The show is over and I’m back home in lovely rural Oregon, which is a lot like Las Vegas … if you take away the mega Casinos, lavish hotels, hundreds of national class restaurants, 24/7 dining, hundred-million-dollar theaters, zombie gamblers, throngs of people, massive convention centers, and the nasty city underbelly you find just away from the fancy venues.
For the next several days I’ll be writing up the show from the approximately 400 pictures I took of CES 2010 and Las Vegas over the past week. That coverage will mostly be over at Technology Report
Although I tend to see things through Web 2.0 colored glasses I really think CES 2010 this year was really pushing the 3D TVs (skeptical of how well consumers will receive this) while ironically much more powerfully showcasing something something that cannot be directly sold – social networking and global device connectivity.
Tim O’Reilly and others have talked about “Web 3.0” which some see as a device-O-sphere where our computers, cameras, phones, household appliances, cars, etc are all streaming data into online environments where that information can be used by other applications in a variety of ways. I think we are very close to having the technical ability to do that, and soon we’ll see a lot more websites and other computerized ways to process and learn from that data stream.
Obviously there’s a downside in terms of the fact our personal drivacy is being eroded away but that ship has sailed and I’m optimistic that the Device-O-Sphere will bring us far more efficient ways to use our resources and time.
Inefficiency is massive in all sectors of the world and I think the folks who are fretting far too much about looming catastrophes from things like global warming should be spending a lot more of their valuable time helping to engineer systems that create energy and resource efficiencies by
1. Finding the waste and 2. eliminating some of that waste.
FYI – start with your conventional water heater – for most turning it down a few degrees won’t create a noticeable change yet it will save more energy than switching off lights from now through the climate apocalypse.
Joe Duck 