Sights and Sounds of Multimedia
By George Harding
CES …
The Consumer Electronic Show is held the first week in January each year in Las Vegas, and is the biggest show of its type in the United States. This year there were 150,000 attendees and 2,500 vendors, both numbers exceeding what had been expected. It’s nice to see attendance continuing to climb each year, but having so many people milling around makes it difficult to maneuver from one booth to another.
One thing that I find hard to understand is how all the freight gets to and from the Convention Center. If you visit the CC a day early, you will see an array of panels, supports, derricks and so on. It’s hard to believe that this mess will ever turn into the orderly display that appears the next day. The wooden crates that all this display stuff comes in gets stacked neatly outside the CC. All the displays come down and are repacked the day after the show closes. Presumably, the crates get shipped to the next show or back to home storage. The shipping companies must make a fortune!
The two predominant themes of this year’s CES were connectivity and large TVs.
All the large companies touted some sort of enhanced connectivity, whether wireless or wired. You will be seeing TVs, sound systems, MP3 players, PCs, cell phones and other equipment items able to connect with each other and play each others files. TVs will have media slots for your camera’s flash drive, so that you can play a slide show of your pictures without using (or even having!) a PC. You’ll see also a USB port in everything, including your TV, allowing any kind of device to be connected and accessed.
There seems to be a race to see which company can build and market the largest screen TV. Before the show, one company announced the largest plasma TV in the world at 82. At the Panasonic press conference, the chairman announced their new 103 plasma TV! Obviously, it’s a mistake to pre-announce that you have the largest anything in the world, for someone will surely upstage you!
When you think about it, though, how many 103 plasma TVs are likely to be sold? Probably not many and while I’m sure they are expensive (the price wasn’t announced), the income would be small compared to the income from selling smaller sized TVs. If the goal is profit, such huge products would not seem to help the bottom line all that much.
One other line of products was more prominent this year than in the past, home theater installations. This must be getting more popular and, perhaps, more affordable. We have had available for several years surround sound setups that enhance viewing DVDs. The idea is to get a presentation more like the commercial theaters, with sound coming from all directions as the action in the movie changes. A part of such an installation is the speaker system, two or more of which are designed to be behind you. This has involved wires trailing along the floor or wall from the DVD player or sound system out to the speakers. Companies have finally realized that the wires are not wife-friendly and have turned to wireless speakers. Since this involves providing power in a different way and transmitting the sound signal wirelessly, these speaker systems will be more expensive, but more appealing.
www.cesweb.org
Although CES is all about the booths displays on the various CC floors, there are also press conferences at which a company can describe to press people their new products, along with text descriptions and pictures. These are sometimes effective, especially for the larger companies. For smaller or unknown companies, the ShowStoppers conference is a more suitable method of getting your message across to press people.
ShowStoppers …
This event must be successful, because this was the 14th year it has been held! I don’t know how many press people were present, but there were about 120 vendors showing their stuff to us. One very nice touch from the sponsors was not only a nice canvas bag to carry all the stuff picked up at the booths, but also a flash drive with all the press kits from the presenting vendors. What a space (and weight!) saver! Thanks Steve Leon!
The room was huge, but didn’t seem crowded. Some of the vendors are very well known, such as Kodak and InFocus. Others are less well known. At the CES booths, you rarely get the inventor or originator of the idea that led to the product. At SS, however, you often meet the President of the firm or the person that came up with the new idea. It’s interesting to talk with such people.
AskMeNow (www.askmenow.com) has an interesting and different product. You can call a number, send an email or send a text message asking any question and receive an answer within a short time. I was told that 3 or 4 minutes was a typical answer time, but I suppose that would depend on the complexity of the question. Certain questions will be answered free (stocks, weather, sports scores, movie times and others) and others require a fee of 49¢. The software for a mobile device can be downloaded for free. Use this for all those questions your kids ask you that you can’t handle!
Avvenu (www.avvenu.com) is a service that gives you access to files and documents on your home or office computer from your web-enabled mobile device or computer. You can send a file from your home computer to any place else on the Internet through your Palm hand-held, for example, as well as with many other device. A recent addition to the service is the availability to search for the file you want on your computer using Google Desktop Search. The service is free and can be use for any sized transfer.
Cellfan (www.cellfan.com) allows you to personalize your mobile device, desktop or laptop computer with vinyl skins of top brands, sports figures, college logos and much more. If you’re a fan of the Lakers, for example, you can let the world know about it by applying a skin to your cell phone. The skin has a glossy finish and gives an additional level of protection to the finish of your device. The skin can be easily removed, does not damage the surface of your device and can be replaced with another skin whenever you choose. Costs range from $13 to $25.
CyberDefender (www.cyberdefender.com) is a multi-purpose threat detector which identifies suspicious files and rates their seriousness. The most serious threats are sent to the CD server for propagation throughout their network, thus getting solutions to users more quickly that other methods. The cost for the service is unknown at this time.
Iolo (www.iolo.com) is a deleted file recovery tool that works not only on your hard disk, but also on flash and digital camera media, DVDs, CD-ROMs. It can recover not only deleted files, bur also music, email, photos and more. Price is about $40, but a full trial copy of the software is available for download.
muvee Technologies (www.muvee.com) has software that analyzes your home movie footage and creates a stunning professional-looking movie complete with a sound track you select. You will be amazed at the result! You can obtain somewhat different results by selecting a theme for the resulting movie. Current price is about $75.
More to come in future articles.
www.showstoppers.com
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