Tag Archives: cea

Unsubsidized words on subsidized travel

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Two summers ago, I got an intriguing travel offer in my e-mail that had the added benefit of not being spam: Would I be interested in an expenses-paid trip to Berlin to cover the IFA electronics trade show?

I'm not used to having my country listed on these things. USA! USA!I’d already gotten interested in IFA after reading some of Harry McCracken’s coverage of the 2011 show, and the prospect of having anybody else pay for my travel certainly got my attention. In two years of full-time freelancing, I’ve yet to have a client reimburse airfare or hotel costs.

But being possessed by Catholic guilt, I replied to the sender (a publicist working with the ShowStoppers PR firm that runs IFA’s U.S. outreach) that I’d have to check with my regular editors to see if they’d object.

To my surprise, their responses ranged from “Should be fine” to “say hello to my old haunts!” So I took the mostly-free trip–I paid miles and cash to upgrade to business class on the flight over,  then the subsidy didn’t cover all of the high-end hotel the organizers had booked–filled my notebook, and learned a great deal about the non-U.S. gadget business that’s since informed my coverage back here.

I was also surprised to see the company I had in Berlin that year and again earlier this month after I accepted the same offer. The contingent of maybe two dozen U.S. journalists included full-time staffers for tech-news hubs like ZDNet, PCMag.com, TechNewsDaily and SlashGear as well as freelancers whose outlets include the likes of CBS and the New York Times–not some scruffy bunch of junket-grabbing hacks, in other words. And I got a lot out of comparing notes with writers I’d only known before through Twitter.

Were I still at the Post, none of that would have happened. The career-limiting move wouldn’t have been getting turned down after requesting permission to take a travel stipend–it would have been my being a jerk for asking in the first place. And even as a freelancer, I can’t sell to some places under these circumstances. My occasional client Ars Technica turned down my offer to file something from the show.

I recognize that letting somebody besides an employer or client pay for my travel can look bad. But I think there’s a meaningful difference between a company I cover paying for a flight or a hotel so I can go write something about its event or product, and the money coming from a third party organizing or sponsoring an event.

The first case looks a lot worse to me and would be harder to explain to readers, so I’ve declined the few invitations I’ve received so far. (Two digital camera vendors wanted me to try out their new hardware in scenic settings, and a couple of tech companies offered to cover travel costs to attend events in New York.)

I’m not going to say first-party travel subsidies are always an ethical foul. Cranky Flier blogger Brett Snyder, my favorite chronicler of commercial aviation, covers an industry in which the product can come with a four- or five-digit price tag; his way of dealing with that conflict is to disclose not just the subsidized trips he’s taken but the ones he’s declined. I continue to trust his work.

You can also argue that third-party subsidies are economically indistinguishable from Samsung or Google writing a check. But if you start looking at how money flows in the tech-news business, you’ll never stop–who do you think buys the ads that support tech-news sites? Besides, I already write for a blog sponsored by a tech trade association and before that contributed to a much larger tech lobby’s blog; turning down organizer-paid travel wouldn’t make me any less guilty under that argument.

Transparency is an overrated response to situations like this but still necessary. My disclosures page breaks down my sources of income but also notes speaking fees and paid travel I’ve picked up (usually for participating in one panel discussion or another). But I also remember that if I’m not going to find enough news or networking when I arrive to keep me busy, it’s not worth being apart from my family.

Edited 11/18/2013 to clarify what I see as the difference between a company directly paying for me to cover its event or product and an organizer or sponsor paying travel costs.

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Weekly output: Aereo, 4K TV, Tech Night Owl, public WiFi, personalized Google search

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I did a lot more writing from the Consumer Electronics Association’s CE Week conference in New York than I’d expected, considering its small size and attendance. (I posted a few photos on Flickr.) The list below leaves out one other post reported from there, which should be up sometime Monday.

6/27/2013: Notes From An Enlightening Interview Of Aereo’s Chet Kanojia, Disruptive Competition Project

To my considerable surprise, an onstage interview of a tech CEO by a trade-association CEO yielded some useful insights about how we view copyright disputes and challenges to entrenched incumbents–thanks also to some unintentionally revealing questions from the audience.

DisCo 4K post6/28/2013: 4K, 3D and How Perfectionism Can Crowd Out Practicality, Disruptive Competition Project

Most of the last day at CE Week was taken up by a series of panels and presentations about “4K” television, so called for its almost four thousand pixels of horizontal resolution. I was a skeptic about 4K’s prospects before getting on the train to NYC Tuesday afternoon, and this show didn’t make me more optimistic.

6/29/2013: June 29, 2013 — Jim Dalrymple, Bob “Dr. Mac” LeVitus, Gabriel Weinberg, and Rob Pegoraro, Tech Night Owl Live

I returned to Gene Steinberg’s podcast to talk about 4K but also tech companies’ attempts to push back against NSA surveillance and my recent review of Republic Wireless (which, I should note, was reposted by Mashable a week ago as part of a Discovery content-sharing deal).

6/30/2013: Public Wi-Fi can alarm your browser, don’t let it alarm you, USA Today

Explaining why connecting to a public WiFi network with a Web login initially yields errors for every encrypted page open in your browser seemed like it would be a pretty straightforward job. That was not the case. The tip part of this week’s column covers a simpler topic: having Google show you search results that it hasn’t customized to suit its perception of your interests.

On Sulia, I posted a round of short reports from CE Week (for instance, relatively cheaper prices for 4K sets from Sharp and Toshiba). I also kvetched about the apparent uselessness of a new link-sharing site called Potluck, reminded readers that Big Music’s protests about Pandora shouldn’t ring true, and noted a successful resolution to a complication with repairs to an iPad 2’s cracked screen.

How DVD Recording Got Paused (June 2012 CEA repost)

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(Since a site redesign at the Consumer Electronics Association resulted in the posts I wrote for CEA’s Digital Dialogue blog vanishing, along with everything there older than last November, I’m reposting a few that I think still hold up. This one served as a belated correction to a few Post columns when it ran on June 6, 2012.)

Five years ago, a newspaper technology columnist heralded an overdue upgrade to a popular category of consumer electronics—adding a “record” button to the DVD player.

DVD recording“The DVD player has been around for more than a decade, but now it has finally grown up,” this writer declared. As proof, he cited an end to a squabble over recording formats (decried in a 2003 column by the same scribe) and these devices’ newly-gained ability to record over-the-air digital broadcasts.

The writer was me, and the forecast was wrong. DVD recording never took off or even picked up much speed on the runway.

CEA’s figures show U.S. sales to dealers of DVD recorders crested at 2.47 million in 2009 before ebbing to an estimated 797,000 last year. Meanwhile, combined U.S. shipments of DVD and Blu-ray players topped out at 34.04 million in 2011 and then dropped to 24.71 million in 2011.

I put my money where my words were, buying a Toshiba DVD recorder in 2009. But after a brief flurry of use archiving old videotape recordings to disc, we rarely employed it for anything but playing CDs and movies.

After a friend sold me his TiVo HD–fortunately, with lifetime-of-the-product service attached–we retired the recorder to the upstairs TV and picked up a Blu-ray player for our living room. (Note that after all of my earlier skepticism of 3-D TV, the under-$100 model I chose for other reasons happens to support 3-D.)

Our DVD recorder now sits alone and insert upstairs; I don’t even think I’ve plugged it back in after testing a Roku Web-media receiver with that set.

What did I miss? And are there any lessons to draw from my errant estimate?

Four come to mind.

* It’s easier to survive a format war without competition. The debut of the DVD itself was held back by lengthy disagreements over its capacity and features, but viewers didn’t have an obvious, appealing alternative to VHS to buy.

That was not the case when manufacturers lined up behind opposing recordable formats: DVD-RW (often pronounced as “minus RW” by opponents), DVD+RW and DVD-RAM. It took a few years of dispute before the industry agreed to support both the -RW and +RW standards, leaving behind DVD-RAM.

(If you could redesign the format from scratch, you might pick DVD-RAM, which allowed much of the same play-while-recording flexibility of hard drive-equipped digital video recorders. But most existing DVD players couldn’t read those discs.)

This delay cost DVD recording more than I had realized in 2007. It allowed DVRs to cement themselves as the video-recording solution of choice.

* Pay-TV incompatibility can kill video hardware. Aside from some models with “QAM” tuners for basic-tier cable and fewer, older models with CableCard slots, DVD recorders couldn’t record pay-TV programming unless their intrepid owners set up “IR blaster” controls for their cable and satellite boxes.

But why bother when a cable or satellite company will rent you a DVR that just works with its service? Nobody had a good answer to that question, and newer ventures in home video hardware—for instance, the Google TV hardware I tried in 2010—have run into the same problem.

So if you want to know why you still can’t buy a Blu-ray recorder for your TV in the U.S., there’s one answer.

* Just because the features you want exist in separate products doesn’t mean they’ll all come together. I expected DVD recorders would soon gain the ability to record in “enhanced definition” 480p resolution—the same upgrade provided by progressive-scan DVD players and generally welcomed by viewers. That never happened, leaving DVD recording stuck in standard-def.

I also though it obvious to use the “TV Guide on Screen” metadata sent out with over-the-air digital TV broadcasts to provide a simple interactive program grid with one-touch recording. Instead, DVD recorders, our purchase included, required me to punch in start and stop times, as if I were still using the top-loading VCR my parents bought in the early 1980s.

* Portability isn’t as important as I think. My advocacy for DVD recording was rooted in the idea that viewers would want a permanent copy of their favorite videos—say, the broadcast of their team winning the World Series or the Super Bowl.

Digital video recorders, however, have generally left out convenient video-export features ever since ReplayTV declined to enable a FireWire digital-video output on its pioneering DVRs. And viewers seem okay with that, as long as they can at least transfer copy-restricted recordings from one DVR to the next.

That’s something to consider as home movie viewing shifts from discs to online streaming. I would like to think that some movies are works for the ages and merit safekeeping in physical media you can take wherever you go. But if you can pull up your favorite flicks online, maybe that doesn’t matter.

Which somehow seems a little sad.

DMCA exemptions: requesting permission to innovate (2011 CEA repost)

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(Since a site redesign at the Consumer Electronics Association resulted in the posts I wrote for CEA’s Digital Dialogue blog vanishing, along with everything there older than last November, I’m reposting a few that I think still hold up. This one ran Dec. 16, 2011; it may help explain where the last few months of headlines about phone unlocking came from.)

One of the stranger rituals of U.S. tech policy is now unfolding in Washington: the triennial reassessment of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s “anti-circumvention” rules.

In this exercise, the Librarian of Congress considers granting exemptions to the DMCA’s ban on picking digital or electronic locks that control access to copyrighted works. The DMCA mandates this review because of the possibility–in retrospect, certainty–of companies abusing their immunity from customer interference with “digital rights management” systems to limit non-infringing uses.

DMCA exemption rulemakingYou may prefer to call this a “requesting permission to innovate” ritual.

In four earlier rounds of exemption proceedings–in 2000, 2003, 2006 and last year–Librarian James H. Billington has inconsistently expanded the range of DMCA exemptions, sometimes taking away earlier permissions.

He legalized hacking into Web-filtering software to inspect lists of blocked sites the first two times but didn’t renew that in 2006. The exemption granted in 2000 for defeating broken DRM mechanisms that wrongly deny access was then narrowed to a loophole for breaking obsolete or malfunctioning “dongle” hardware keys. (A related exemption, covering systems that require presenting an original copy of a program or game in a storage format that has become obsolete, arrived in 2003 but was not renewed in 2010.)

E-book customers won the right in 2003 to hack their DRM if it prevented the use of screen-reader accessibility software and have kept it since, but no equivalent accessibility exemption has been granted for movie viewers. And yet in 2010, the Librarian legalized ripping “protected” DVDs for fair-use criticism and commentary purposes, something still not allowed for DRMed e-books or music.

2006′s exemptions let you unlock a phone to use on a competing network, but 2010′s narrowed that to used phones. But last year’s proceeding also granted the right to jailbreak a phone to install the software of your choice–a big development for iPhone users.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, many of the 20 comments submitted in this year’s proceeding focus on preserving prior gains or ironing out inconsistencies.

For example, a group called the Library Copyright Alliance only wants to renew 2010′s DVD-ripping exemption, while the University of Michigan’s library seeks to have its protected class of students widened beyond those in “film and media studies.”

(Those links and all that follow point to PDF files.)

Public Knowledge wants to see the current DVD rule extended to cover “space shifting” to other formats, noting the increasing number of laptops without DVD drives.

A coalition of Telecommunications for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing, Gallaudet University and the Participatory Culture Foundation propose granting a broader exemption to make movie downloads, streams and discs accessible to those with hearing or sight impairments.

A group led by the International Documentary Association proposes to expand the same provision to cover Blu-ray discs and movie downloads and streams so that future filmmakers can incorporate fair-use excerpts in documentary or fictional works. A set of professors at the University of Pennsylvania and elsewhere make the same request for educational use and are echoed by the University of Rhode Island’s Media Education Lab.

The American Council of the Blind and the American Foundation for the Blind, meanwhile, want to maintain an exemption for making e-books accessible to readers with limited vision. The Open Book Alliance wants another for removing DRM from books that are already in the public domain.

Mobile devices figure in over a quarter of these submissions. Small wireless firms MetroPCS Communications, Youghiogheny Communications and a trade group called RCA – the Competitive Carriers Association all want to renew and expand 2010′s phone-unlocking exemption to cover mobile devices in general, not just phones. Consumers Union concurs.

The Software Freedom Law Center also favors allowing device owners to install the operating system of their choice. It also wants to permit desktop users to bypass any mandatory app stores–although neither Windows nor Mac OS X impose that restriction today.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation sent in an all-of-the-above brief backing exemptions for jailbreaking phones, tablets and video-game consoles and another set for unlocking DVDs, downloads and streams to extract fair-use clips.

Four submissions from individuals request blanket waivers on circumvention for personal use; a fifth seeks one for the narrow category of DRMed e-books in the Mobipocket format Amazon no longer supports on its Kindle readers.

We’ll have to wait until sometime in February to see which of these requests get a favorable hearing, or if any of 2010′s exemptions will disappear. That’s plenty of time to contemplate a broader question: If a far-reaching provision of a law carries such a high risk of collateral damage that an unelected official must drill holes into it every three years–and those holes seem to get bigger over time–shouldn’t we think about rebooting that rule?

A bout of broken links at CEA’s blog

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The Consumer Electronics Association recently moved its Digital Dialogue blog over to a new content management system. That wouldn’t be a news item to me, except that when CEA switched its blog to the same CMS that runs the rest of the site, they elected not to bring over entries older than November.

CEA Digital Dialogue logoThat means that along with CEA posts going back to the blog’s debut in March 2008, all of my own work there has gone down the bit bucket. (That’s not the first time this kind of link rot has happened; when Discovery News changed CMSes and redid its design in January, my car2go review somehow vanished; they were able to repost it, but not at the same address.) That’s not what I would have done; it’s also not my server.

You can still find most of my CEA contributions through the Internet Archive, but only if you know the original address of each. So I asked the folks at CEA if they’d mind me reposting some of that stuff here–I had to ask because my contract, like too many freelance arrangements, had a “work for hire” clause assigning copyright to them–and they said that would be fine as long as I noted where and when the work first appeared.

I said “some” and not all because I don’t have the time or motivation to rescue 50-plus contributions, not all of that material retains its relevance, and some of it is, you know, not that good. Four I have in mind: a December 2011 post unpacking the odd ritual of granting exemptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s anti-circumvention clause, an April 2012 rant about how “digital rights management” restrictions in e-books preserve Amazon’s dominance, a June 2012 confession of how I overestimated the appeal of the DVD recorder, and a July 2012 protest against sacrificing compatibility or connectivity to make phones and laptops fractionally smaller or thinner.

But if there are others you’d like to see restored here, please let me know. To help with that, I’ve gathered a more-or-less complete list after the jump of the posts, podcasts and chats I did for CEA, with Internet Archive links when available.

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Packing and planning for CES

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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.

CES 2012 South HallI 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.

Weekly output: Android security, CES answers, SOPA, Web chat, interview

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This week was about a million times easier than my post-CES week last year–when two days after coming from Vegas, I was on the 7 a.m. Acela to New York to cover the introduction of the Verizon iPhone, followed by an 8 a.m. TV appearance the next morning. This time, I had time to linger at the State of the Net conference Tuesday and Wednesday (where I did a radio interview about SOPA that, sadly, doesn’t seem to be anywhere online) and edit, sort and caption my CES pictures into a semi-coherent photoset on Flickr.

1/15/2012: Security tip: Assess Android apps wisely, USA Today

The week’s summarizes the ways you can assess the quality of an Android app before installing it on the phone, then shares a lesson learned from my Christmas tech troubleshooting of an iPhoto problem on my mother-in-law’s computer.

1/18/2012: Why The Web Is Sick Of SOPA, Discovery News

Wednesday’s online protests provided a handy news peg to summarize the things I and many other Internet users hate about the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act. One of them is the greedy, control-freak mindset behind these exercises in copyright overreach, as recently documented by News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch in a series of delusional tweets.

1/18/2012: CES 2012: Answers To Your Electronics Questions – Not All That You’ll Like, CEA Digital Dialogue

I’ve done a lot of CES recaps–including last week’s for Discovery–that focus on the new hardware on display at the electronics show. For this one, I opted to assess what sort of answers CES provided to some of the questions I hear most often about gadgets. Sorry, you won’t like the response the show coughed up about the future of smartphone battery life.

1/20/2012: Rob’s CES Recap, CEA Digital Dialogue

I did my first Web chat since my goodbye Q&A at the Post in April for CEA on Friday. (This was also my introduction to the CoverIt Live app I’ve seen used at many other sites.) About 10 minutes in, I realized how much I’d missed the experience–it’s good to be back in the saddle. The plan is to do these once a month at CEA’s site, although if there’s sufficient interest I wouldn’t have a problem with stepping up that frequency.

1/21/2012: January 21, 2012 — Kirk McElhearn, Daniel Eran Dilger, and Rob Pegoraro, Tech Night Owl Live

I was a guest on Gene Steinberg’s Tech Night Owl Live podcast. He interviewed me about Apple’s new iPad e-textbooks initiative (don’t put too much weight on my answers, since we spoke only an hour or so after the announcement and I hadn’t had much time to digest the details) and then my favorite political punching bag, SOPA. (This episode isn’t live on that page yet but should be sometime Saturday night. 1/22, 1:04 p.m. Now it is; I’ve added that link and corrected the title.)

Post-CES travel tech recap, 2012 edition

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One of the things I try to do after each CES–catch up on sleep, do laundry and cook for myself for the first time in a week–is note how the technology I took with me to the show worked out.

I did that in 2008, 2009 and 2010 for the Post, but apparently I was too wiped out after CES and the Verizon iPhone circus too repeat the exercise last year. This time around, I had a lot of new hardware on hand, and I was also able to switch out some of the software I’d used in previous years.

My laptop at this year’s show was the Lenovo ThinkPad X120E I bought in April. I continue to enjoy its light weight (3.3 lbs.) and extended battery life (four hours of nonstop work is no problem), and at a wireless-hostile show like CES it’s handy to have a laptop with a conventional Ethernet port.

But this ThinkPad is not a fast machine. At all. I’ve been planning to replace its hard drive with a solid-state drive, which should help a bit; in the meantime, it’s not a bad computer for writing and simple photo editing. And, hey, it only cost $500 or so.

About photos: After ditching Google’s Picasa a while back–it was too much work getting at edited photos from inside other programs–I usually alternate between Microsoft’s Windows Live Photo Gallery and Paint.Net. I used the latter app almost exclusively at CES for a reason irrelevant to most of you: Discovery News’s blog format requires specific photo sizes, and Paint.Net makes it easy to crop a photo to a set proportion.

The best photos I took came from the oldest hardware in the image above, the Canon A570 IS camera I’ve had since 2007. Once I got home, I used Apple’s iPhoto to upload everything to a Flickr set.

I carried my own phone, the battered HTC model at the bottom left of the photo, but used it much less often than the two review models above it, also Android-based: a Samsung Galaxy Nexus on Verizon and an LG Nitro HD on AT&T. I’ll save my full evaluation of both for later, but I will say I’m not the biggest fan of the Nexus for its battery drain, the two freeze-ups I could only cure by removing its battery, and its maddening failure to save a timestamp on several photos. The Nitro, in turn, suffered from LG’s puzzling and unnecessary alterations to the standard Android interface.

I took most of my notes on Twitter, which was terrific for real-time sharing but inconvenient afterwards. As noted before here, Storify is useless as an archiving tool, since I’d have to drag and drop 300 or so tweets one at a time; I may try TweetBackup instead. I didn’t use Evernote as much as in prior years, and this time around its utility was undercut when the app crashed a couple of times, taking my most recent input with it in each case. That raises a question: Why does its Android version have a “Save” button at all when the Windows and Mac editions save every keystroke automatically?

I took along one extra item, a Belkin travel surge protector. Being able to turn one outlet into three–plus two powered USB ports–simplified recharging everything in my hotel room. It was also an enormous help (and a good conversation piece) in crowded press rooms.

The luggage you see underneath is a messenger bag called an Airbeltbag that I got as a Christmas gift. Yes, that’s a real airline seat-belt buckle you see latching it closed. The TSA guy at McCarran Airport in Las Vegas and a publicist for the Tripit travel-planning app got a kick out of that, but I also appreciated that this bag will not accidentally open once you insert the metal fitting into the buckle. I just wish the zippered pocket on the outside had some pouches on its inside for pens and business cards.

If you have questions about any of this gear–or, more importantly, my coverage of the show, including the wrap-up I did for the Consumer Electronics Association this week–you can ask me in real time at tomorrow’s Web chat. It runs from noon to 1 or so at CEA’s blog. This will be my first live Q&A since my finale at the Post back in April, so I’m looking forward to it. Talk to you all then?

CES XV

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LAS VEGAS–With this trip, I’ve been to this city 16 times. Fifteen of those have been for business, all for the convention formerly known as the Consumer Electronics Show and now going by the condensed moniker of “International CES.”

So although I’m not quite as keyed up about the show as some folks, it feels weirdly comfortable to be back. I’ve been here and I know the way–now give me my laptop and my phone, because it’s time to work.

My schedule this year is still cluttered, as you can see in the stylized view of my calendar at right. But not having to blog every few hours should free me to spend more time roaming the show floor and finding interesting gadgets. (Notice the white spaces on Wednesday and Thursday?)

If you want to keep up with what I’m seeing, the best way will be to follow me on Twitter–that’s where I’ll chronicle Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer’s last-ever CES keynote tonight.

But I’ll also try to do a better job of sharing photos on Google+ than I have lately (in part because tech blogger Robert Scoble was kind enough to add me to a circle of “the best tech journalists on Google+” and now I feel obliged to live up to that label). When I have a moment to put together a better-curated set of pictures, I’ll post them to my Flickr account as well.

Later on in the week, I’ll do a summary of the show and a tour of some of its more intriguing gadgets for Discovery News, followed by a wider-angle writeup for CEA. And the week after I get back–you’re seeing this here first–CEA’s site should host my first Web chat since I left the Post.

Now I just need to get through the next four days without having all of my devices run out of battery at the same time. Wish me luck…

CES tips for rookie reporters

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My first trip to what was then called the Consumer Electronics Show in 1998 feels like it happened so long ago, I can’t guarantee that my voice didn’t crack as I was introducing myself to people. But over the 13 subsequent visits to the show that now calls itself the “International CES,” I’ve picked up a few tips about how to manage its chaos.

Planning:

If you want to feel like you’re not being ignored by the rest of the universe, get on the CES mailing list. I received 66 e-mails pitching various CES exhibitors last week alone. My advice is to be exceedingly conservative in booking appointments: On one hand, you will be late to most of them (read on for reasons why), and on the other if you show up on time the appropriate publicist will probably be somewhere else through no fault of his or her own.

So I usually limit my booth appointments to large companies with a diverse product line–the likes of Samsung, Panasonic, Sony or Microsoft. In those cases, scheduling a meeting can help get an advance look at unreleased hardware or the chance to sit down with a higher-ranking executive.

Packing:

The most important item to bring to CES is a set of comfortable walking shoes. I’m partial to Eccos (note to Ecco PR: where’s my endorsement contract?), worn with hiking socks. Other useful things to pack: Clif Bars, in case you don’t get around to eating lunch; some separate source of bandwidth (either a phone with tethering available or a MiFi or equivalent); a travel-sized surge protector with USB ports (it can make you friends when other people notice the sole available wall outlet just as you reach for it); twice as many business cards as you think you’ll need.

Most important, for the love of all that is holy, do not forget to pack your laptop’s charger.

The LVCC and other exhibit areas:

The Las Vegas Convention Center, home to most of CES’s exhibit space, could double as an assembly line for airliners–or for other, smaller convention centers. Budget 10 minutes to get from any one of its three halls to the next, 20 to hustle from one end to the other. I usually do one at a time: the Central Hall, where most of the big-ticket vendors exhibit, will eat up at least a day by itself. The North Hall, home to automotive electronics and satellite radio, takes less time (but may also deafen you faster). The South Hall collects smartphone and tablet vendors, camera manufacturers and–well, everybody else. You’ll find the weirdest items on its lower level.

There’s also some exhibit space in the convention center’s parking lot, in the Las Vegas Hilton (about a 10-minute walk from the North Hall), and in the Sands Expo and the next-door Venetian about a mile and a half southwest.

Some companies also have off-site meetings in nearby hotels. (And some are exceedingly off-site: A few years ago, one manufacturer of high-end speakers offered to take journalists on its private plane to Los Angeles for a tour of its facility there. Not wanting to get fired for violating the Post’s ethics policy–and not being interested in audio hardware more expensive than most cars–I declined.) Don’t even think of trying to stop by those places in the middle of the day; visit them before or after everything else.

Getting around:

The Las Vegas Monorail is a good way to avoid traffic on your way to and from the convention center–except when you have to wait 10 to 15 minutes to board it in the morning or evening. But even then, it can be faster than getting on a bus that has to crawl through traffic to and from the LVCC–or spending even more time on a horrendously long taxi line. But since it doesn’t stop at the Sands or the Venetian, you’ll have to get off at the Harrah’s/Imperial Palace station and walk a block or two north.

The Consumer Electronics Association (note: a freelance client of mine) also hires out a fleet of shuttle buses to run between the official show hotels, the LVCC and the Sands. You shouldn’t have a long wait for them in the morning, but forget getting out of the LVCC  in a hurry on the first two evenings. The wait for one can exceed half an hour.

Many evening events happen at the Wynn. That’s nowhere near a monorail stop, but getting a taxi or shuttle bus can also require a prolonged queue. Remember my advice about walking shoes? Use them to hike the mile and change from the convention center to the hotel.

Power and bandwidth:

Both are in pitifully short supply. So anytime you’re sitting down and near an outlet, recharge your devices. Don’t expect wireless to work with so many gadgets in use, although you may find the occasional exhibit space with a more robust wireless network than usual. If you can find a wired connection, use that instead. And remember that if your phone has to spend more time hunting for a signal, it will run down even faster than usual.

Any other tips? Let me know in the comments and I can update this post accordingly.