CES

Digital Experience! (the exclamation mark is part of the name, not our invention) seemed like the bigger brother of CES Unveiled, with over 150 companies on display over at Ceasar’s Hotel. Only press was invited to the event which unfortunately only ran 3 hours and conflicted with the Bill Gates keynote address which we also attended. In case you’re wondering why there was a conflict, it’s because Digital Experience! is thrown by Pepcom, a different organization from CEA which hosts CES. We were a little strapped for time here, not even getting to chow down on some of the great spread they had, but managed to talk to a few companies and even found a pretty wicked new software product.

Some of the companies that we spoke with included: Netgear, Sling Media, Palm, Alienware, Belkin, OQO, Microsoft (for their Windows Home Server), Pinnacle Systems, Linksys, and MojoPac. Here the highlights.

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CES 2007: Pepcom’s Digital ExperienceRead More »

Update: If you’d like to see the keynote, Microsoft has a Webcast of it.

For the tenth time in the forty year history of CES, Bill Gates officially opened the show with the keynote speech, which was largely about Microsoft Vista and what it could do. A large portion of the presentation was run by Microsoft Entertainment and Devices Division President Robbie Bach who showed how Microsoft is delivering a new generation of connected experiences, via Vista of course.

Several new products and services were announced including new Windows Vista PCs, previously unreleased Vista features, IPTV-enabled XBOX 360 and an exclusive partnership with Ford that extends the digital experiences to the car. They introduced the Microsoft Windows Home Server that provides a central place to store, protect and access all the digital content in the home. For more coverage of the Microsoft Windows Home Server, check out our coverage of Digital Experience.

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CES 2007: Keynote by Bill Gates – “Connected Experiences”Read More »

Last on the triple of press events on Saturday was CES Unveiled, where approximately 60 companies showed off a handful of their products. Most of these companies had also won a 2007 Innovations award for one or more of their products. The Innovations awards are given out by the CEA for the best engineered and designed products. We can’t say that we say anything that we thought was groundbreaking, but we found a couple little gadgets that we really liked.

We’ll highlight some of the products and companies that caught our eye.

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CES 2007: CES UnveiledRead More »

The prevailing trend the Geeks have noticed this year is that press people suck. This is a generalist statement and this does not apply to all press, but we noticed a few press folks that feel they are entitled.

We noticed some press never feel anything is impressive, but are the first to get in line and demand free press samples. While asking questions, quite a few press members come across as accusatory, aggressive and almost unaccepting in tone. How they get this privilege is beyond me as they are not part of the creative process to bring these new and innovative products to market but somehow they feel entitled to only attack and criticize!

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CES 2007: Press People SuckRead More »

Even though Saturday was pretty much a half-day, it was still pretty tiring, especially with lugging around a laptop, camcorder, camera, other assorted gear and a coat (since it was a 40 degree day in Vegas). [Note to self: get a small tablet or UMPC next time.] We attended the statistics-filled State of the CE Industry address, a presentation of “HD Audio” (which is really just a marketing term), and then CES Unveiled which was sort of a microcosm of the floor show to come.

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CES 2007: Chief Gadgeteer’s Thoughts on CES SatRead More »

We attended a pre-CES show floor sneak peak at the latest trends in high-resolution audio, otherwise known as HD audio, at the High Performance Audio and Home Theater press event. This unique press event seemed more like a music industry CD listening party as several tracks were compared between a downloaded HD audio file from musicgiants.com (24bit 88.2kHz) and a standard iTunes tune (128kbit aac file) including Sympathy for the Devil (Rolling Stones), Temptation (Diana Krall) and a recording of Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto. Also played was an original mono recording of Sloop John B (The Beach Boys) which sounded excellent as well.

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CES 2007: High Performance Audio and Home Theater First LookRead More »

The very first presentation we attended was the “State of the CE Industry Address” which was given by Sean Wargo who is the Director of Industry Analysis for CEA. Sean had a Powerpoint slideshow filled with statistics and charts on growth, trends, etc. and gave his take on things. Shawn Dubravac, a CFA for the CEA gave a brief analysis of the economic side of things. The bottom line was that the consumer electronics industry is alive and well, but then you probably knew that. Read on for some interesting stats on things like sales, growth and % breakdowns.

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CES 2007: State of the CE IndustryRead More »