A Barking Dog

Convergence, video on demand, content anytime, anywhere, on any device. 24/7/365 always on, anything you want. Unless of course it’s one of the most anticipated keynotes in the biz. Among the thousands of display pieces jamming the Las Vegas Convention Center with the so called always connected digital lifestyle it’s hard to escape the irony that one of the largest conventions in the world is not able or willing to broadcast one of the most anticipated keynotes of the session, if not the industry. That would be Larry Page, co founder and President of Google. If you don’t know who Google is, Google ‘em and find out. A lot of the reason that I attended the 2006 CES show is to get a chance to see these sorts of keynotes in real time. That and the fact that now that I live here it’s a good way to kill a week for cheap. As long as you don’t eat in the LVCC concession area.

Friday, the second day of the show not only had the afternoon keynote by Page, but Terry Semel, currently the chairman and CEO at Yahoo. If you don’t know who Yahoo is, Google ‘em to find out. Semel had the morning keynote and I’m only a good morning person in the early part of the morning. Say from midnight to 5 am or so. I was interested in hearing what Semel had to say but not so much to get up and mobile by the 9 am start time. I figured I’d get up just before, make some breakfast, do some email while watching the keynote streamed to me then hit the show late morning. Except I couldn’t find it online, convergence, video on demand, content anytime, anywhere, on any device, 24/7/365 always on, anything you want. I knew that some kids would blog it and there might eventually be some sort of Webcast so I was OK not getting it for a few hours.

The Page keynote, I really wanted to see though I would have to settle for the overflow rooms at the show. Only a couple of thosand people out of the estimated nearly 150,000 would be able to see it live, in the theater of the man who writes the songs the whole world sings in the hotel named after the waify blonde chick with the little dog. Or is that a monkey? (technically Bruce Johnston wrote the song, but that would bummer my reference) The Page appearance had quite a buzz. Everyone was talking about it all week. CES even sent me (and 150k of my closest new pals) a reminder at 10 am, day of to remind me about it and inform me of the locations of the overflow room. When I found my way to that part of the show, about 10 mins prior to the start time it was assholes to elbows. Nothing in the advertised rooms and a line out the theater, through the casino and down the hall. And that was just people wishing to get in if there were noshows. The supposed overflow rooms were being set for other events. I did happen on staff member saying that said the only overflow was in a tent in the parking lot that was temporary home to some hospitality areas. Which happened to be about a 1/4 mile back in the direction from which I just came. The guys running this show are pretty good, particularly for the scale and magnitude of the show so I have no idea how this got so screwed up.

Several hundred of us were headed that way. When I got to the tent, it was already packed. There were four or five TVs in the Intel lounge, and a smattering of TVs in the Freescale (they used to be the Motorola chip division) Lounge area across from the AOL booth. Just after start time and it hasn’t started but the tent was getting packed. We can hardly see the Google Zeitgeist rolling preshow with what I’m ASSuming are real time depictions of search terms. There are several other realtime reports of what happened after the event started. I’ll refer to Engadget’s real time transcription (with pictures). What happened next in our little group, now with too many people to really see or hear what was going on wasn’t a fun time. We were packed in the back of this tent and the position of the displays made it such that the majority of people in our group had to stand in the aisle to see. Apparently some sort of fire code violation as they removed us from the asle. Err, then why did they put the displays there in the first place? It started and we couldn’t hear anything. The audio in our area was provided by what looked to be a couple of JBL Control 1s on some truss in the AOL booth behind us. They did however, adjust the audio within the first 30 secs or so to bring it to a listenable level, though the distortion was into double digits at that point. At least we could hear him. About 10 mins into it, we lost video but not audio. Then the hard rock band in the Gibson tent next door started. At least those that ran the sound had the fortitude to adjust it again, alas more distortion. Someone in the crowd yelled something to the effect of “it’s ok, they’re showing video clips and don’t have clearance”. Well, no. We still had audio and Page was just going through some standard dog and pony. Besides, we had a feed of the IMAG from the room, not a program feed of the included vids and slides. And at times when that does happen, the vidiots usually throw up a bumper or at least bars.

After a minute or two of audio only, we got the picture back. It continued along through some more dog and pony ending with the announcement of Google Pack. At that point I thought, you gotta be shittin’ me, that’s it? Up until this point the presentation was pretty lackluster. I kept thinking there has to be more than this. Page said there was one more announcement, that Sergy always wished that Google connected directly to your brain. The feed ended abruptly, with a bumper stating that due to the proprietary nature of the content, they were suspending the feed and it would return in a “few moments”. WTF? This was an international product rollout with a couple of thousand journalists watching live, many of them blogging and shooting pix in realtime and the rest of them ready to post stories minutes after the session. What the hell was proprietary about that? There are currently several stories on Google News detailing the event. They WANT people to know about it. I waited for several minutes before I got all Cartman about it and thought “screw you guys, I’m goin’ home”. There had to be another reason for the blackout.

The Inquirer over in the UK attributed it to Robin Williams making some disparaging comments toward the French as the reason for the blackout but it happened several minutes prior to that. TG Daily is reporting that the spots were blacked out due to issues that CEA (the promoters of the show) had with the prescreened content of Williams’ routine. I don’t really need some balding, fat, old bastard to determine what I should or shouldn’t see, particularly when they used that event to drive traffic to the show. I’m old enough, fat enough and enough of a bastard to determine on my own what I think is or isn’t offensive. Thankfully, I still have a lot of hair. CEA did a disservice to Page, Google and the attendees of the show by trying to play Big Brother in determining what was or wasn’t offensive. Plus they bullshited us with that “proprietary info” line of crap. At least have the balls to make a bumper that states WHY you’re censoring the content. Off color? This from a location where the largest porn show in the biz runs concurently, sharing one of the same venues no less and mobile billboad trucks advertising “Strippers Direct to Your Room” are circling the venue all day long.

Convergence, video on demand, content anytime, anywhere, on any device. 24/7/365 always on, anything you want. As long as CEA doesn’t find it offensive.

Apparently CES stands for Convergence Every Second. In the lastest and greatest round of the fabled show looks to ring in the year where they’ll finally ram “convergence” down the collective throats of the buying public. Every booth seems to have the latest and greatests phoneorganizermoviemusicplayerinternetviagradispenser. I spent into the wee hours of the morning prior to the show welcoming my pals that are working for the breaking big time rock band in town for a gig. I got a bit of a later start on the festivities making the show floor by mid afternoon. I wanted to catch Intel’s announcement of what was known as Yonah, or now properly Centrino Duo the new dual core cup for laptops. As I couldn’t get tix to the keynote, I decided not to watch in an overflow room and catch it in the Intel booth. There was some time to kill and the mega booth of the Unholy Borg of the Northwest was across the aisle just getting ready to demo Windows Vista for Music.

The demo started a little late, but not near as late as Vista by the time it ships. In reality it was a demo of Windows Media Player 11 running under Vista. To me it looked like the latest in ill fated attempts at catch up to iTunes. I was surprised by the lack of some features and how far behind iTunes the product was particularly with regards to device integration. Vista though, looks pretty cool particularly on the latest group of tablets that are on display in the booth. More on the tablets in a few days after I spend some more time with them. The recently announced deal between Bill’s Kids and Viacom in the form of “Urge” is gearing up to take online music world by storm but may fall flat on it’s face. The service will specifically make content unusable on iPods by using the bundled Windows Media DRM. The reason the iPod (and as an extension iTMS) is so popular is because it’s hip and cool. The kids dig it. The integration between the player, computer and the online store is excellent, even on Windows. Microsoft, Windows and even MTV are anything but hip and cool. The media player is less capable, the integration to all the different players is problematic and we have no idea what the price point will be or how easily the store will integrate with the software. There is also no real data to point to that consumers are willing to “rent” their music collection by subscription though that may be more of a generational issue. Even then, that’s a pretty big leap of faith to think those kids are going to buy new devices only to use that service or hope that the myriad of device makers that support WMP will be considered better devices, let alone be percived as hip. Way too early for me to predict failure but at this point it seems more of a hamfisted play to gain marketshare rather than provide music fans with a pleasurable experience. We’ll see…

The keynote by Intel’s Paul Otellini introduced what had been widely known and anticipated, Intel’s mobile dual core CPU. Not only for notebooks, expect to see this chip on other so called “personal devices”. This also fuels speculation that at Macworld next week will rollout the first Intel based Macs, starting with iBooks and Minis. Otellini invited Micheal Dell on stage to demo a 20″ laptop, with 8 speakers no less. In one seemingly unscripted moment when Dell was comparing side by side the 20″ to a current Dell laptop, Otellini joked asking if Dell was planning on having a two for one sale. Without missing a beat, Dell shot back “well, are you going to be having a two for one sale?” With rumors coming out today that Dell may start using AMD processors in some lines, Otellini might want to think about giving that sort of deal to keep him in the fold.

Lotsa handheld gadgets, the Motorola Q looks cool. It’s like a RAZR meets Treo meets Windows Mobile PC. I’ll take a better look at it in the next day or so.

The stage in the Sony booth powered by Nexo Geo S and a new Yamaha M7CL.

LG was showing the “V” phone specifically for Verizon’s V-Cast service. It’s sort of a portable entertainment center that opens to a QWERTY keyboard and nice little (operative word being little) video display. It’s been out for a bit, surprised I missed it until now.

Perhaps the best known touring circus on the planet and self proclaimed “Greatest Show on Earth”, the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus has decided to try a new format this year. The “blue” company is abandoning the traditional three ring format along with some other pretty significant changes. The “red” company will continue with the traditional format at least for the time being. Part of the reason is a sort of changing of the guard with Nicole Feld, daughter of longtime producer Kenneth Feld in an co producer role. Other changes include adding IMAG (that’s video screens, for you civilians), moving the circus band from the arena floor to a landing, or bridge above the floor. Other changes include getting rid of the “ringmaster” role and adapting the format to more of a story encompassing the whole show and incorporating ringers in the audience playing wannabe circus performers.

It’s good to see the old circus get a facelift to compete in the entertainment market of today. I haven’t been to see them in several years. Might just have to go check this one out.