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Lip Reading, 3D Desktops, And NUI: Microsoft Plans To Reinvent User Interaction

admin2 — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 01:25:45 +0000

Deep in the skunk works of its Research and Labs divisions, secreted around the Seattle area, Microsoft is working on totally reinventing the way people interact with their computers. Very little is out in the open or in more than a prototype form, but the work is unquestionably being done. Last week it transpired that Microsoft is working on building Kinect into the bezels of laptops , and after that, presumably, tablets and eventually mobile phones. But it’s not just about building out the install base for Dance Central 3. It’s enabling the next generation of awareness in our electronics. The iPhone ushered in an era where our devices know when we touch them. Microsoft is working on the next one, in which our devices will simply know us. How do you, as a person, experience the world around you? You mostly see and hear, and to a lesser extent you touch, taste, smell. Our devices, however, are largely restricted to an extremely limited sense of touch. Why shouldn’t they be more like us? There’s a good reason, actually: computers don’t need to be like people because computers aren’t people. For years this has held true: the computer’s primary purpose for decades was to sit still and perform calculations humans couldn’t do. Interaction with a computer was strictly input, output. You didn’t interact so much as instruct, and wait for the result. But mobile phones and touchscreens and laptops began changing the idea of a computer into something more personal, more interactive, more two-way. And technology exists to let our devices become more human. Why not let them? Microsoft wants to. Despite their reputation among tech enthusiasts as a sort of stodgy blue-chip still coasting on the PC explosion of the late 90s and early 2000s, their R&D sections are world-class and put out actually innovative ideas and devices all the time. The trouble, briefly stated, is that implementing these ideas as products that fit into the Microsoft ecosystem isn’t easy, and even if it were, Microsoft has no talent for it . But this work on “Natural User Interaction,” or NUI, is more promising. People have embraced the idea in gaming: the Wii led the way and the Kinect brought the future into your living room, though the future is a little laggy and the voice controls spotty. People are simply interested in new ways of interacting with their content and devices. For years the promise of a different kind of interaction has been dangling, in the form of sci-fi shows and movies usually, and people have always been intrigued by it. So people want it — and Microsoft wants to make it — and they have the technology. Purchasing the IP behind the Kinect was an extremely smart move, maybe smarter than they know. What started out as a way to cash in on the market the Wii had created has snowballed into an entirely new form of interacting with computers, and a way for Microsoft to differentiate itself meaningfully for years to come. It was reported to me that one of the things the new Kinect/depth/IR sensors will do is read lips. At first it sounds silly. Why? Maybe so it can better interpret your words from across the room, or in a loud environment. You won’t have to turn the music down to search and navigate the web on your TV or tablet. And then it becomes clear that it’s just part of a larger suite of “senses” the device would have. The new devices are to have face recognition and voice recognition, so your password will be you saying your password in your own voice, not someone else, and not a print-out of you. They’ll be able to pick you out of a crowd, say a small party, and will be able to tell when you’re giving it a command — because you make eye contact and move your lips . Again, it sounds perfectly ridiculous until it starts sounding perfectly natural. Another feature described was a sort of 3D desktop on which you could actually grab files and place them here and there. This has been tried before, of course, and Windows 8 is looking decided two-dimensional, so it’s probably more of a research project than anything. But it’s still interesting. Think of the basic gestures you might be able to make. One was described as pulling out a drawer. In the surprisingly resilient desktop metaphor of files and folders, what could be more natural? Or perhaps raising your hand palm up to show the task bar or dock? Trace your finger in a counter-clockwise circle to undo, clockwise to redo? User experience reflects both the needs of the user and the capabilities of the device. For a few years now we’ve been satisfied with running our fingers along a slab of glass, producing an electrical signal interpreted as a point or blob — mainly because capacitive screens got good and cheap, and nobody wants to plug a mouse into their phone. But there are many other ways of interacting with our new mobile objects and information. Soon the glass touchscreen will seem as quaint as the command-line interface. And yet, some are no doubt thinking, we still have some command-line interfaces in use. Sure. And mice and keyboards are still better for productivity, and a pen and paper is better for sketching out ideas, and headphones are better for listening to music in public. There are countless use cases and potential applications of technology, but it’s good to recognize when one should give way or simply isn’t applicable. Microsoft is working hard at this, and you’d better believe that Apple is too, though they aren’t nearly as open about their research. And for once, they seem to actually be missing a piece of the technology pie: Microsoft has a head start on them in the world of NUI, having purchased and developed depth and personal sensors for at least two years now. Apple can always throw money at the problem, but it’s pretty clear that Microsoft has perceived this rare advantage and will be using it as a wedge wherever possible. This shouldn’t be taken as an indication that Windows 8 is going to be anything other than advertised, but I think it will be a test bed for some major changes coming down the line. Microsoft wants to change the way people interact with computers because it sees, hopefully not too late, that the old way, the PC way, treating a computer like a box that computes things, is on its way out in a hurry. So if computers are going to be a part of the real world, they need to be able to live in that world. Eyes, ears, and who knows what else. It’s only creepy until you can’t live without it. [images: Matthew Fisher/Stanford , Wolfgang Herfuntner ]

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Lip Reading, 3D Desktops, And NUI: Microsoft Plans To Reinvent User Interaction

Micron CEO Dead At 51

vertical8 — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 01:30:12 +0000

The CEO of Micron Technology, Steve Appleton, died in a small plane crash today in Boise, Idaho. He was 51. Appleton worked at the company since 1983, starting on the night shift production line. He died piloting a Lancair experimental aircraft around Boise. He is survived by his wife Dalynn and his children. Micron is a major semiconductor supplier and most notably built a number of memorable laptops and hard drives during the early days of the dot com years. The company currently produces the Crucial and Lexar memory lines, among other hardware. via Micron

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Micron CEO Dead At 51

Secret Windows 8 Weapon: Kinect Built Into Your Laptop

blogger — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 03:39:12 +0000

The Windows release of Kinect is coming up in a couple days , but for most people that won’t be a major event: the Kinect they have is sitting on their TV or in a drawer, waiting to be taken out for an impromptu Dance Central 2 party. Of the 10 million Kinects out there, the only ones connected to computers are the ones being fiddled with by the various hackers and students making science projects out the things. But according to the Daily, Microsoft is hoping to remedy this particular situation by building Kinect sensors right into your laptops . TechCrunch alum Matt Hickey got to handle a pair of prototypes, which were confirmed to be official, not just one of the many experiments that hide within Microsoft’s various lairs. Unfortunately the laptops were not ready for their debut and no pictures seem to have been permitted. But they are described as netbook-like, with a number of smaller sensors instead of a webcam, and what could be an IR LED at the bottom of the screen. The inclusion of depth-sensing cameras on a laptop is an interesting idea, and if they can drive the price of the sensor array down, it might become a standard feature. Microsoft has clearly also been focusing on miniaturizing the Kinect hardware, as the bulky original would seem somewhat out of place on a petite netbook. Whether this smaller sensor set has the same capabilities as the larger isn’t clear and wasn’t discussed. A smaller Kinect would also suggest that Microsoft’s next console, rumored to have Kinect built in, is nearing readiness. While many gaming industry insiders have discounted the idea that the next generation of consoles will be announced this year, the rumor mill says otherwise.

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Secret Windows 8 Weapon: Kinect Built Into Your Laptop

Apple Just Incentivized Every College Kid To Get An iPad. As For High Schoolers…

bestcbstore — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 06:13:59 +0000

As I watched Apple’s iBooks event in New York City last week, my mind began to race about the ramifications of such announcements. Everyone had a pretty good idea for weeks (or months if you read the Steve Jobs biography) that textbooks would be a focal point for Apple, but there wasn’t much thought given to what this would mean. During the event itself, I just kept thinking, “wow, Apple just incentivized every college student to get an iPad”. Except, they didn’t. Not yet. The weird thing about Apple’s event was that it mainly focused on high school education. Yes, the iTunes U update is fantastic, but for now, the textbook side of the equation is about high schools. And again, that’s weird because the iPad plan seems better suited for college students. In fact, it seems almost perfectly suited for college students. In kicking off the event, Apple SVP Phil Schiller noted that high school students in the U.S. that enter as freshman only have a 70 percent chance of graduating these days. In urban areas, it’s more like 60 percent, he said. Schiller was setting up Apple’s iBooks textbooks as a possible way to improve this. The problem is that the cheapest iPad is still $500. What high school student is going to buy that? Basically none — their parents will have to. And that’s fine for some students, but not all. Not even a high percent, I’d imagine. In the inner-cities — again, where education is even more of an issue — it’s probably even less likely of a purchase. As Josh Topolsky points out , Apple does work with school districts to lease iPads on a four-year schedule, presumably at a nice discount. But that means the school owns the iPads and temporarily gives them out to students. That goes against Apple’s stated mission that students should now buy (or get via redemption code) all iBooks textbooks and keep them forever, keeping their notes, highlights, etc. The school leasing also probably means the iPads are staying at the schools. How does that help for homework? Or are the schools allowing students to take the iPads home, risking losing them or damaging them? That doesn’t seem like a tenable idea for many budget-minded schools. Schiller also told The Verge that he felt the numbers worked out favorably if the school districts bought students iPads instead of old-school textbooks and computers for the classroom. Maybe. But computers are a purchase the high schools do in multi-year cycles and students share them. For this new iPad textbook system to fully reach its maximum potential, schools would have to buy one iPad for each student that comes through the school. And again, what if they get lost, or stolen, or break? My point is that Apple’s textbook plan for iBooks is a wonderful, obvious, and much needed evolution of the current system . But it’s more naturally suited for college students. At least right now. One could easily imagine students buying $499 iPads and $15 textbooks instead of paying several hundred dollars a year for just the old-school textbooks alone. (Though it wasn’t entirely clear if college-level textbooks would have the same $15 ceiling that high school ones do — again, the focus last week was on high school.) Yes, college students can (and often do) sell back books once they’re done with them. But having been a college student myself, I feel safe saying the entire experience is pretty crappy. I’d much much much rather have an iPad with all my textbooks on it — that I get for a reasonable price, and keep forever, along with all my notes. Even better, you could imagine the universities themselves wrapping the cost of an iPad into tuition. Many schools started doing this with laptops years ago. Because college is so expensive — and again, college textbooks are so ridiculously expensive — this works. At the very least, it works a lot better than it currently does for high school students. Even if when the next iPad is announced, the current model drops in price to something like $400 — or even $300 — that’s still an expensive sell to high school students and/or their parents and/or their schools. If every kid in the world already had an iPad, this would be the most brilliant program ever. Unfortunately, Apple needs to sell at least a few billion more iPads to get to that point. I’m worried we may have a chicken and egg problem here. Apple is giving students a huge incentive to use iPads, but it’s still prohibitive for many of those students to get one. And if many can’t get one, does the iBooks program take off like it should? If it does take off, I bet it does in colleges first. And that’s why it’s weird that Apple is starting off by focusing on high school. The education system in this country (and I’m sure you could certainly argue the same is true in most parts of the world) absolutely needs fixing, and it’s great that Apple is working on the problem. I’m just not sure I see how it’s anything but an extremely slow process with iBooks, if it works at all. I have no doubt that in the not-too-distant future, students walk around with tablet computers carrying all of their textbooks and other education needs. But we need to get the tablets in their hands to get to that future.

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Apple Just Incentivized Every College Kid To Get An iPad. As For High Schoolers…

TCTV: Live At SF vs SOPA, The Biggest Tech Protest In Decades

kram412 — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 07:52:48 +0000

When you hear the words “San Francisco,” there’s a good chance that the word “protest” will also come to mind. Or, if you’re on a different wavelength, “Ron Conway.” But today, the city’s favorite pasttime and its top angel investor came together at a special appearance in Civic Center Plaza to speak out against SOPA and PIPA, the two slimy “anti-piracy” bills currently worming their ways through Congress. In a microcosm of the internet, the event featured a wide range of speakers sharing their various issues with the bills — the secret ways they were crafted, the draconian “rights” they would give copyright holders to shut down websites, etc. (Be sure to read up on our ongoing coverage of the topic, here .) At first I thought I was witnessing the first real-life tech protest ever, as representatives from a wide range of entrepreneurial and information-freedom organizations got on stage to issue their denounciations. But Conway set me straight, as you can see in my first ever TCTV video above. There was a previous one, he recalled, some 25 years ago in San Jose, that venture capitalist John Doerr had helped organize to around immigration. The protest wasn’t big, especially by local standards. Having participated in anti-Iraq War protests in the same spot last decade, I can certainly say it didn’t match those. Although maybe it’s getting more results. There were maybe 200 people participating at any given time that I was there after noon today. But plenty more cameras, laptops and phones, with all sorts of citizen and professional media folks transmitting the words online to join the massive internet protests that have been taking place. The most exciting part was the general feeling that the tech community, broadly speaking, needs to figure out how to take this energy and translate it into a firmer agenda around innovation. Not necessarily legislation, as politics doesn’t have all the answers for everything we’re doing. But something. The two other people I interviewed at the event get into this topic more, Elizabeth Stark from Stanford and Alex Fowler , the privacy and public policy head at Mozilla. Viva La Innovation! Event organizers and speakers included people from SF New Tech , Hackers & Founders , 106 Miles , Designers and Geeks , Hacks & Hackers , and the Electronic Frontier Foundation among many others.

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TCTV: Live At SF vs SOPA, The Biggest Tech Protest In Decades

Why Apple Bought Anobit

ACMAir — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 20:45:32 +0000

Apple finally confirmed earlier reports that it bought Israeli semiconductor startup Anobit Technologies. Apple did not confirm the price, which is believed to be between $400 million and $500 million. Apple bought Anobit for two reasons: its flash memory controllers are a key component of all Apple’s leading products (from iPads and iPhones to MacBook Airs), and in one fell swoop it just added a large team of chip engineers to payroll. Do not underestimate how important those chip engineers are. Apple had at least 1,000 chip engineers. Roughly 160 of Anobit’s 200 employees are also engineers, thus they instantly represent more than 10 percent of the total number of chip engineers at Apple. Anobit is a fabless semiconductor company based in Israel which makes a key component that improves the performance of NAND flash memory chips, which are used in iPhones, iPads, and iPods. As Robin wrote when the rumors first surfaced: Anobit provides flash storage solutions for enterprise and mobile markets , based on its proprietary MSP (which stands for ‘Memory Signal Processing’) technology. Its solutions are designed to improve the speed, endurance and performance of flash storage systems while driving down the cost. Anobit’s technology is comprised of signal processing algorithms that compensate for physical limitations of NAND flash, the company claims. Flash memory is a crucial piece of Apple’s technology puzzle. Apple has been moving away from hard drives for years, starting with the iPod, then the iPhone, the iPad, and now it’s MacBook Air laptops. None of these computers have hard drives. They’ve all been replaced by flash memory chips. Removing the hard drive is what allows these devices to be so thin, assume any form factor, and run on less power. Any technology that improves the performance of flash memory, such as Anobit’s, is a critical piece of technology which Apple decided it needs to own. But beyond the technology, just as important are the engineers that come with the purchase. Apple designs its own chips, and then farms out their manufacture to semiconductor fabrication plants around the world. So with a relatively small tam of chip designers, it’s been able to replace what it used to rely on Intel for (and before that,IBM) with its own in-house team focussed on creating chips for post-PC devices. These chips have different characteristics than the power-hungry Intel chips in PCs. In computers, whether PCs or post-PCs, everything starts with the chips. By designing its own chips and building out a world-class chip engineering team, Apple is investing in its ability to keep creating more post-PC devices for years to come.

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Why Apple Bought Anobit

Why Cool Startups Are Losers In China

jos — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 21:54:09 +0000

Editor’s note : Contributor Kai Lukoff is based in Beijing and is co-founder of the startup blog TechRice . Here’s Hongyi Zhou’s advice to Chinese entrepreneurs: “Don’t try to be cool.” Zhou is CEO of Qihoo 360 (NYSE: QIHU ), whose company’s core is the definition of uncool: anti-virus software. Yet Qihoo has 370 million monthly active users and a very cool $1.9 billion dollar valuation. If you want to build a big company in China, don’t build for your iPhone-toting friends, the Chinese tech blogs, or copy the latest fad on TechCrunch. Chinese entrepreneurs must appreciate the vast chasm between white-collar elites and the rest of the country. The Silicon Valley has an echo chamber of its own, but China’s is an order of magnitude louder. “There’s only 80 million or so white-collars in China, and not even 5 million could be considered your peers,” Zhou told a group of Chinese Stanford students visiting as part of the Stanford CEO Beijing tour over winter break. Many of the students are already running startups in China or considering returning to do so. Hot startups that pop up on TechCrunch all have at least five Chinese versions. That’s a common route for the ‘cool kids’ among Zhongguancun’s techies : there are more Tumblr, Flipboard, Pinterest, Instagram, and What’s App clones and mashups than you can count. You may receive a mention on 36kr or Tech2IPO , China’s top startup blogs, but that does nothing for your user growth in a second-tier Chinese city, let alone in the third, fourth, or fifth tier. Chinese blogger Simon Shen writes , “China does not have one so-called ‘national internet,’ instead there’s a great divide. It encompasses the elite with ThinkPad laptops and also the grassroots with MTK Shanzhai mobile phones. Our elites are on par with America, while our grassroots are on par with Vietnam.” In ”The Story of W&L”, Shen tells the tale of two Chinese entrepreneurs: W, who always adopts the latest coming out of the Silicon Valley, and L, who mingles with migrant workers to learn what simple games they want on their Shanzhai feature phones. It’s L who’s making the real money: “in China, you target elites to make noise, but you target the grassroots to make money.” The Four With Reach Only four companies have achieved mass market reach among China’s 500-million plus netizens: Tencent, Baidu, Alibaba, and Qihoo. The first three are China’s reigning Internet emperors. Qihoo is a scrappy newcomer with the user numbers and decent revenues, though its business model is still a work in progress. All four feature products that foreigners—and highly-educated Chinese returnees—may scorn, but are beloved by local users. Qihoo 360 started in 2006 with anti-virus software, a product so prosaic that it even flew under the radar of China’s existing Internet giants for the first three years of the company’s existence. In 2009, Qihoo made a daring decision to give away its anti-virus software for free. Anti-virus may not be flashy, but it’s a basic essential for all Chinese netizens, who face a daily barrage of viruses and malware. It quickly became the default for Chinese Internet users. Leveraging that trust and brand recognition, Qihoo then rolled out a suite of security-related products. In China, the Qihoo 360 Safe Browser is second only to Internet Explorer in market share. The browser directs massive traffic to a start page ( hao.360.cn ) full of paid links to popular Chinese websites, with a layout like Yahoo’s circa 1996. It won’t win any awards for web design, but selling links and search traffic on that one page generated 60% of Qihoo’s $47.5 million in Q3 2011 revenue (see also Red Tech Advisors’ superb deep dive on Qihoo’s innovative business model ). Building a billion dollar company and solving a real problem for hundreds of millions of users, that’s pretty cool.

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Exclusive: ThreatMetrix Acquires TrustDefender To Protect Cloud From Fraud

admin2 — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 06:34:41 +0000

As companies move their data out from behind firewalls into the cloud and employees use self-provisioned mobile devices, infosecurity must change. That’s why cybercrime prevention provider ThreatMetrix will announce tomorrow its acquisition of TrustDefender , which detects malware-based attacks. ThreatMetrix can now offer an integrated fraud protection solution that verifies the identity and integrity of any device trying to access secure data. If an endpoint has been compromised through malware or identity theft: access denied. Reed Taussig, ThreatMetrix’s CEO tells me the acquisition was made with a combination of cash and stock. It was bankrolled by ThreatMetrix’s 300% year on year revenue growth and the $12 million funding round it took in October 2010. TrustDefender co-founder and CEO Andreas Baumhof will become the new ThreatMetrix CTO. The majority of the Australian TrustDefender’s team was picked up, but won’t be relocating to ThreatMetrix’s San Jose headquarters. TrustDefender took $16 million in funding from Nexbix Ltd in March 2010. ThreatMetrix’s device identifications system looks at over 250 aspects of an endpoint device to determine its integrity. — where is it, hidden proxies, if text is being rendered in foreign language, or if that email address has been used to make a request from multiple continents. TrustDefender detects malware and other threats including trojans, Poison Ivy, and man-in-the-browser-attacks. It services financial institutions, SaaS providers, ecommerce companies, and government. Before now, companies had to seek out separate vendors for device identification and malware detection. Taussig tells me “The identification of malware on a device should be a feature of device identification. We were fortunate to have found a malware ID company that has leading edge technology with referenceable, high-end customers that recognize this is a match made in heaven. The acquisition provides huge advantages, as clients can be supported by a single product.” Additionally, ThreatMetrix has just signed a partnership with major credit bureau TransUnion. This will help it verify the authenticity of user biographical and financial data to protect logins and payments. Instead of only accessing firewalled data through dedicated, pre-screened devices, employees now accessing the cloud with their own laptops, tablets, and phones. Let’s be honest. Who knows what those devices are being used for in the off-hours? It’s therefore more important than ever for IT departments to have a strong device ID security system. Otherwise their company’s source code, intellectual property, design docs, customer names or credit card numbers could be at risk.

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Exclusive: ThreatMetrix Acquires TrustDefender To Protect Cloud From Fraud

Live From The Intel CES 2012 Press Conference: The Ultrabook Lifestyle

Administrator — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 22:14:50 +0000

Intel opened with that goofy guy from “Evolution of Dance,” which wasn’t very encouraging. However, things got better quickly. Intel is coming down hard on the ultrabook this year, showing off a number of interesting 2+ GHz laptops with Intel processors that can do much more in a package the size of a Macbook Air. These new machines are slim, small, and based on Intel’s Ivy Bridge architecture. [We are streaming this press conference live right here ] The demos included a super-fast render of a cute photo sharing app including lots of hi-res photos stuffed into a slideshow as well as a clever demo involving a train going over a bridge. The bridge, made up of hundreds of individual parts, is blown up and each part rendered in real time using 50% the processing power of the current chipset, Sandy Bridge. In addition, the new system allows for secure NFC connectivity. For example, you can “tap” your credit card on the laptop to make a purchase, provided you have NFC capabilities built-in. Each machine manages “correct” cards to ensure that your card won’t work if your card falls into the wrong hands. Most important, this chipset allows for a much thinner machine. Most laptops go from 9.5mm to 6.5mm with socketless chips that are soldered right into the motherboard (something hackers will hate) as well as improved heat dispersion. Intel is serious about ultrabooks. They’ve already announced a $300 million dollar investment to reduce the price of thin components and prices are all ready at a commodity price. Interestingly, I suspect that these laptops will become the de facto standard, eventually pushing the standard, inch-think laptop to the side. They couldn’t pull off netbooks, but I think the ultrabook is the new hotness. Click to view slideshow.

Nobody Wins At CES

vertical8 — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 20:39:44 +0000

Rather than do a CES pre-round-up of exciting products I’d like to address this interesting slant on the whole “massive electronics trade show in the middle of the desert” concept that has kept the Gadgets crew here up for the past few weeks. MG said Apple won CES. He was being snide, but, in a way, honest because, in the end, nobody wins CES. The Consumer Electronics Show is, as its name implies, a show for consumer electronics. These include, but are not limited to, TVs, DVD players, Blu-Ray players (if they still make those), and accessories. TV stands! TV brackets! Speakers! Remotes! In fact, there’s an entire hall dedicated to the Asian purveyors of the components that make up those consumer electronics, a sort of Fishmongers Row to the CE industry where the smell is at least far more tolerable. You’ll notice that nowhere in there did I mention PCs, laptops, cellphones, tablets, and Microsoft Windows. That’s because those are typically termed “mobile devices” or PCs or operating systems. There are trade shows for those, as well, although they are far fewer these days than they ever were. Why? Because the Internet took away all the fun of schlepping a booth to the Javitts Center in New York and paying for hotel rooms and food for a bunch of salesmen to stand around giving out tote bags. Why have a COMDEX when you can get Engadget, The Verge, and Gizmodo to cover your geegaw the moment its launched. Why pay $100,000 in booth fees at SXSW as a start-up when you can talk to TechCrunch to get approximately the same number of eyes? It doesn’t make sense. CES is really for buyers. Sure it’s a hoot to see what gadgets will launch at back-to-school in September and we, regrettably, will be there reporting on start-ups and cool gadgets we find. But it’s buyers – men and women who love to spend a week eating steak and playing backgammon at MGM grand – who really drive CES. Buyers may be considerably more plugged in these days than they were in the past, but the orders they place at CES are usually the last time they actively pursue the noephillic instinct until January of the next year. Again, with the rise of the Internet, this is swiftly changing but for now the mom-and-pop electronics shop in Scranton trying to fight off Amazon and Best Buy comes to CES to see which TVs to stock. Microsoft left CES because the news cycle it imparted on the industry didn’t suit it. You can talk backroom politics all you want, but in the end Microsoft could make its own news without CES. Every company is beholden to produce something new and great for CES and their R&D teams are geared to follow this schedule. Microsoft wanted off the treadmill, and they’re big enough to do it. Ultimately, nobody wins CES because there’s nothing to win. Most products announced don’t launch for months (if not years) and the major news articles end up being trend pieces rather than actual reviews. Sometimes companies can take the air out of the event by launching something “huge” – the Palm Pre is the last item in recent memory that really stole the show – but CES is about selling real goods to real people, not impressing some tech blogger with a 1 terabyte cellphone. It behooves us to remember that the Consumer in Consumer Electronics Show is less a term of endearment and more a target for a precision strike. We are the consumer. They want to sell to us. CES is geared to making that happen. If you’re a gearhead, I don’t want to cancel Christmas on you here. Yuck it up. We’ll be covering it in our own way over here . However, just remember that CES exists not to offer solace to the unmitigated fanboy. It exists to make money and when that money can be made elsewhere, CES will go away.

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Nobody Wins At CES