Last week, I attended the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas. Below is a video of some footage that I took on the floor. Unfortunately, my microphone adapter broke so I was not able to hold any interviews - gotta get that fixed for next year!
Also, I've embedded a list of Tweets that I shared if you weren't following the action last week. Check it out! If you can't see the tweets below, click here.
The exhibit hall of the Consumer Electronics Show is finally open to all, which is kind of like a large electronic Ikea with the sound multiplied by a thousand. Even though the convention center is much larger than an Ikea, I can actually navigate it better. Funny how that works.
Instead of blow by blow tech product coverage that is better offered on large tech sites such as CNET and The Verge, I want to focus on the sessions and panels that had the most impact to the future of science and technology. .
I saw the premiere of a great documentary called Silicon Prairie. It focuses on the importance of internet outside of standard tech hubs of New York in California, and highlights many businesses in the Midwest of the US that are often overlooked by the tech press. One that really made me say "wow" was a farmer in Virginia runs a website connecting farmers with high volume consumers, eliminating the middle man. The trailer is below.
Afterwards, the group behind the documentary held a Q&A session. There were many great points made during this session, mainly around the dangerous laws such as SOPA that are designed to hamper internet growth. The point was consistently made that our representatives in Congress need to know about the local businesses that are powered by the internet. They need to be accountable for this when they meet with the rest of federal government and make sure that decisions about internet regulation made by our government is an informed one.
I also attended an excellent panel called CNET's Next Big Thing, which covered emerging themes in tech and what we should not only expect, but dream about for the near future of technology. It was one of the more popular sessions of the conference so far, and the room was HUGE:
Hosts Molly Wood and Brian Cooley of CNET moderated a panel of tech visionaries to discuss the future. One of my favorite points came from Mark Cuban, who stated that the problem that most companies have is that they try to take an existing problem and automate it, instead of trying to prevent the problem from ever occurring. The example used was washing and drying clothes - instead of finding a way to make it easier to get clothes from a washer to a dryer, why not eliminate the need for both separate cycles at all? These are the kinds of challenges that seem impossible at first, but will stretch us to be able to do things that we could only dream of before.
The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) has been a blast so far!. After meeting up blogger TechGirlTweets, I wandered around the few sections that were up, most notably CNET's.
I usually rely on CNET for video streaming news, and they've done in incredible job of creating a huge studio for live streaming. I was able to watch the Lexus press conference and hear commentary from anchors Brian Cooley and Molly Wood live. I also ran the host and producer of one of my favorite podcasts, The 404. I've been listening to their show for five years and it's been one of the inspirations for my own podcast.
The second half of my day was devoted to the Second Screen Summit (S3). The first screen is known as the television, and the second screen is any additional "screen" that is used while watching TV. This includes phones, tablets, or even video games like the Nintendo Wii U TVii service that I profiled earlier.
Moderators and panelists from major TV networks and software providers such as Shazam shared their perspectives on the future of using second screens to interact with our favorite programs. One representative from FX even said that they sold a significant number of $600 shirts that were worn by a character on the show Sons of Anarchy by making it easy to purchase on their tablet app - that's a lot of money!
The summit ends with Microsoft speaking about its two screen strategy with Xbox SmartGlass. If you own an XBox and a tablet or smartphone, you can access different parts of the same content on each device. The example they showed was accessing highlights of a basketball game while still watching a different live game.
The show goes into overdrive on Tuesday when the full exhibit hall opens to attendees, so make sure to follow me on Twitter as I'll be tweeting throughout the day on my adventures.
Fresh off of my flight to Vegas for the Consumer Electronics Show, here's all the tech that I fit in a bag small enough to slide under an airplane seat.
There are a lot of hard calculations, math, and science involved in trying to get men to the moon. Believe or not, one critical concern is - how the hell will astronauts use the bathroom? There's a contraption that allows urine to be ejected out of a small hole on the spacecraft, but even that requires additional calculations. Within the vacuum of space there is very little matter, so even a small amount of force exerted by ... liquid ... exiting a spacecraft can shift its spacecraft
For more info, check the video below by MinutePhysics. If you can't see it, click here.
