This year I was lucky enough to be able to attend the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. Ed has a customer who exhibits there every year, and last year he was invited to go. There was a pass for me, too, but then airfares proved to be prohibitively high so I couldn’t go. But this year they were lower! Yay! But there weren’t any rooms left in Vegas! Boo! It all worked out though because Ed’s customer had an extra room booked at their hotel that we could use. Yay!

The CES is over-the-top. Overwhelming. Exciting. I’ve been to one other huge trade show before, the Offshore Technology Conference in Houston. I thought that was impressive, but when Ed told me this was that times 100, I didn’t really understand that until I got there. The thing is huge. We walked over seven miles in one day. I pulled a hamstring.

A large vendor like LG, Samsung or Microsoft has a “booth” that is a structure that is larger than a mansion. Ed’s customer’s CFO said they spend almost half a million on theirs every year just to look bigger than they are (they are not an LG, Samsung or Microsoft) to about 14 of their customers (big box stores). And it’s gaudy. And loud. But there is a lot to see, a lot to play with. And a lot of things that are silly, stupid, or puzzling.

Highlights:

• A porn star called me “honey” (not in a condescending way, she thought I need another piece of swag from the booth where she was signing posters of herself.
• After looking at a “no-glasses” 3D television, I was interviewed by a Houston TV station about my opinion of it.
• I got to look through a 600mm fast lens at the Canon booth.
• I got to play some cool Gibson electric guitars at the Gibson booth.
• I got to see Lou Holtz talking about ESPN 3D. Also a couple of football players I had never heard of before.
• Watched a taping of “The Week in Tech” with Leo Laporte.
• Saw a guy in the Monster cables booth riding a gold plated Segway.
• Also a car from Tron
• Also a car from the Green Hornet (Ed sat in the driver’s seat).
• Also a couple of cool Audi concept cars.
• Watched a guy volunteer to be tased at the Taser International booth (this was actually a regularly scheduled thing where people could volunteer, and I found it disturbing).
• Used an OLPC (One Laptop Per Child)
• I got a demo of AmpKit, which is iPad software that you can use in combination with a small piece of hardware to mimic lots of different amps, filters and effects pedals for an electric guitar. Here is a video that is pretty much the same demo I got (same guy). I own two other iPad apps from the same company and was glad to run across this.
• We went to the Woot! booth to get some screaming monkeys. I told Ed that we needed to be there at 3 for that. I could tell he was not convinced, even though I told him these are famous monkeys, but he humored me. We stood there with about 50 other geeks, Ed looking pretty out of place and awkward. But when we got our monkeys, and especially when we got to use them (they are kind of like slingshot finger puppets, that scream), he was very happy we went. He laughs every time he plays with them, which is every day.
• Breakdancers!
• Ooooh….foot massagers….aaaahhhh….just in time!
• Oh, Woot! reminded me, I tried on the TV Hat! Wow!

The thing that impressed me most about the whole show, though was the elephant in the room. Apple does not go to CES; they do their own “shows”, and that serves them very well as they don’t share the spotlight with anybody. But at CES, every time I turned a corner, I was blasted by a wall of iPad cases, or an iPhone or iPad knockoff prototype, or whole booths that looked exactly like an Apple store (including the font and colors), or vendors using iPads for sales or to take notes. And especially spokesmen on stage talking about how their tablet was the “iPad killer”. Apple was everywhere, without even spending a penny.

I have a lot more to say about the tablets and phones that we saw, but I’m going to save that for my next post so I can get this one up.