Category Archives: gadgets

LEDs in Contact Lenses? Cool!

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Technology continues to blur the line between our bodies and helpful gadgets.  CNET reports that the University of Washington is experimenting with embedding LEDs into contact lenses, a step in the direction of creating vision correcting contact lenses.  

In his powerful book “The Singularity is Near”, Ray Kurzweil notes how powerfully the technologies involved with Nanotechnology, Robotics, and Genetics will enhance our understanding of the way our human attributes work to create  awareness, intelligence, and consciousness. 

Gizmodo on CES blogger ban

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Brian at Gizmodo has a thoughtful, pointed piece today about why he thinks people were way too hard on Gizmodo for pranking Motorola at CES, turning off screens during a presentation.     

He hasn’t changed my mind yet because next year I think every booth staff person is going to be more skeptical than they were this year of the legitimacy of those with  “blogger” badges (Gizmodo folks probably had press badges – but this was all reported as a blogging stunt).  

More importantly CES’s great treatment of bloggers has been rewarded with stunts.

Brian’s case would be stronger if Gizmodo’s buzz machine had focused on negatives at CES – such as some of the press payoffs he mentions in his article, rather than simply sabotaging a presentation for cheap YouTube thrills and views.

But, ultimately I suppose the community and those affected more directly than me must define the appropriateness of this kind of activity and if there is little outrage by Motorola or CES than maybe I was the one who overreacted.

CES 2008 coverage coming soon

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The Consumer Electronics Show – CES 2008 – the number one technology event in the world, is coming up fast and I’m excited to go as a first time attendee/press dude.    One of the nice tech blogger press perks is I’m getting invited to a lot of cool parties all over Las Vegas.   There is so much activity it’s hard to get a handle on it all. Like Las Vegas, there are far more things available than you could possibly do in a single day.  

The whole city of Las Vegas is basically taken over by geeks, geek wannabes, and even major pop celebrities during the several days of CES excitement.  I just heard that Kevin Costner’s rock band will be performing at one of the award shows.  Thousands of exhibitors and about 140,000 attendees make this the world’s premier tech event, where many companies will showcase and release hardware and software and hope for a good reception, because a good showing at CES can make or break a small company and even some large ones. 

Sunday’s keynote will be by Bill Gates, but I have to admit I’m more excited to attend the Monster Cable retailer awards at the Paris Las Vegas where Mary J. Blige will be performing as part of the party.   Now *that’s* a party!

In addition to my take on the event hundreds of other bloggers and CNET and all the mainstream media will have a lot of good coverage. Even MSNBC’s bombastic Donny Deutsch will be blogging the event for his “Road to CES” specials for his show “The Big Idea” 

Fear of Wi-Flying? Bah and Humbug!

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This SILLY article suggests several unlikely scenarios where on board WIFI, a superb innovation coming to several airlines, will be a nuisance.   Loud talking on phones?   Porn surfers?    Well, maybe, but I think this is one of the *billions* of examples where having more broadband access makes a better, not worse, world.    Has he bothered to note how much these things are problems at airports with free WIFI like Las Vegas or Portland, Oregon?     They are NOT problems.

Looking for the gray cloud on the silvery lining of ubiquitous broadband reminds me of the early days of the internet (ahhh – those were the days back in, what….the 1990s?)  when people would explain to me how they didn’t really need email addresses and business websites because this was a passing fad or a “tech thing”.    It didn’t help much to explain that the internet is not about technology, rather it is about people, and that they’d be online very soon.     Now of course everybody is online, but the reporters are explaining to us (again) how all this technology puts us all at great social and personal peril. 

No, it doesn’t.  Get over it, and move on.   You cannot cheer enough for innovation and ubiquitous broadband.   We’ll have it eventually and it’s better to have it sooner not later. 

Hmmm – speaking of Airlines and Airports here’s my Airport Codes website.

Joe Duck – Chinese Edition

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Click HERE for my Chinese Edition.    Cool?

Actually, any web page can be auto-translated in this fashion by Google.  It’s a really cool feature though I’m guessing the translations must leave something to be desired.    My understanding is that you still need humans to pull quality meaning from one language to another.    Still, this is a huge step forward and the advent of hand held translation units, online translation, and a lot more global travel is breaking down one of the barriers to international understanding – language.

China is expected to be the world’s top travel destination by 2020 and I don’t doubt that estimate.  It is one of the reasons I’m anxious to get over there to SES China in Xiamen, the Xianglu Grand Hotel (though I’m not clear if this is the SES China venue or not), The Great Wall of China, Beijing and the Forbidden City, Hong Kong Harbor, Hong Kong, Kowloon, and much more of the amazing China Travel landscape. I want to start exploring and understanding the nation and culture that may eventually eclipse the USA in terms of global influence  (I’m not predicting that – just noting it is a possibility.  What is a certainty is that China will continue to be one of the most influential nations for some time to come).      One of the most interesting graphs I have ever seen showed the global GDP of about 1850, noting that India+China were over half the global totals, and the USA was not even in the same league.    The USA’s remarkable industrial rise since that time led us to the global economic dominance we now enjoy, but things could change … again.   I don’t see this shift in Economic dominance as a negative, rather more an inevitable balancing and levelling of an increasingly globalized playing field – the world Tom Friedman has described so well in his book “The World is Flat”. 

CES 2008 – The Hollywood Track and Donny Deutsch’s “The Road to CES”.

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Entertainment Technology will be big at CES 2008 in Las Vegas, and there is a website devoted to keeping you posted on that aspect of the show.    The website is HERE – Digital Hollywood.

Another fun CES preSpinoff is Donny Deutsch’s website.  He’s an Advertising guru and host of the excellent TV show “The Big Idea” on MSNBC.    His CES efforts are online here.    Donny’s CES blog is here.

Yikes MSNBC you *really* need a content optimizer over there!   The URL for this major project is  this!    http://www.cnbc.com/id/22206030/site/14081545/

CES 2008

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Click HERE for the latest on my CES Experience

At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas I’ll be blogging as much as possible, liveblogging the Bill Gates keynote on Sunday and trying to get a grasp on the big picture at this huge conference.    I’m really looking forward to seeing the latest gadgets and trends in technology.     One of the gadget themes I’ll explore are language translators.   These are important in travel and I’ll hope to test a few during the China trip this April.

Franklin has a translator device that looks like one of the best offerings out there – a twelve language translator where you type in the word and it speaks it back to you.

Google’s got an interesting new language translation “bot” for the Blackberry that Google is blogging about here.   Maybe they’ll have a Treo version later?

Computer Electronics Show in Las Vegas and Search Engine Strategies in Xiamen, China

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OK, it’s time to start getting excited about several events I’ll attend in 2008 – China SES in Xiamen, The Computer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, and the Web 2.0 Conference from WebGuild in Silicon Valley. More about China later as I start to plan that trip with my two table tennis pals, one of whom was born in Beijing. Here’s a great recap of Rand Fishkin‘s experiences last year at this conference.

CES Las Vegas is the world’s most super gigantic humongous computer show. Bill Gates is the keynote this year.

There will be amazing new product launches and thousands of exhibitors hawking the latest and greatest electronic gadgetry. I expect at least a few new amazing Google phones based on Android SDK and literally thousands of neat new gadgets for hands on investigation. Hopefully Scoble and Podtech will host another Bloghaus at the Bellagio. I’d read about CES Bloghaus 2007 last year and it really sounded like the happening place to hang out during the conference as a gathering point and 24/7 watering hole for bloggers.

I’m already getting a lot of emails and some phone calls about setting up press appointments with the CES Exhibitors. For many this is the key place to build the buzz for new product launches. I’ll hope to report on the neatest things I see in travel and tourism as well as anything amazing that really stands out.

SES China 2008 in Xiamen

CES Las Vegas 2008

Universal Voice Translators are almost here

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One of the neat futuristic gadgets in Star Trek was the universal translator, a device that would take in any language and output English.

Engadget reports that NEC says they are close to having one of these.

the firm has developed a system that can understand around 50,000 Japanese words and translate them to English text on the mobile’s display in just a second or two.

Now this is not quite Star Trek because you’d need to convert the text to voice, but that technology is here already.   This is close, and it’s just another in the long line of technological improvements we all call … home.

I see this as very fertile ground for the open handset alliance.  Just think how positively travel would be affected if the language barrier was stripped away!    Perhaps even less conflict as people would find it harder to keep from communicating during crises.

Mossberg on Amazon’s Kindle book reader – just fair.

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Bloggers roundly panned the Kindle a few weeks ago during it’s launch, and then Amazon sold out of them almost immediately.  However many (including me) suspect they just didn’t build that many.   Given the negative initial reactions from so many, and the fact Amazon has very conspicuously failed to mention how many sold, I think the “Kindle sell out” was a marketing ploy rather than a sign of the Kindle’s popularity.    In fact I’d be surprised if they sold more than 50,000 or so – probably far short of the numbers needed to bring the Kindle project close to anything approaching profitability.

Adding insult to injured initial reputation, Walt Mossberg just wrote in the Wall Street Journal that the Kindle is just an OK device.   He was not too hard on it, but no endorsement either.     In contrast and over at CNET, Josh Taylor is warming up to the Kindle after a few weeks of use.    Of course he was on a beautiful tropical beach reading, so maybe that colored his perception to a Kindley hue ?     All I know is that at $399 + $9.99 per book and a buck per blog I won’t be buying one anytime soon.