, burning the back of my finger. Hopefully no one buys the one with my knuckle hair cooked to the top of it. In a twist that I think would make some audio fanatics scoff, there were even tube amplifiers with iPod docks. What makes this a silly proposition is that it's pretty widely recognized that music sounds terrible in the mp3 format, so plugging one into an expensive system would be fruitless. By the way, when I say "expensive one" I mean I heard one woman tell a visitor to her booth that her tube units would retail for 7 grand.
