CES is huge. The tradeshow floor covers three halls (N/S, Up/Down) in the Los Angeles Convention Center; three floors of the Sands Expo Center; and the Hilton Convention Center. There’s no way to cover everything, so there are two approaches to attacking CES: 1) predetermined tactical strikes and 2) total surrender, letting everything wash over you as you devote 2-3 days of just walking the floor. I call the later approach the “outward bound” approach, dumping my co-workers off in the middle of the floor and letting them find their way back with a compass (or, more appropriately, a key-chain sized GPS device connected to their cell phone, like the ones seen below).

JIP
The big take away from the largest tradeshow in the nation? Hardware manufacturers are willing to make just about anything that that uses electrons moving around and can bought without a purchase order and consumers are looking to be entertained, create, communicate, and connect in many, many different ways.

What’s impeding innovation is Juice and IP (or, what I’m calling, JIP), not consumers and not the manufacturers, who will make whatever the consumers want the way they want it.

IP issues abound as more devices connect and share. The most telling is the juxtaposition of these two ads in the program, one from digitalfreedom.org that advocates consumer fair use of content (an overlay) and one from Deloitte on protecting, managing, and monetizing IP:

Fuel Cells

With a slight nod to the hydrogen economy of the future, a few companies announced fuel cells at CES: Jaboo, Toshiba, and Samsung. A fuel cell is an electric generator that uses hydrogen as its fuel. It’s a replacement for a battery, which is essentially a small electric reservior. One scenario is that when you buy a desk lamp 20 years from now, you will not need to plug it into a wall, it’ll get its power from a fuel cell…and there’s enough fuel to last five years, so you may never need to worry about replacing it.

It’s Curtains for Wires
As technology become more embedded in our lives (eg: is there really someone over 20 who doesn’t own a cell phone?), it will tend to become more invisible. One example are all the wireless protocols for connecting devices that go beyond bluetooth. In talking with collegues, we came to a time frame fo about five years before you’ll many DVD players, stereo systems, computers, TV’s, etc. that connect to each other wirelessly. However, there are products that do so now.

The Industry Still Doesn’t Know What To Do With Gamers
With the downsizing of E3, the gaming industry is struggling to find it’s own identity. That was evident in the World Series of Video Gaming Tent, which was not as crowded as the general show floor. Games are still being used as a primary example for showing off hardware, such as Intel’s Duo Core processors, but along side all the other entertainment options in the world, gaming doesn’t seem to pack the punch it does with its own show. It’s easy for people to keep in thie box it’s trying to bust out of. If only Nintendo had a booth so all the women at teh show could play with the Wii and the DS…

Second Life gets a small boost at the show, with IBM showing store environments for Circuit City and Sears in-world. While IBM announced a $10 million collaborative initiative, which includs Second Life, the consisten message I get from all the IBM’ers I talk to is that SL is just one of many, many projects in that $10 million. When I press them on collaboration tools, I don’t hear much. So either, they’re being very tight-lipped, or they’re not actively pursuing collaboration tools at this time. With the exception of 3D building, other common types of collaboration tools are hard to make in SL, including: shared whiteboards, filesharing, VOIP (although I predict that will change soon), etc.

More to come…