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Despite fighting the airlines (snowstorms won't stop me!), I made it to the pre-show Pepcom press event, which seems to get larger every year. Eventually the press won't even need to go to the trade show, they can just attend all of the different press events that get held.
If you want to check out the latest breaking news and product announcements from the show, check out our CES news page. Here are some of my early thoughts from CES:
It's bigger than ever here, and a lot of companies are attending that offer IT-based products. Take Anthology Solutions, for example, which launched a "toaster-sized" storage appliance aimed at small business and branch offices. The appliance, dubbed the "Yellow Machine," integrates a 1.6T-byte (yes, terabyte) network-attached storage device and RAID (0, 1, and 5) with networking and security features. Another vendor told me they were at CES because there wasn't a Comdex last year, and this is the only game left in town to show off new stuff. Whether IT buyers will attend this show is a big question -- most of the attendees I've seen here at the airport seem to be in the speaker business.
If I hear one more vendor use the term "digital home" I'm probably going to scream. Expect to hear this phrase tossed about to describe everything from photo software to wirelessly enhanced video players. During the Internet boom the way to get attention was to add an "e-" to describe what you were doing, this year it seems to be adding the word "digital."
I love it when a company decides to converge two technologies. Olympus apparently does too, as they were showing off the m:robe 500, a digital music player that includes digital camera features. The m:robe 500 can store up to 5,000 songs (a 20G-byte drive), and includes a 1.22-megapixel digital camera with a 3.7-inch color VGA LCD screen. At 1.22 megapixels you might not be able to create large photos, but it's an interesting convergence trend.
In looking at the early list of celebrity appearances, CES appears to be a B-lister's dream. Still, I expect to see attendees waiting in line for the likes to chat with or get an autograph from Tom Arnold, Jackie Chan, and former Bills QB Jim Kelly. Last year Kelly was at the show and was throwing miniature footballs out to the crowd, and one almost hit me. There also seems to be a lot of '80s music acts, and if I have the time on Saturday I might wait in line to get a photo with Go-Go's guitarist Jane Wiedlen (you can't keep a good Go-Go's fan down).
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