CES 2009, Friday

At the intel booth, they had a circular display with glass panel displays right out of the Minority Report. To demonstrate the speed of their I7 processor, you can point to an object on the screen and move it around. This is similar to what Microsoft was showing across the aisle on a monitor. For a shared virtual workspace, this should be a winner. However there seem to be some bugs.

While at MS, two gentleman at the next display were both pointing at the screen trying to do things. They crashed the system. Apparantly the max number of touch points that the system will recognize is two. If you go wild with many touch points, the system eventually overloads. Since my first thought at the Intel booth was along the lines of the shared desktop a la Terry Winograd at Stanford, this wouldn't work. Instead of a matrix read of the touch points, the technology will need to be something more like capacitance so many simultaneous touch points can be accepted.

SWAG
Given the economy, it is no surprise that the swag is less this year. Some people live for that stuff but how many trinkets do you need in one life? But one handout struck me. Someone was passing out small bottles of hand sanitizer. Now since they don't have their name on it, I don't know who. But wouldn't this be a perfect item for Symantec?

At the Intel booth, one of the more interesting items was a high-end machine designed for the retail market. To deal with the cooling issues, they have encased the entire machine in a fluid that is circulated with a pump. Apparantly they had tried mineral oil in an earlier prototype but it was too viscous and not friendly with some of the components. This fluid is not dissimilar but proprietary. It has a clear panel and blue lights in it. While the specs give it a drool factor for anyone who is a high-end gamer, it looks like something more intended for prestige and wow than as a solution for a problem. With a retail price that bottoms out at $3700 and can go as high as $10,000 fully loaded, this is not destined for too many teen ager's bedrooms, no matter how indulgent their parents.

When HD isn't enough
Panasonic was hawking standards above 1080i. They were showing several monitors which had resolutions up to 4x that standard. I couldn't see the difference and without source material I wonder what advantage there would be.

Benefit Denial as Theft Deterence
In the CES Today newspaper, they were talking about new packaging for BluRay disks. Since retailers are continually concerned about inventory shrinkage, anything that will help them gets attention. The latest concept is to require activation of the product, either at the POS or at home via the internet. If Comcast and AT&T ever deliver on their high-bandwidth products, why would we even care about packaging any more?

High Design
Like an island of calm and sanity in the hubbub of the floor, Memorex had a booth which was focused on high-design. In a pristine white environement with products lovely to behold, they were promoting their design esthetic more than anything else. But for me they give design a bad name since it is that artsy-fartsy type with inscrutable controls and minimalistic appearance. They are more akin to the monolith in 2001 than consumer electronic devices. It feels condescending as if you need to be in the know to appreaciate their products.

Bug Labs
For a second year, Bug Labs is back with in production products. Their concept is to have a roll-your-own kind of consumer product. With GPS module, audio module, keypad module, display module, FM tuner module and perhaps others I've forgotten, you plug 4 things into a base and you get a complete product. Later when you needs change, you reconfigure it. It makes a dandy toy but I'm not sure it will be a viable product.

USB drives
One of the obvious design flaws I see with USB drives is that they protrude from the laptop and are highly vulnerable if your laptop slips. You can easily loose the drive, the socket or potentially you motherboard given the leverage inherent. My presentation mouse has a small extender for a USB which mitigates, but doesn't remove this vulnerability. While I want cheap USB drives, I'd still like to see one that offers some flex at the plug to reduce this risk.

It's a wireless world afterall...
Our response to the paperless world of the web has been an incredible increase in the amount we print at home. Now with everything going wireless, we seem to have a proliferation of wires around the house. At night the cell phone needs to be plugged in, also the headset, the PDA, and an endless list of other devices. We need to run wires for the speakers in a 6.1 home theater, for the cable and lights. One company, Flatwire, is showing a new product that uses the same ribbon cable methods found inside computers to solve this problem. You can glue these onto walls and paint right over them to provide low voltage lighting or speaker cabling.

Another solution to powering remote controls comes from PowerCast. These people have a way to provide a trickle charge to a device within a few feet of a base station. They brought out a line of glowing xmas tree ornaments using the technology. Unlike some other solutions which are designed for one-to-one arrangements such as a power mat, they are focusing on one-to-many such as remote controls or lighting. There is some potential for this in the hospitality industry which is grappling with multiple remote controls and the labor to continually refresh the batteries. They offer a tray for the maid to place all the controls. While in the tray they will get a trickle charge giving a maintenance free device for the length of the shelf-life of the battery.