The Richter Scale^®

Due to being Mom-Dad this week while my wife is up in frigid New Hampshire, and more e-mails than flamingos here on Bonaire to weed through (the flamingo population here on Bonaire ranges from a few thousand to somewhere around 15,000), it’s taken me almost two weeks to get my office and to-do stack sorted out post-CES. I now have a pile of CES things I want to comment and report on here in my blog (beyond any editorializing I do in my writing for Jon Peddie’s TechWatch).

Two weeks does give one a chance to ruminate and reminisce, and thinking about why CES is such an interesting show to attend each year (other than because of work), I’ve come up with a rather simple answer: It’s the place I get to create my wish list for big kid (i.e. 40-something year old kids like myself) toys for the coming year.

With that in mind, I’ve started a new category in my blog, where products and technologies I write about will also be tagged as “Wish List” items when they are ones I plan on procuring in the coming year.

I hope to also add unprocured wish list items to a “Wish List” roll in the Left Side menu of my blog in case any of you are wondering what toys I’m still waiting to have ship and be available.

Right now, the Kodak V570 camera and the Sony Reader are my first two wishlist items. More forthcoming in the next day or two.

It’s now two days after the 2006 Consumer Electronics Show has ended its run in Las Vegas. I saw a number of things at the show that I will still be reporting here later, but I wanted to share some observations of life during CES first, and more importantly, how to survive a show like CES

First, wear good, comfortable shoes. Without them you’ll cripple yourself walking the miles of aisles in the three main venues (Hilton Convention Center, Las Vegas Convention Center (LVCC) (with four massive halls!), and the Sands Expo) and I walked all of them except for North Hall in the LVCC. My choice of footgear was the Merrell Jungle Moc (taupe, size 13 U.S.), broken in for a week or two before the show (my last set was a year and a half old and had no grip left as the soles had worn flat). While going to the monorail one evening, I met Michelle, a model from Austin working for one of the oriental consumer electronics companies in the Central Hall of the LVCC. Her employers made her wear high heeled shoes while manning the information counter at the booth. I had (and still have) great sympathy for her poor aching feet. Asking women to wear heels at trade shows is pure male chauvinism and unnecessary, never mind it being a cruel thing to do.

Second, hydrate well. You’ll make yourself sick if you don’t drink a lot of water all day long. Symptoms of dehydration include being light headed, headaches, slurring words more than usual, and possibly dizziness. Las Vegas air is dry - very dry. Don’t be afraid of drinking too much water - bathrooms are everywhere. I always carried a spare bottle of water in addition to whatever I might be drinking at the time. Also, lots of water helps flush toxins (like the residual alcohol from the night before) from your system and keeps your insides “well lubricated”.

Third, wash your hands often and/or use one of those anti-bacterial hand gels. Everyone you’re shaking hands with has shaken hands with people from all over the world carrying all sorts of great germs and contagions. Flus and colds are a major post-show “thrill” for many show attendees. Minimize your risk of infection with good hygiene. And, if you find your hands getting dry and raw from too much hand washing, use a moisturizer (I recommend Dr. Bigelow’s quince-based hand moisturizer from Bath & Body Works - smells great, doesn’t leave a greasy residue and moisturizes well).

Fourth, snack often but avoid bad carbs. Bad carbohydrates are chips, baked goods, pizza, french fries, cookies, sugar-sweetened drinks, etc. These will give you a quick energy boost, but the post-rush crash will make you very sleepy and groggy and unable to power walk the aisles and speak coherently with vendors. Fresh salads, nuts, low carb energy bars, and water are the best options. Salads are available at the eating outlets in most show halls, and it’s pretty easy to bring packages of nuts and low carb snacks in your bag.

Fifth, get a bag with wheels to stick all the brochures and tradeshow loot into. Otherwise you find yourself lugging 30 pounds of paper and stuff on your shoulders, which is bad for your back, neck, and shoulders. Plus, it drains your energy reserves. I particularly like the wheeled backpack I bought last year at CES for about $40, as it is convertable between wheels and backpack straps. This year’s model didn’t have the backpack straps. An additional bonus of wheeled bags is that you can strap a second bag to the top of the extended handle should you run out of space in the main bag. The only downside is that the cattle, er, people wandering the show floor who don’t pay attention to where they are going occasionally trip over such bags. Hopefully after tripping over such bags often enough, such people may learn. (Personal observation - there were far more bag trippings at the AVN Adult Exposition held concurrent with CES at the Sands Expo Center than at CES, likely because there were more sources of distraction - more on that later).

Sixth, unless you are fortunate enough to be lodged near a main show hall (I was at the Treasure Island, only a 10 minute walk from the Sands, but about a 30 minute walk from the Las Vegas Convention Center), be prepared to wait a long time for a bus (only available at an “official” hotel), or taxi to get you to where you want to go. In Las Vegas, the monorail is also an option, but that can get rather congested too. Taxi lines at the LVCC were rumored to be in excess of two hours at one point, while half hour or longer waits for buses were the norm. And that did not include travel time on rush-hour packed streets.

Seventh, carry a bunch of cash around on the last day of the show when in the vicinity of smaller booths - you may be able to buy some demo items for a steal because booth personnel would rather not ship them home. My bargains from Sunday include an Ethernet and PC cable tester, several Pelican cases, and a wireless day/night surveillance camera. Any leftover cash can be used at the card tables at the casinos after the show (I donated to a couple of casinos during my stay).

Eighth, get at least 6 hours of sleep a night. Very difficult to do in a place like Las Vegas, but if you wear yourself out with lack of rest, you become more susceptible to colds and illness, never mind it’s difficult to talk with people when you keep yawning all the time.

Nine, don’t forget your business cards at home, and then always carry more than you think you will need. I will typically take a full box of cards with me, and put them in my planned luggage for the trip well in advance of leaving home (days or weeks).

Tenth and lastly, don’t forget you can always use FedEx or UPS to ship boxes of brochures and other show items home from the show, but that the business centers at hotels do close at some reasonable hour (even in Vegas). That way what happens in Vegas can be shipped out of Vegas without inciting the ire (and resulting monetary penalties) of the airlines. I shipped three boxes of stuff out on Sunday evening, packing it all up while watching “Doom” on pay-per-view (starring The Rock) (4.5 out of 10.0 on The Richter Scale, incidentally).

One additional non-general thing I learned for myself was that quality blogging from the show is not easy. By quality blogging I mean providing more than a sound bite of information, or doing lots of little posts from my phone (as I did during E3). I had great aspirations, but little success.

Technical difficulties with my new notebook computer aside, I had seriously overbooked myself with meetings and conference sessions, which left very little writing time, and there was no easy way to quickly get images from my digital still camera (an aging but still great Canon S500) into the right shape to post to my blog. The camera in my Sidekick II cell phone was too crappy to be of much use either. I will have to come up with some new approach to see if I can blog live. Suggestions are welcome.

So, instead, I will be blogging a week later with observations and commentary about CES. Looking on the bright side, it means my blog entries may actually be better thought out, with better images than would have been possible if rushed from the show floor. Or maybe not.

In addition to a State of the Consumer Electronics Industry address on Day 0 of CES, there was a special press receptions to show dozens of products which the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) had dubbed as innovative through their rather subjective CES Awards process, which I wrote about a couple of weeks ago.

The event was called CES Unveiled, and while I find the qualification process for the CES Awards to be completely lacking in objectivity, it does not diminish the fact that there were definitely some gems to be found at the Unveiled event.

One such gem was the forthcoming Kodak V570 digital still camera (pictured below).

A common problem which bugs many photographers (myself included) using point and shoot digital cameras is the lack of a decent wide angle capture mode (at least without resorting to often painful multiple image stitching). The cameras that have a reasonable wide angle field of view lack decent zoom ability, and lenses which try to combine both wide angle and zoom are downright lousy because the optical requirements of wide angle vs. zoom are different enough that one lens can’t satisfy both needs well.

The Kodak V570 solves this problem by offering two lenses in the same camera. The first is a wide angle 23mm (in 35mm equivalent) fixed lens, and the other is a telephoto lens with 3x optical zoom. The LCD viewfinder switches seamlessly between the two lenses based on user zoom input.

The new Kodak V570 also has a rather advanced panoramic stitching mode which was demonstrated to me. It uses an onion-skinning type of overlay to show you where you need to take the next picture in a panorama, and then figuers out where all the proper merge points are and creates a reasonable seamless pano image as a result.

The Kodak V570 will ship at the end of January.

This camera is on my wish list, and once I get my hands on one, I will give a first hand review.

Thursday, January 5th - way too early in the morning to be up in Vegas. It’s the opening keynote of CES, featuring Sir Howard Stringer, chairman and CEO of Sony. Mostly it’s been a lot of flash and pitching of Sony products.

But among the highlights (in addition to an absolutely hilarious appearance by Tom Hanks) was the introduction of Dan Brown, celebrated author of The Da Vinci Code, whom Sir Howard brought in to discuss the new Sony Reader.

Dan Brown on Stage

The Sony Reader is an electronic device similar in size to an oversized paperback (but thinner), featuring electronic paper, a capacity to store nearly a hundred books internally, and hundreds more on Memory Stick or SD media. All pages are black and white, and the device can also be used to grab blogs, web pages, and images and store those in the Sony Reader (or on the portable media). The Sony Reader has a projected price in the $299 to $399 range, and is expected to ship at the end of March 2006. Sony plans on making thousands of books available via the Sony CONNECT service. The battery life on the Sony Reader is projected to allow for 7500 page changes (no power is used by electronic paper when being displayed, only during the transitions).

The Sony Reader

Dan Brown lauded the Sony Reader as a great tool for education, for travelers, and for researchers such as himself. He gave as an example his ability to use the Sony Reader to take hundreds of books of reference materials with him on a research trip, in a very small package, and then being able to download any additional books he might have still needed but forgot to “pack” (instead of trying to find a bookstore in some foreign country which carries the English language version of the book he wants). However, I should point out that the sorts of research books Dan Brown wants are unlikely to be available in an electronic format any time soon.

Brown also discussed the boon that a device like the Sony Reader would be a boon to education, as instead of having to carry bags of books, at a high per pupil cost, students could just carry an electronic book reader with all the content they need. That would certainly be nice, but I think pricing of e-book content will need to reflect the much reduced distribution and duplication cost - and presently, it’s not, if you look at electronic books available from Amazon (or digital music from the music download services in contrast to physical media contribution).

One area which I think will be a major new market for e-book content will be the publication of works by lesser known authors. We already see some of that now with blogs on the Internet, where anyone who wants to write can self publish. That’s one end of the spectrum, while authors like Dan Brown with huge marketing budgets behind them are at the other end of the spectrum. And in the middle are authors with real publishers, but small budgets. They will be the ones to truly benefit here.

Brown did say that he still feels that nothing will quite replace the feel of a book in his hands, being able to turn pages, and even the smell of a leather binding, reading in his den. But outside the den, or perhaps the home, readers like Sony Reader have the edge.

I agree, and I’m therefgore adding the Sony Reader to my gift wishlist.

But I wonder if the flight attendants will let me read from the Sony Reader during takeoff and landing. Will Sony lobby the TSA to get it listed as a non-electronic device, or will I only be able to read the current page, and not flip it to the next one during the “no electronic devices” flight segments?

UPDATED: 01/05/2006 - 19:41 AST

Yesterday, Tuesday, January 3rd was effectively Day 0 of the Consumer Electronics Show here in Las Vegas. It’s the day before the conferences start, and two days before the exhibit floors officially open.

My first CES-related task of the day was an overview of the consumer electronics industry for 2006, presented by Sean Wargo, director of industry analysis for the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA). The CEA runs the CES show. That was at 3pm, giving me ample time to go shopping for a number of items I needed as well as finalize my press registration.

My shopping task was to find a nice suit to replace my old tuxedo (losing 20% of your body weight as I have affects how old clothes fit, I’ve discovered) for formal functions. I wanted something with a “mandarin collar”. No luck finding that, but I did stumble across what I thought would be my dream mini-notebook (at least for now) - small, portable, and pretty powerful - with a great battery life.

I found this marvel at the Sony Style store at Caesar’s Forum Shops - it’s the TX series notebook. The model I wanted, the TX-690, which features 1.5GB of RAM and a cool blue metal finish, was not in stock (and had not been available on-line last week either, so I held off buying what they had in stock - the TX-670. While searching every store at the Forum Shops from Armani to Banana Republic for my suit, I get a call saying that a small shipments of the 690s arrived. I hightailed it back to the Sony store and bought it along with an extra battery and docking station.

To make a long story shorter, I’ve spent the last day trying to get the machine set up the way I want. Somewhere along the way, the 90 day trial version of Norton Internet Security choked, giving me a blue screen of death after I tried to uninstall it, so I had to waste hours of work doing a complete recovery. I figure I’m about 12 hours into getting the system set up properly now, and expect to spend at least another two putting my data from my other notebook on it. Sigh. Meanwhile, all the great blog entries and writing I had planned to have done by now have not materialized.

The battery life on the TX-690 is remarkable. I had it running pretty much non-stop from 9am until 3:30pm today on just the small battery. And now that it’s close to properly set-up I can say I am happy with my extravagant purchase.

More later. Off to the Sony press conference. And Panasonic apparently just announced that Comcast has selected them to provide next generation set-top boxes, much to the surprise of the person I just overheard hollering this into his cell phone here in the convention center.

So, here I was, a couple of weeks ago or so, starting to get ready for the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES 2006), mapping out all the things I want to see and follow up on, and the Consumer Electronics Association sends out a notice that it has pretty much discovered out all the cool products at CES 2006.

The problem with this is the show doesn’t even start for another two weeks, and even then, the CEA is basing its decision based on written and photographic materials submitted by the so-called Honorees, not actual product, as best I can tell. Better yet, entrants (who can submit nominations as early as August 29th) have to pay a program fee to submit their “innovative” product information - fees run from $225 to $950 per entry, depending on CEA membership status, date of submission, and whether the company will be exhibiting at CES.

The entries are judging in early October, and the so-called “honorees” announced on November 15th. Considering that most new products announced at such shows are not immediately ready to ship, this seems awfully premature. The whole process is suspect if you take into account the fee structures and submission dates.

But these are not the only Awards related to the show. There are others too.... For example, there’s something called the Technology Is A Girl’s Best Friend Diamond Showcase. Ahem?

And let’s not forget the “CNET’s Best of CES Awards 2006” (submission deadline of December 1st - a scant four and half WEEKS before the show even starts).

Used to be, you would go to a show, and then learn a week or two later what the best products shown were. Contenders for the honors did not have to pay fees other than exhibit fees, and judging could be based on tangible products instead of promotional puff pieces on paper. Not any more apparently.

The closest to a during or post-show award is the “Scientific American Innovations People’s Choice Award” for which attendees can vote on the show floor, but the rules page for this award appears particularly void of information (at least to me).

My suggestion to people who may actually care what the best new products are: Avoid all these pre-show awards judging farces, and wait for the post show summary from sources which: 1) do not derive revenue from submissions and 2) have also touched the products in question before issuing their proclamations of greatness for particular products.

One of the biggest problems I see with press releases and press invitations is that the writer of said missives often presumes the recipient understands obscure acronyms and terminology. Maybe that’s fine when you personally know your target audience, but when you blast out a message to hundreds of media with a broad range of non-overlapping interests it’s plain foolish.

Case in point. An invitation to a press conference at CES 2006 I received yesterday stated

The DECT Forum, the international industry association embracing suppliers and operators of DECT based terminals, announces the availability of DECT6.0 - Interference Free Communication in the United States.

Searching further in the invitation for what “DECT” and “DECT based terminals” might mean, I found this nugget

The DECT Forum is the industry association with global reach, embracing suppliers and operators of DECT based terminals, systems, and networks. The DECT Forum represents the interests of the DECT industry and is located in Bern, Switzerland. Full members of the DECT Forum are currently: Ascom Tateco, Binatone, DSP Group, Infineon, Kirk, Panasonic, Philips, RTX, Siemens, SunCorp and Avaya-Tenovis.

Based on the list of members, I kind of got the sense that “DECT” had something to do with telephones. Nowhere else in the message was there any description or definition of what “DECT” meant. Fortunately the person sending the e-mail included a web link to http://www.dect.org, where, in the second paragraph, I learned that:

DECT stands for “Digital Enhanced Cordless Telecommunications” and denotes a radio technology suited for voice data and networking applications with range requirements up to a few 100 m.

Gee. I guess that should have just been obvious. Although, I must admit the obtuse e-mail did actually get me to click on the link, but I feel cheated nonetheless, and as this is not a key technology area I’m following anyway, off the invitation goes into the “Not Interesting” box.

Every January, hordes of technophiles swarm to Las Vegas to see the latest consumer electronics - this has been going on for longer than I can remember. My first CES was sometime in the early 1990s, and I went a few time. I went last year as well to do some research for a client, as well as get my feet wet with respect to being a regular journalist once again.

In a couple of weeks I head back out to Vegas and CES 2006 to cover the show for Jon Peddie’s TechWatch and my blog (The Richter Scale).

Being a registered media attendee has some benefits and some drawbacks. The benefits include free attendance, invitations to all sorts of interesting parties and shindigs, and the fact that no matter how boring you look, people in booths on the floor want to talk to you in the hopes of getting some “free ink” (in regular language “get written up via free editorial coverage"). The drawbacks are that you get inundated with e-mail requests to set up meetings and interviews with people offering every possible product under the sun regardless of whether the products being offered are of interest to you (in the hopes of getting some “free ink”, of course), and no matter how bored you look, people in booths on the floor want to talk to you in the hopes of getting some “free ink”.

I’ve held off committing to any interviews so far mainly because I’ve not been organized enough to figure out what my schedule will be during the show. I’ve started doing that now, and find I have over 180 meeting requests to parse through. These are being sorted into “Not Interesting”, “Possibly Interesting” and “Definitely Interesting” categories. “Not Interesting” is winning, but I see a few potential gems in the “Definitely Interesting” pile which I will share here in my blog in the coming days.

My daughter has been playing Kameo on the Xbox 360 for hours (with the occasional cry for help when she gets to a boss she can’t beat by herself).

Today, when she went to play Kameo, she discovered that all her work had apparently been wasted. The Kameo save game had disappeared. 

I don’t know if it was a software glitch, or something accidental her brother might have done when playing Kameo himself, but regardless, the save game for Kameo has gone missing. Poof. And my daughter is rather distraught.

I have Googled to see if anyone else has had this problem with Kameo, and found nothing. So maybe this is an isolated incident. Or maybe I’m the first to publicly post about it. We’ll see.

In the meantime, I guess I need to start instituting an Xbox 360 save game back-up policy. Sad that it has come to this. Yet another thing that potentially limits the market potential of more advanced console devices to tech heads instead of ordinary people.

UPDATE - 12/18/05: I’m glad to report that this is not a game problem. My son admitted at dinner last night he was trying to start the game when he accidentally deleted his sister’s saved game. Now the question is whether or not forcing him to play Kameo until he gets back to where his sister had gotten to is considered punishment or a reward for poor judgement.

I’ll admit right off that my on-line gaming experience on consoles is limited, mostly by choice. Most of the on-line gaming I’ve done has been on the PC (with City of Heroes/City of Villains being particular favorites). I tend to like cooperative play more than things like death matches, and I prefer typing my communications to my team members instead of speaking them (since my experience in voice-enabled console gaming is that many players are pretty crude, never mind I hate having to listen to people coughing, snuffling, and snorting among other things).

However, yesterday I found myself up at 4am for some reason, so after playing a bit of Perfect Dark Zero in solo mission mode, I decided to check out Xbox Live play with that game.

I should point out that I spent a couple of hours a couple of weeks ago doing Call of Duty 2 deathmatch play on the Xbox 360 and found the experience to be pretty horrible when more than 3 or 4 people were in the match. Performance got worse than sluggish and my character’s position kept resetting.

The PDZ Xbox Live deathmatch experience was MUCH better than that in Call of Duty 2, although it took numerous tries to get connected to a game in progress because I kept getting the commonplace “You Have Lost Connection to Match” error message. At one point there were about 18 of us playing a team deatchmatch game. Responsiveness was great, even on my relatively slow connection here on Bonaire.

I even got my headset out. Found that the Brits playing the game were a lot more likely to actually use the headset as a way to coordinate game play. But most people appeared not to use their headsets at all. It did make the game more interesting when the headset was used properly, but things deteriorated when the “cougher” came on-line.

If anyone’s up for some on-line play when I’m on, my gamertag on the Xbox 360 is “BonaireGamer”.