LAS VEGAS–I’m writing this from a hotel room a little before 7 a.m., and I did not just get back from the casino floor. Instead, I got back after a couple of receptions for the CTIA 2013 wireless-industry show, thought I’d lie down for a bit and then slept for six hours.
I could head downstairs now for a little gambling–but, honestly, I have some e-mails to attend to after this post, and then I want to get to McCarran to try to get on an earlier flight home. Maybe I’ll have time to hit the breakfast buffet first?
This is what traveling to Vegas for business has done to me. I have now made my way to this city 18 times. Sixteen of those (!) were for CES, there’s this trip for CTIA, and I went to Vegas once for a friend’s bachelor party. The one time I couldn’t get my expenses reimbursed or put them on a Schedule C, I had to stop myself from asking for a receipt everywhere.
I can’t tell you what any of the fancy shows at the Strip hotels are like, but I have memorized the fastest walking route through the Venetian’s floor to the Sands exhibit space. I’ve eaten in some of the better restaurants in town, but I have no idea what they charge. I should find better uses for my brain then caching the locations of bathrooms in the convention center.
Before the invention of blogging and Twitter, I had a little free time in my Vegas schedule. One year, I blew off a keynote to check out the Star Trek Experience; another, I detoured to the Gun Store and discovered how quickly an M-16 can empty a clip. But from 2007 or so on, my only time to experience Vegas as a civilian has been the last night in town–except when I’m too tired and conk out first.
SAN FRANCISCO–I set a personal record for keynote livetweeting with the 3.5-hour production that opened Google’s I/O developer conference here on Wednesday morning. That was by far the longest tech-event keynote I’ve sat through, but nowhere near the strangest.
The keynotes Steve Jobs led for Apple were models of restraint in comparison. (I can’t speak to the live experience of those since his death, as I haven’t been gotten given a press pass to any of them.) Jobs spoke at a measured pace, the slides mostly consisted of white text on black backgrounds, supporting speakers didn’t come onstage to their own at-bat music, and the guests who didn’t work at Apple were almost always confined to executives at other tech firms cooperating with Apple on various projects–not random boldface names.
But the Steve Jobs And Apple Show made its own mistakes. The extended dissertation at Macworld NY in 2001 over how Apple’s PowerPC processors weren’t really slower than Intel chips was both legendarily dull and distinctly dodgy, given that Apple was already working on its subsequent switch to Intel. (Trivia: I think was also the one and only time a review of mine got favorably cited in an Apple keynote, when Jobs gave a shout-out to my iDVD review.) And was it really necessary to end each one by playing an ad for the new product not once but often twice?
I can’t think of too many other forms of creative output more in need of editing than the average tech-industry keynote. But if the people involved can’t do that, I have two lesser suggestions: Keep any slides with numbers on the screen a little longer, so we can jot them down correctly, and follow Google’s good example by providing power strips and Ethernet in at least the first rows of seats for the press.
This is a story I kind of missed during the show, but it also took me a day or two to realize how dangerous CBS’s rationales for interfering with CNET’s editorial decisions would be for tech journalism in the traditional (read: media conglomerate-owned) media. I was glad this little rant got as much attention as it did; I wish that had been followed by accountability for the twit or twits in CBS’s executive suite who thought this stunt would work.
Friday marked the first anniversary of the Internet rearing up and kicking Big Copyright in the hindquarters during the battle to quash the Stop Online Piracy Act. That’s worth celebrating, but a week after the death of net-freedom advocate Aaron Swartz I also thought it necessary to point out all the items remaining on the tech-policy to-do list if you value a more open Internet and technology economy. I hope the results doesn’t make me sound like a total Eeyore.
I discussed the things I saw at CES, Apple’s stock price and other tech-news topics on Gene Steinberg’s podcast. I haven’t heard Kirk McElhearn‘s segment yet, but I’m sure that Macworld and TidBITS contributor had insightful things to say too.
I returned to the topic I covered in my USAT column last spring, this time with more context about what Java was supposed to do and how it became the nuisance it is–plus a few remaining, non-Web uses for this software I hadn’t addressed in detail in that earlier piece. There’s also a tip about enabling a security feature Yahoo finally added to its Yahoo Mail service, some five years after Google had provided the same option to Gmail users.
Last week was a little busy. I flew to Las Vegas to cover CES, walked several miles each day trying to stay on top of show events, wrote and spoke at length about it, ran into Vint Cerf (who, no kidding, asked for help getting on the Internet) and met Bryce Harper (I told him thanks and good luck). And I subjected various hardware and software to the cruel and unusual punishment of five days at the electronics show.
This time, I left my 2011-vintage ThinkPad at home in favor of the lighter, faster MacBook Air I bought last summer. The battery life and backlit keyboard were great; I was not so fond of having to break out an Ethernet adapter (not Apple’s, but a $10 Monoprice model that worked just as well once I went to the trouble of installing drivers for it) when I didn’t want to take my chances with WiFi.
But–this is going to sound crazy–the WiFi actually worked at lot more often at CES this year. Even in the past-fire-code-packed Samsung press conference, where the Mandalay Bay convention center’s wireless somehow never dropped. I would love to think that we’re learning a few things about scaling this technology.
I did my standup computing on two loaner smartphones I’d packed, an unlocked Galaxy Nexus on a prepaid T-Mobile SIM and an HTC 8X Windows Phone unit on Verizon. Both were a lot better than the smartphones I took last year–even though one of them was a Verizon LTE Galaxy Nexus. (Yes, the VzW Nexus was that bad.)
I employed the HTC phone and its faster, more reliable LTE connection for a fair amount of tethered access. That worked fine in my hotel room but was almost unbearably unreliable in crowded settings like Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs’ bizarre keynote. As in, the one where Jacobs kept going on about how awesome our wireless future was going to be.
I took more photos with the 8X than with the Nexus, but I still spent more time on the Android phone. I blame Twitter–specifically, its buggy, clumsy excuse for a Windows Phone client. The Nexus also had slightly better battery life, but I was pleasantly surprised to see I didn’t have to recharge both phones by lunch every day.
The one application I used most often was Evernote. Once again, it was terrific to be able to start a note on one device, then seamlessly pick it up on another. And once again, I could not get through the week without a synchronization hiccup resulting in conflicting modifications that I had to reconcile by going over two copies of the same note to see which one was newer.
For photo editing, I used mostly iPhoto, with OS X’s Preview handling some basic cropping. My word processor? Don’t laugh: OS X’s TextEdit, combined with the free WordService plug-in, sufficed to generate copy to paste into an e-mail or a blog post.
I brought an old Canon point-and-shoot camera (some of its work is on display in the Flickr set shown after the jump). It was fine in most cases, but there’s no way I’d take that to another CES. Modern cameras have better resolution, low-light performance and telephoto reach, and now camera vendors also seem to have agreed that they all should support automatic picture transfers to cameras for on-the-go sharing.
The photo above shows the two other major pieces of technology I brought: the Belkin travel surge protector that avoided “who gets the last outlet?” awkwardness in various press rooms, and the nerdy Airbeltbag messenger bag that distributed the weight of my gadgets sufficiently well to keep my shoulder from feeling completely destroyed. Continue reading →
CES week has usually been the single busiest workweek of the year, and this time around did not disappoint. It also featured perhaps my shortest and certainly my highest-profile TV appearance yet.
About eight hours into what became a 14-hour workday, I chatted briefly with the Fool’s Rex Moore for a show-opening video segment about some of the trends I’d seen thus far.
As it did last year, Panasonic ran a series of interviews with tech-industry types, journalists, athletes, politicians and various other guests from its CES exhibit. Here, I discussed the intersection of sports and digital media with the Sports Business Journal’s Eric Fisher and host Jordan Burchette. I trust nobody was surprised to see me rant yet again about the idiocy of regional blackouts for live game coverage.
I evaluated some of the more talked-about CES appearances in terms of whether they might entrench incumbents in a market or offer an opening to their challengers.
This show assessment for the NewsHour’s Rundown blog got a shout-out on that night’s NewsHour broadcast, right after an interview of my old Post cubicle-mate Cecilia Kang. Which makes a certain amount of sense, since the piece’s length and tone made it the closest thing to the CES-recap columns I wrote for the Post for… wow, 14 years in a row.
Note that the first version of this posted had a stupid mistake in the description of 4K resolution; when I was trimming a paragraph on the technology, “million” wound up where “thousand” should have been, and it took a reader’s comment to bring that to my attention. (That’s only one of the reasons why I try to read every comment.)
Larry Magid, a longtime tech journalist I enjoy running into at events like this, saw fit to include a sound bite from me in that day’s one-minute tech update.
My CES recap for Discovery–also, my first in the site’s new design–covered the same trends I tackled in the NewsHour piece but benefited from another day’s worth of soaking in the show.
I did a post like this back in 2011 that critiqued the absence of non-TiVo video recorders (among other things), didn’t think to return to the theme last year, but realized it would fit in well with DisCo’s focus on the ways outside factors distort and limit what the tech business can do.
The Fool’s Chris Hill interviewed me about the show for the Fool’s weekly podcast. He had me on as a guest pretty regularly when I was at the Post; it was good to be back.
An editor at NBC noticed the column I wrote for USA Today about Java security last spring and e-mailed to ask if they could interview me for that evening’s show. They recorded something like 30 minutes’ worth of footage; they asked good questions, didn’t cut off my answers and finished by asking if there was anything else I wanted this piece to say. Maybe 10 seconds of that wound up on the air, with me identified as a ”USA Today Technology Writer.”
(I was worried they wouldn’t use any of it. Between the heat from the studio lights in NBC’s Nebraska Avenue offices and my own don’t-screw-this-up anxiety, I started getting a little flustered and began fumbling some of my answers.)
Anyway, now I can cross “be interviewed as an expert on a national nightly-news show” off the bucket list. And in yet another weird coincidence, that night’s broadcast also featured my friend Daniel Greenberg, one of my best freelance contributors at the Post, talking about video-game violence.
This week’s column looks at the persistence of Adobe Flash on the desktop and recants some of my earlier optimism about a quick sunset for that format. (Though I have to note that Discovery’s new design finally does away with Flash for slide shows, even older ones; I no longer feel guilty about linking out to those.) It also shares a few tips about talking crash-prone browsers out of their sulk.
(With 15 of these 500-to-1,000-character posts a week, I can’t see adding them all to the weekly roundup, any more than I’d inventory my tweets. But maybe calling out a few highlights will work.)
LAS VEGAS–Around 1 p.m. yesterday, when one of the two lines to get into Samsung’s press conference had already stretched around the corner of one long corridor in the Mandalay Bay hotel’s conference center, I had to question the use I was making of a painfully long day.
Press conference day has been part of the CES routine for as long as I’ve known the show. From 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. the day before the show actually opens, a line of consumer-electronics vendors take turns pitching their plans for the coming year. It should be a good opportunity to get a read on their priorities and see most of their new products.
But the massive crowds these events attract–and the lack of any meaningful Q&A time, usually a requirement in real press conferences–increasingly make them a no-win proposition. First you wait half an hour or longer to get in line (if you’re lucky or on excellent terms with the PR types running the show, you can squeeze in later), then you hunker down on the floor, in the back or the side of an enormous room (to get a seat, you’d need to have camped out more like an hour in advance).
You then watch a parade of executives bantering on about the company’s hopes and dreams and showing off their upcoming wares, which is good and useful–but from the cheap seats, you see no more detail than you’d get from watching video offsite. And except for Sony’s presser, which takes place in its exhibit area at the Las Vegas Convention Center, you rarely get any hands-on time with the new hardware either.
And only a lucky few reporters get to have any sort of conversation with the executives involved before everybody has to rush off to the next press conference–make that, the one happening an hour later, since the one kicking off in 10 minutes is already at capacity. TechnoBuffalo’s Roy Choi came up with an apt description of the phenomenon while standing next to me on one of these lines: “It’s really more of a lecture.”
If you’re a large and successful tech-news operation, you can work around this inefficiency by flooding the zone with reporters–CNet sent 90 people to cover CES, a fact that kind of makes me want to cry. But if it’s only you and one or two other journalists, you have to question spending a day like this.
So next year, maybe I’ll fly out on press conference day instead. I’d still have the full show itself before me–and, to rebut the “CES is dead” crowd, being able to see almost an entire industry’s worth of upcoming products and talk to the people involved remains worth the time and travel expense. And in the bargain, I’d have an extra day with my family.
This expands on the post I did for Discovery about Instagram’s terms-of-service fiasco. Instead of yammering on about what that service and others have done wrong, I suggested a few ways they could communicate ToS changes more clearly to their customers.
(But will some other overconfident dot-com ignore this kind of advice and blunder into yet another PR meltdown within three months? Sure.)
After attending CES for 15 straight years, I’ve seen more than enough over-hyped debuts go on to flop at retail or never even make it that far. This curtain-raiser goes over a few factors that I’ve seen sink promising CES launches, but two days later I feel like I should have enriched the piece with more historical examples.
A reader question led to the pleasant surprise that printing from Android and iOS is a lot less restricted than Google and Apple’s own solutions would suggest. It also caused me to realize anew how rarely I use our printer-scanner to put ink on paper; since I switched to mobile boarding passes for almost all of my flights, my number-one use for that Canon device is probably scanning in checks for deposit through our bank’s site.
Here we go again: Tomorrow morning, I’m going to board a plane and fly to Las Vegas for my 16th consecutive year of covering CES.
I should have the packing routine down by now–if you’re going to the show and haven’t read the cheat sheet I wrote in late 2011, it’s not too late to check it out–but I’m still not sure that I do. This year’s gear doesn’t stray too much from last year’s:
13-inch MacBook Air
Ethernet adapter to make up for the Air’s lack of wired networking (has nobody at Apple ever tried to use the WiFi at most tech events?)
unlocked loaner Galaxy Nexus phone overdue to return to Google; in the meantime, I’ve got a prepaid T-Mobile account on it
Verizon-loaned HTC 8X, since I haven’t given Windows Phone 8 a real torture test yet
My own pathetically obsolete phone
aging Canon point-and-shoot camera (I need to upgrade and hope I’ll get a sense of what I should buy at CES)
charger and spare AA batteries for the camera
Belkin travel power strip
compact USB hub, in case the two USB ports on the power strip aren’t enough to power nearby devices
I’ll be in Vegas through Friday morning, meaning I have all of Monday to hop between press conferences, followed by three days on and around the show floor. Beyond incessantly tweeting out whatever I see, I’ll be writing a CES recap for Discovery, a couple of posts for the Disruptive Competition Project, and some sort of contribution to the PBS NewsHour’s site.
I’ve got a couple of video interviews on tap as well–the Motley Fool wants to get my thoughts on the show, and I’m supposed to chat with tech journalists Cali Lewis and Jordan Burchette on Panasonic’s Live@CES video stream Tuesday at 3:30 Pacific. And I’m going to try an additional experiment: posting too-long-for-tweets updates at Sulia, a “subject-based social network” that aims to provide more depth and context than Twitter.
I will not be at all surprised if this to-do list expands over the next few days.
If there’s anything in particular that you’d like me to look for or check out while I’m at CES, now would be an excellent time to leave a comment.
BERLIN–I’ve been to CES15 times and I’ve only attended IFA once, so I don’t have an enormous amount of experience with this trade show to compare it to the one that’s been welded to my calendar since 1998. But a few things jump out at me.
One is attendance. Although CES doesn’t draw as many attendees–156,153 this January, compared to 239,518 for last year’s IFA–the former convention feels more crowded. I think that’s because IFA, unlike CES, sells tickets to the public (last year, about 105,000 people) but doesn’t admit them until after two days reserved for the press and other “trade visitors.”
Another reason has to be the location. The Las Vegas Convention Center consists of three enormous halls large enough to store airplane hangars, while the Berlin Messe sprawls across 27 smaller structures. The LVCC pays for that simpler setup with perpetually gridlocked connecting passages, while this facility offers more, and more confusing, ways to get around. Some of these connections can only be described as Escher-esque.
The Berlin Messe also offers more food options with shorter lines–and beer on tap–and its bathrooms seem less disgusting than the LVCC’s.
The selection of exhibitors at IFA and CES doesn’t overlap nearly as much as I thought. While you have the same usual electronics-industry suspects–LG, Panasonic, Samsung, Sony, Toshiba but, of course, not Apple–IFA draws fewer obscure Asian manufacturers but collects far more appliance vendors.
These companies, many European-only operations that I’d never heard of until getting here, fill the lower levels of eight halls. I have never felt so inadequate about my oven, dishwasher, refrigerator, washer and dryer until now. Another, more pleasant, side effect: All of these manufacturers feel compelled to show off how well these machines work by offering snacks and beverages prepared with them, causing this part of IFA to double as a cooking show.
Far more actual news happens at CES, so that makes it more relevant overall–covering technology without going to that show borders on journalistic malpractice. (As you know, the Consumer Electronics Association pays me to blog for them, but I would have written the previous sentence anytime in the last 15 years.)
Getting to and from the show and around the city, however, is no contest: The U-Bahn shuts down the Las Vegas Monorail in every way. Berlin itself is more my kind of city, with things like walkable neighborhoods, mostly human-scale architecture and trees that can grow without constant irrigation. Yeah, Vegas has casinos–but there is one a short walk from the press center here, on the third floor of Hall 7. I think I’ll show a little more common sense than I do at most CESes and save that distraction for some other time.
Today’s realization: It’s a mistake to wait to write this post until after getting back from a bike ride, when I’d rather take a nap than string together any sentences. Can somebody remind me about that next week?
This was an update of the advice about Timeline grooming that I gave in a December post for Discovery News–written with the benefit of a month of seeing how friends have adopted Facebook’s new profile interface. The Q&A part of the piece offered some context on why Adobe Reader will sometimes ask you to restart after installing an update–and, it seems, confused readers unfamiliar with the column’s two-part structure.
A critique of the selection of Internet apps on “connected TVs” was one of the first topics I suggested to the people at CEA; it just took me a few months to get around to writing it. As you can see from the comments thread on Google+, the piece may need to be corrected if it turns out that Vizio–contrary to the info on its site–does include a YouTube app on its connected sets. (I’m waiting to hear back from the company’s PR rep.)
I chatted for a good half an hour with veteran telecom analyst Gary Arlen about the past, present and future of CES and a few trends afoot in the electronics business. Gary’s been going to the show for some 30 years (conveniently enough, his birthday often overlaps it) and has quite a few stories to tell; until we talked, I had forgotten that Apple introduced the Newton at CES. Maybe that’s why the company wants nothing to do with it these days.
I hope you enjoy the gruesome collage of log-in interfaces I put together to illustrate this post, which critiques three common and incorrect suggestions about creating and maintaining passwords. As you might guess, I’m not a fan of password-expiration policies, especially when coupled with irritating “minimum complexity” rules. But I’m embarrassed to admit how many of my passwords feature the number and symbol substitutions for letters that password-cracking tools already factor in.
I could head downstairs now for a little gambling–but, honestly, I have some e-mails to attend to after this post, and then I want to get to McCarran to try to get on an earlier flight home. Maybe I’ll have time to hit the breakfast buffet first?
