Getting my Geek on at CES
27 Jan 2012
I’m a massive tech nerd, and there isn’t a better time for tech news than CES. Every year I eagerly await CES to read the live blogs and find out about all the amazing product announcements. Last year while reading all the latest news on my (then) favourite tech site Engadget I decided that next year I was going to attend CES. So that’s exactly what I did.
CES takes place every January so I bundled this with another item on my Life Goals list to spend New Years in New York. We left New York and flew to Las Vegas where we stayed in the Luxor hotel. Vegas is a crazy place, if you imagine the real world; double it in size then multiple it by crazy and flashing lights, then that’s about right. I spent the first day exploring and spent a small amount of time gambling. I thought I was pretty wild splashing the cash on the 1c machines; apparently everybody else had a different opinion. But I wasn’t there for the casinos or the crazy nightclubs, technology is my first love.
On the first day of CES we attended the Microsoft keynote presented by Steve Ballmer and co-hosted by Ryan Seacrest (who quite frankly I didn’t know anything about). I really enjoyed the whole thing, but in reality I was just swept up in the excitement at attending my first real keynote. As far as keynotes go it was pretty dire, lots of fake joviality between Ballmer and Seacrest, and no real product announcements. There were some highlights though, the first being this awesome music video remix of past Microsoft keynotes by Pogo, and a incredibly cheesy, but still awesome tweet choir.
The second day was the first real day of CES where the show floors open. CES consists of 3 giant halls that are all filled to the brim with booths from pretty much all the big names in tech (Apple being a notable exception). Now, some of these booths are ridiculous; Samsung and Sony being the two largest. These companies obviously spend a lot of money to make sure their booths get the most media attention, and it pays off, I’ve never seen so many 3D TVs in my life.
There were some particular standout products that I really liked from the show floor, first being Cubify which is a 3d printer coupled with great software that really makes the process simple. While I don’t actually see myself having any use for this product, I love it just for it’s awesome-ness. Second is Sony’s Crystal LED TV, which was just ridiculously stunning in real life. Just the picture quality was spectacular, hard to really capture in images but trust me, it was gorgeous.
After the excitement of the show floor we went to 2 super sessions, which are basically panels with rock stars of the tech industry. The first was CNET’s ‘Next Big Thing’, which featured Eric Schmidt! The interview with Schmidt was really interesting and at one point hilarious when he told the interviewer he was going to “answer another question”. We also attended (my current favourite tech site) The Verge’s ‘Argue the Future’ which included panel members from Samsung, Microsoft, HTC as well as The Verge. The conversation mostly revolved around mobile and it raised some really interesting issues. It was great to hear the different perspectives of the hardware engineers and the software developers.
On last day of CES we had pretty much seen all the booths but we did attend The Verge’s impromptu meet up, where this happened.
Yeah, it was awesome. CES; Mission Accomplished.
January 28th, 2012 4:50 pm
Sounds like you had an awesome time, definitely on my to-do list for the near future. Loving the Verge GIF btw