Ok... many technical problems later I'm able to post live from CES (The International Consumer Electronics Show). This post is brought to you by YAHOO, who was kind enough to have access to broadband and a laptop. So, hats off to Yahoo. Now back to CES.
What's NEW and REALLY BIG?
Well LCDs and Plasma rule and they're big.. REALLY big. I like big video like the next guy but it's not really new or much cheaper (just bigger). BlueRay is great and will empty the pockets of many. I heard more people just comment on how many flat screens there are here and from how many new players. Polaroid is heave into consumer goods now.. tvs, dvds, etc... that was a surprise but not a big one.
Yahoo (see disclaimer above) is really pushing their data and connections to Flickr through Media Centers and Tivo as well as their iTunes like media player and music services. It still looks like content is king and everyone is getting in on it. The cool news about that is that the content can really go from device to device, pretty much anything you can think of can access it.
ACC... Apples Achilles Heal? Got ACC and want to put it on a non Apple device or network.. forget about it. Time will tell on this one... I want to watch Lost on my Dell Axim with out a bunch of hoops and conversion to go through. Heck, I'mn not even sure if it's legal to do so.. seems silly to me that I can't....
Whole home multimedia and remote control is everywhere. Neat stuff, again not new but more people making it and selling it. One note is I've seen things people had to hack together (like me) that are now being offered as produt and services. Seems like there's a good pace of conversion going on from concept (or hack) to real product.
XM is EVERYWHERE. There has been an explosion of devices using XM. Expect lots of new services as more and more customers jump on board. What if iTunes and XM got together... hmmmm, now that would be something.
More later.