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A View From The Road – Volume 4, Number 1
Observations on technology trends from the latest conferences
and seminars.
January 10, 2010
 In
This Edition:
• CES 2010 – The 3D
Show
• The Effects of
Smaller / Bigger
• Home Video Conferencing (Or is that
Telepresence?)
• Technology
Milestones
• New And Notable -
From the Show Floor
Greetings from CES 2010 – or “The
3D Show” as most have been calling it, with my temporary new picture above
a nod to the return of the days of us all wearing silly looking glasses in
public … but more on that later.
 This was the first consumer electronics show in very long time
that had significant logistical problems – which I suppose was both good
and bad. Last year’s show had 140K
registered attendees and 130 “announced as present” (with 100K probably
being a more accurate number.) The
Consumer Electronics Association that runs the show was very concerned
about the sparse crowds in the challenging economy and took significant
steps to prevent that perception…steps that backfired. This years 43rd annual show
was reduced to one venue – The Las Vegas Convention Center – intentionally
not utilizing The Sands Convention Center nor any outdoor venues in the
parking lot as they had done in years past (tents for special technologies,
registration, etc.) Using what must
have been Vaseline and a shoehorn the CEA folks crammed every inch of the
LVCC’s main areas, lobbies, hallways, etc. with exhibitors – many of which
used more compact booths. There was
no lobby mingling area, no CES store, and no breathing room at all (save
for the very back of the south hall – which was vastly underutilized.) The result of all of this was that the
estimated attendees of ~115K were often elbow-to-elbow in the larger booths
on the show floor. As an example, It
would take a person a good five minutes just to walk from one end of the
Samsung booth to the other even if all you wanted to do was get to the
other side without stopping – and you’d be pushing people and being pushed
yourself the whole way.
If you wanted to
try to stop and look at something then that’d be a whole different ball
game, with you having to fight to stand your ground out of fear of being
pushed along by the tide of people.
This was neither fun nor productive for anyone. CEA really has to rethink the layout for
next year.
~~~~~
Now,
back to plan X from outer space
or the attack of the killer
manufacturers. This year’s CES
was definitely ground zero for consumer 3D television. Wherever you turned you were faced with a
sign about 3D, a person wearing 3D glasses and/or a blurry image of an
animated movie (unless you were wearing said pair of glasses.)
Most
of the major display manufacturers had 3D product offerings – either 3D
capable out of the box or 3D “ready”.
In addition, there were a number of 3D programming ventures
announced in conjunction with the show – Discovery, IMAX and Sony will
launch an all 3D Network this year to showcase a mix programming including
entertainment, sports and the natural history programming for which
Discovery and IMAX are well known.
ESPN will launch an all 3D sports network with Sony as the sole
sponsor. Direct-TV also announced a
couple of all 3D channels. (Of
course, not all of these 3D ventures utilize the same technology, but
that’s just normal technology immaturity.)
I wish I wasn’t such a cynic about the 3D hype. I personally still don’t see it taking
off in any of the consumer spaces (other than perhaps gaming) for a very
long time. I agree with what the
management of NEC Display said here – it is not wrong to sit back to wait
and see if this hype comes to anything.
~~~~~
CES 2010 was also
the first time that home video conferencing hit the mainstream. Most of the display manufacturers showed
“internet ready” devices for web browsing and on-demand content. Going one step further, both Panasonic
and LG showed TVs with HD video from Skype as a built in feature – both to
be available this summer.
As you may recall –
it was at last year’s CES that Cisco’s John Chambers said “Home
TelePresence” was 18 months away.
Cisco held a conference immediately prior to this year’s show
demonstrating a prototype of the product, but did not have it on display
anywhere once the show officially opened.
However IBM and Polycom did show a demonstration of their home
telepresence solution that is based upon IBM & Philips “Net TV”
offering in Europe, with a prototype HD
conferencing solution accessible on one of the “widgets.” It was an impressive mix of services in
the cloud and Polycom’s HDX technology
retrofitted for the home. I’m sure
there’ll be further developments in this space as the year progresses. Two things that are clear though are that
two way video to the average home is coming very rapidly, and telepresence
is definitely now just the politically correct method of saying HD video
conferencing.
~~~~~
Of
course CES 2010 had the requisite showing of video displays getting
thinner, brighter, with better contrast and still yet higher resolutions
and better motion handling – take a look at this “football pool” scan rate
chart from LG (and please do send me a note if you can figure out what it
means.)
However,
this year’s show was more notable for the large number of technology milestones and innovations
that were launched or mainstream positioned for the first time.
·
Display Port: VESA (the Video Electronics Standards
Association) spent a great deal of effort promoting Display Port
technology. (www.displayport.org) Everyone (at
VESA) says this is the wave of the future – that VGA and other types of
connections are going away. Everyone
says that but I have not seen it.
Maybe it’s early – maybe it’s wrong.
·
USB3: A few
manufacturers have begun to release products that utilize the new USB3
standard. The benefits of this
standard include data rates 10 times faster than USB2 and a 900mA power ratings – meaning your chargeable devices
will charge faster and you can attach more of them.
·
GPS Enabled Digital Cameras:
First there was the GPS for your car. Then it made its way into mobile phones. The next product class to be GPS enabled
is the digital camera. A number of
manufacturers had products in this area, including Sony, who also included
a compass to capture directional / facing information for uploading to
applications like Google earth.
Every exposure automatically gets tagged with the metadata
about where it was taken. I believe
that this is just the next wave of many product classes that will combine
location awareness and network access to perform a whole host of life
improving/simplifying functions.
Think of your car knowing where the nearest gas station is, or your
Blackberry knowing what room you’re in and automatically adjusting the
lights and music to your preferences, or your luggage being able to report
what city it’s in.
·
E-Readers: If 3D wasn’t
the stealing all the hype from this year’s show, the emerging electronic
book space would surely have been the biggest buzzword. A huge number of devices were being shown
to take on the “first to market / leader” Kindle from Amazon. One example of note was Sony’s “Daily
Edition” reader, which at a $399 list price gives you about two weeks of
battery life, the ability to also view PDFs, Word
documents and publications such as the electronic Wall Street Journal
updated live via the device’s free 3G wireless connection. (Free only to the Sony store that is.)
Sony’s also has the ability to read in landscape – like a
traditional book.
·
LED Light Bulbs and backlighting: Improvements in LED technology have finally
hit a tipping point – both in high tech devices and simple illumination
products.
C.Crane’s GeoBulb third
generation (www.geobulb.com ) is now
able to produce the equivalent light of a 60 watt incandescent bulb – and
lasts five years. It’s pricey, but
less so than in the past and dropping all the time. The same LED technology improvements that
allowed for this bulb have pushed the trend of LED lighting as the
backlight source for most new flat panel displays. The uniform nature of the elements allows
for their placement near the perimeter of the display panels – and reduces
display thickness. This means the
tongue twister for the most modern and efficient type of large format
displays is the LCD display with LED side light
backlights.
~~~~~
My
list of product and manufacturer
highlights from the show represents the particularly eclectic nature of
items displayed this year.
·
Cheap Telepresence – straight from the Oxymoron Department,
Jumbo Shrimp division comes a new firm that used CES to introduce their new
inexpensive telepresence product. VU
Technologies (www.vutelepresence.com)
referring to themselves as the worlds first distinctive display company,
introduced their “Tele Presence For The Real
World”. I spoke with their
representatives a great deal and worked very hard to find out about the
technical details of their system in time for this article – regrettably
without much success. (If they do
ever send the whitepaper they promised me – twice - I’ll update the on-line
versions of this View From The Road.) What I did find out was that they use a
proprietary board of DSPs that they put into a
standard PC for control only, they use a proprietary algorithm for video
but can interoperate with standard algorithms if needed, each endpoint can
support multiple screens and data sharing as standard features, and their
endpoints use 500-700KBps for transmission – even working in the face of
significant packet loss. All this
for an estimated cost of about $3K US per endpoint. I list all of this as it is what I was
told, but we will have to see how this new entrant’s actual reality plays
out.
·
There was lots of buzz from Sony this year. In addition to all the 3D stuff, they
announced that they have joined the SD card alliance and have included SD
slots (alongside their memory stick slots) on all their new products – a
good move for them to help standardize the industry. They also unveiled a new slogan at this
show, their first new campaign since the HDNA tag of a few years back. The new positioning is “Make.Believe”.
(That reads “Make Dot
Believe”, as in anything you can envision, Sony technology and its access
to the net can make happen.) I’m
putting this one in without much comment, as I do get it, but I’m not
really convinced that people will dot
get it without dot making fun of
it. Score another one for the
Marketing dot team.
·
Plantronics showed itself as a leaner, more focused firm,
separating from its consumer audio Altec Lansing
division and concentrating on headset and other solutions for unified
communications.
It fielded a powerhouse line-up of products, including a Best
of Innovations winner in its Savi Office and an
honorable mention for its Voyager Pro earpiece.
·
Sharp touted it’s “Hello Yellow” campaign, highlighting it’s Quad Pixel Technology, which includes amber
elements to produce more accurate colorimetry, especially in yellow and
gold hues.
·
Targus - the computer peripheral company – introduced
some cool new technology in an unexpected category. Their new series of screen protectors use
something they call “Clear View” which is specially designed and formulated
to prevent smudges from oils and fingerprints from showing up.
They are initially planning these screen protector overlays
for the consumer Smartphone marked as one would expect. But if it works as well as the demo did
and holds-up well I can see this having enormous implications for many
areas of the touch screen enabled world.
·
A company called Saygus (www.saygus.com) displayed their VPhone – an Android based Smartphone with what they
describe as “Americas
first nationwide, two-way video calling capability.”
I know there have been devices and services like this in EMEA
and Asia that use front and rear cameras – and that they have had mixed
reviews regarding their usefulness.
However the USA
has yet to experience it up until now.
The unit only functions as a CDMA device for now, but they expect to
grow the product to other networks and providers in the future. The VPhone also
won a Best of Innovations award this year.
·
Creative Labs also introduced some new video products – off of
the show floor in their private suite.
These included the introduction of their own
version of handheld Smartphone videoconferencing and a new desktop solution
with a 12" screen to go along with their smaller “In-Person” product.
·
A Korean firm called ILoveSchool (www.iloveschool.co.kr)
demonstrated an interactive writing board using some cool new technology.
The writing surface is a finely and lightly printed sheet
(slightly resembling graph paper.)
Their pen or marker or crayon can really write on it if
desired. The pen contains a
miniature camera that connects to a PC via Bluetooth. The camera knows what position it is pointed
to on the sheet and can interpret this information to record pen strokes or
display an overlay onto a projected image of the paper. The applications (collaboration,
recording of meeting minutes, traditional smart presentations) are very
diverse.
~~~~~
To finish this report on a lighter note, I’ll give honorable
mention to my new earbud YoYo. To think last week I didn’t even know
what an earbud YoYo was, now I can’t imagine life without it.
Mine is a simple
blue, but you can order fancy designs or custom imprints from them at www.covington-creations.com. Maybe you can order a few hundred for me
that are branded for cheap telepresence and/or home telepresence.
~~~~~~
That’s it for the
Consumer Electronics Show 2010 edition of A View From The Road. Look for the next report from the
National Association of Broadcasters conference in April, or a special
report sooner than that if industry events warrant the coverage.
------------------------------------
A View From The Road is written by
David Danto and contains solely his own, personal opinions. David has spent
31 years in the audio visual and broadcasting industries. He has designed
facilities for firms such as AT&T, Bloomberg LP, FNN, Morgan Stanley,
NYU and Lehman Brothers. He recently joined JPMorgan Chase & Company
and is the IMCCA’s Director of Emerging Technology. Email David at
David.Danto.IMCCA@Danto.com
About the IMCCA
The Interactive
Multimedia & Collaborative Communications Alliance (IMCCA) is a
not-for-profit user application and industry focused association with
membership comprised of service and product providers, consultants, and
users. Members benefit from the understanding and the use of various
interactive and collaborative communications technologies in their
professional and everyday lives.
For further information please contact Carol Zelkin, IMCCA Executive
Director, at 516-818- 8184 or czelkin@imcca.org.
Visit the IMCCA web site at www.imcca.org
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