I never work harder in a week than during CES, so I immensely appreciated the gift of a snowstorm this weekend that let me get in some cross-country skiing, go sledding with my daughter on the nearest suitable hill and think about work very little.
If you’ve already read all of the posts below, please check out my Flickr album from the show.
1/8/2019: True Confessions: ICOs, Crypto, Tokens and VCs, Digital Money
My spot on this panel track was an onstage interview of cryptocurrency investor Michael Terpin about how a SIM-swap hack led to him being robbed of startup tokens worth almost $24 million at the time.
1/9/2019: Your TV could soon have these features that are better than 8K, Yahoo Finance
Just about every one of the 22 consecutive CESes that I’ve covered has led to me writing a report on the state of the TV. This year’s version involves an unusual company: Apple.
1/10/2019: Last Gadget Standing, Living in Digital Times
Once again, I helped judge this gadget competition and introduced one of the contestants–Origami Labs, developer of the Orii smart ring. This year’s contest, however, featured a new emcee. Instead of my former Yahoo colleague David Pogue, my USA Today colleague Jennifer Jolly did the honors.
1/10/2019: How cybersecurity forecasts got 2018 wrong, The Parallax
Having botched enough tech forecasts of my own, I appreciated having a chance to revisit other people’s predictions for the year we just escaped.
1/11/2019: From a smart toilet to ‘Shazam for Food’: CES unveils new connected appliances, Yahoo Finance
Once Samsung explained how this year’s version of their Family Hub fridge automatically identified food inside visible to its three interior cameras, Silicon Valley’s “Shazam for food” plot line immediately jumped into my head. That also led me to think of the role of hacked smart fridges in the HBO comedy–which made the unwillingness of so many CES smart-home exhibitors to talk specifics about security fixes all the more annoying.
1/11/2019: The drones of CES 2019 aren’t all in the air, Yahoo Finance
I wasn’t sure how I’d end this story until finding myself staring at a an enormous John Deere combine–brought to the show floor to exhibit how GPS guidance lets it drive itself to an extraordinary degree of accuracy. That makes it a very large drone that happens to help bring corn and corn-based products to supermarkets, and there I had my ending.
1/12/2019: 8K TVs show the tech industry indulging in a bad habit, USA Today
This take on TV technology revisited some CES flops of a decade and two decades ago: 3-D TV and the would-be CD-upgrade formats DVD-Audio and Super Audio CD.
1/13/2019: The weirdest tech we saw at CES, Yahoo Finance
I wrote this, along with the two prior stories, after landing at Dulles early Friday morning. It turns out that you can be productive after a red-eye flight home if you pass out for almost the entire flight, nap a couple of times during the day and apply caffeine as needed.
Updated 1/24/2019 with video of my interview of Michael Terpin.