CES 2010, the Consumer Electronics Show put together by the CEA officially opens its doors on Thursday in Las Vegas, NV. However, many press events kick off today at the show, so stay tuned as we bring you the most important news and new gadgets.
Here are a few more photos from our time blogging at the NBC Universal booth at CES. Here I am chatting with Bill Hartnett, Senior VP at NBCU, who was kind enough to take time out to discuss why NBC feels it’s important to be present at a trade show such as CES.
Chief Gizmateer twittering away. 🙂
NVIDIA is touting its new Ion platform as they’ve demonstrated how it can be used to make the world’s smallest Vista capable premium PC. By plugging the Ion board into a case that is just slightly larger than the board and adding a hard drive, the PC is complete.
What’s more interesting is that the Ion with its GeForce 9400 (with built-in North- and Southbridges) coupled with an Intel Atom processor can be used to power even smaller netbooks that can push 1080p HD video and 7.1 surround sound audio via HDMI.
This video shot at CES shows how small the board is:
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CES 2009: NVIDIA Ion platform makes for smallest PCRead More »
Every year the Geeks go to CES happen upon a couple small but interesting gadgets. Last year we ran into Guitar Rising, this year we found a company enthusiastic about saving your plants called Easy Bloom.
Easy Bloom consists of a gadget that measures and collects various environmental variables and a database of over 5,000 plants in their database. Utilizing the collected data and comparing to the database, the right plants can be chosen for the right locations or a plant problem can be diagnosed.
The Easy Bloom is available from Amazon for about $60. If you have a black thumb or if you have a problem area or plant, you have to check out Easy Bloom.
Jon Accarrino and NBC Universal were kind enough to host us at their blogging booth again this year. NBC certainly stepped it up another notch after their first appearance at CES last year. The booth is even bigger and they aired even more live TV segments from right here in the Las Vegas Convention Center. Also nice for us bloggers was the larger blogging section, the This year, they’ve also featured Microsoft Surface Tables which visitors can play with. Nice touch.
The NBC Universal Booth
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Instant-On computing environment platforms seem to be everywhere at CES. We ran across DeviceVM at ShowStoppers just a day or two after talking with the Hyperspace folks at Digital Experience.
While Phoenix recently released Hyperspace, DeviceVM’s Splashtop software has been shipping since mid 2007 and is embedded on millions of notebooks, desktops, web-centric netbooks and nettops and other devices on manufacturers including ASUS, Acer, Intel, Lenovo and HP.
Splashtop is known as an Instant-On platform and loads and is ready to use in about 6 seconds. The Splashtop application environment is built on Linux. In addition to the Web browser, it includes Skypeâ„¢, IM, media playback tools, and PIM applications. The environment can be extended with native or web-based applications.
For CES, DeviceVM and Lenovo expanded the range of quick start netbooks to include the IdeaPad S10 netbook.
Released in early October 2008, tikitag attempts to bring the online and offline world together by tagging real world object which, when scanned, will run an online application. Scanning involves touching the real-life item to a Near Field Communications (NFC) RFID scanner hooked to your computer which then executes an event on your computer such as dialing a number in Skype or loading a URL.
tikitag runs the Application Correlation Server (ACS) that provides remote tag management via web-interface allowing users to create associations of the appropriate actions with the RFID tag. tikitag includes an open platform via API (web services using SOAP and REST) for 3rd party application developers and geeks.
tikitag opens up NFC technology via an application platform that is available to consumers and businesses who are interested in using, sharing and creating NFC applications. The core element tikitag manages is the network-based Application Correlation Server, which monitors and launches the right actions in the right context whenever an NFC tag is touched with an NFC device.
The first demographic of users for tikitag were R&D companies interested in RFID but has spread to the geeky consumer over the holiday season. I wouldn’t mind playing with tikitag, but after a couple of weeks my interest would wain. The value for consumers will be in families where geeks can setup their non-techie family members to automate techie tasks such as calling a family member via Skype. tikitag will probably see more success with commercial applications such as tagging badges at a conference, but at least consumers can play with NFC RFID technology starting at $50 for a reader and 10 tags. Additional tags are $30 / 25 tags.
Here is one of those new monitors that will work with the nVidia GeForce 3D Vision glasses. The FuHzion VS2265wm is a 22″ 1680×1050 LCD monitor that has a super fast 120Hz refresh rate, a 3ms response and DVI-D dual link interface.
Available for $399 in late January.
While Phanfare has been around for a couple years, Andrew Erlichson was showing off Phanfare Photon which turns your iPhone into a wireless digital camera storing images on your Phanfare account. The iPhone application also supports full album viewing and management experience on the iPhone.
Phanfare allows users to upload from a camera, iPhone, the web or your favorite desktop organizer (soon to include Picasa on a Mac). You can then share your photos and videos on an iPhone, Phanfare’s full-screen slideshows, print to books, cards and DVDs or your monitor could become a picture frame. Phanfare even has a Facebook applications that allows you to show your photos and video albums to your Facebook friends.
Finally, utilizing your Phanfare account you have safe and secure online storage of your video and photos, album security and privacy, fullsize archival originals. Phanfare uses Amazon’s S3 storage and provides free storage up to 1GB and unlimited storage at $54.95 per year.
Hyperspace by Phoenix Technologies Ltd (the BIOS folks) was represented at Digital Experience and the Geeks received a demo. Hyperspace provides instant-on/instant-off capabilities to use a limited number of “purpose-driven” applications including immediate access to the Internet (web browser), calendar, e-mail and a couple extra small apps.
Besides providing instant-on/instant-off computing, Hyperspace provides smart connectivity that activates the best network source (wired then wireless), longer battery life of 25%-35%, security due to a private operating system and applications can only be updated or added if approved and owner or audited by Phoenix and Phoenix mentions uptime as an additional benefit in case Vista fails.
The HyperSpace instant-on/instant-off experience for the consumer is immediately available for download in two versions at www.hyperspace.com. HyperSpace Hybridâ„¢ is available for $59.95 annual license or $149.95 for three years and allows the user to toggle back and forth between the two operating system environments reducing batter consumption by more than 25% when in the HyperSpace environment. HyperSpace Dualâ„¢ is available at $39.95 annual license or $99.95 for three years and is designed for both Windows Vista and Windows XP systems that do not have virtualization enabled at the chipset level by Intel and AMD. The difference between Dual and Hybrid is that Dual user can only being in one environment at a time (either Windows or HyperSpace).
While an interesting concept if you want to be on the web within 10 seconds of boot, the Geeks have opted not to install this software…
