CES Report, by David Siegel
I just spent 4 days in that cloudy snowy damp city, Las Vegas -- where the gambling apparatus continuously sucks the money out of over-caffeinated tourists, where the clubs are harder to get into than the showgirls, where everyone is chasing the action (and the showgirls), where transportation breaks down at the mere mention of 120,000 gadget freaks entering town, and where I spent four whole days under the fluorescent rays of the Consumer Electronics Show getting a 400 megawatt tan (not the showgirls). Here’s my report on companies and trends for people interested in technology, investing, and buying new gadgets. 5.1.1 Surround Sound People take a lot of pride in their home theaters. So it wasn’t surprising to see companies offering the latest products designed to make you look like a “real man” in that department. There were motorized red velvet drapes for your 102” Samsung plasma display. And there were many companies selling chairs, couches, and lounges that hook directly to your amp and vibrate your ass every time Rambo blows something up. I think Joe Six Pack will buy a vibra-lounger just to see the look on his neighbor’s face when he gets into the chair (complete with plenty of cup holders, coolers, stirrups, etc) and gets blasted by the soundtrack. Although this category is a gimmick and I have no specific recommendations, I believe this market will see solid growth for several years. Tiny Video/Photo Players There was a lot of buzz around products like Creative Labs’ Zen “Portable Media Centers” (www.creativelabs.com). These devices show your photo or video collection along with playing your sounds. Needless to say, kids will want to watch and swap music videos, so pretty much anyone who spoke Chinese or Korean at the show had some version of this product to show. This area will explode, and I predict no real winners, just a large growing pie. Another approach to this market is Orb (www.orb.com) – a server that lets you access ALL of your hard-disk contents via your cell phone. Leave your MP3s and your photos at home and simply play them over your phone! Forget about capacity – your cell phone has access to all the gigabytes on your home computer or company server (think about sales presentations). This is clearly going to just be another feature of your cell phone in 2008, but you can have it today for just $10/month. What? You already know what’s on your hard disk? You’d rather get news, sports, weather, and horoscopes on your cell phone? Simply go to www.mobitv.com and see all the content you can get by the minute. PoE – Power over Ethernet A PoE port is an Ethernet port that, like a USB port, has enough power (12 or 24 volts) to power a phone or another device all by itself. Here’s an estimate of number of ports shipped (predicted to ship): Year Number of Ports 2004 130 million 2005 200+ million 2006 300+ million 2007 500+ million I’m very bullish on this market, not just for powering phones but for products like cameras. You can put a powered-Ethernet camera into the ceiling or wall without a permit because you don’t need to run 110v wires plus conduit through the walls (and batteries for stationary cameras aren’t a good idea). Note - this means wireless stationary cameras probably won't take off, given that they need power anyway. Corporations should be big purchasers of PoE cameras, and other peripherals won’t be far behind. If you’re interested in investing in this space, contact me. Voice Input and Control I caught a demo of Dragon Systems’ Naturally Speaking 8.0 and wow, was I impressed! I think it’s time for me to pick up a noise-canceling headset and this amazing software product. OQO This Bay Area startup showed their shipping product, which is a full Windows XP machine with screen, keyboard, battery, and Wacom-like tablet in a package the size of a peanut-butter sandwich. Sales are brisk and customers are happy. Thumbs up. Meedio As homes become more automated, the number of remotes tends to grow with the square of the number of devices controlled. Meedio simplifies life with a single interface to control anything from a refrigerator to an alarm system to your MP3 collection to the next episode of the Simpsons. The interface is a horizontal component (you find it in everything), and this company wants to provide consumers with a uniform interface for all their smart products. In reality, they have as much chance at becoming the dominant paradigm as Esperanto has at becoming an international language. But cool nonetheless. Dave Networks This company is aggregating video content for distribution on set-top boxes and on computers connected to the Internet. Think of it as I-Tunes for video. You’ll be able to get everything from free downloads to ad-based views to pay-per-view to pay-to-own videos. They have partnerships with four companies making set-top boxes and they’re out to aggregate all the video content they can get. They also offer “channels,” allowing anyone to publish his/her own video content on the dave.tv web site and sharing revenues based on the payments received (home porn publishing, here we come). It’s an interesting company and a potentially interesting investment. I think they have more milestones to meet before they’re ready for prime time, but their deals with content providers and cable box manufacturers are worthy assets. Still, there are and will be competitors. It’s hard to tell which, if any, will win, but I want to keep my eye on this space. Contact me if you’re interested in learning more. GPS Locators Some day, this product will be injected under the skin. Until then, keep track of your kids, your friends, your stuff, even your dog with a GPS locator that sends you a signal from their unit. I wouldn’t be surprised if this category takes off, but I think it’s more likely to be incorporated as a feature into your cell phone. Dual Cordless Phones Not quite here in the US but they will be soon, this phone is both a regular RJ-11 phone and a Skype Internet phone. It has distinct ringtones for Skype vs analog, it is cordless on a frequency that won’t gum up your existing wireless network, and it shows you on its display when your Skype friends are logged in and lets you call them with a single button. You can dial phone numbers using stored names and phone numbers or you can make Skype calls by name and IP address. This is the phone I’m looking for. They are looking for domestic distribution now. Can you help them? Flash Memory I looked hard for flash memory chips to replace the mini hard drives on today’s MP3 players, and I was surprised at how little flash I saw at the show. Prices and capacities just aren’t there yet. The flash players I saw were in the 128mb and 256mb range. Some offered 512mb and the few 1gb flash players I saw seemed to be “not shipping yet.” When I asked about 2mb, everyone said to come back a year from now. One company (www.lexar.com) said they were shipping 2gb drives for USB ports, but their MP3 players still only went to 512mb. Most companies seem to be focused on adding various bells and whistles to today’s MP3 players (Bluetooth, 2-color displays, FM transmitters, phones, etc.). Not ready for prime time but watch out in 2006. PowerGrid Fitness This was the most addictive experience at the show. You step onto a small platform, grab the “wheel” and start playing games. But you’re not controlling the movement with your fingers. You’re getting a workout while playing a video game! The Kilowatt is a game joystick that you have to push with your body to move, burning calories as you chase bandits. I loved this product, and I’m not a game player! I had to stand in line to get a chance to use it. The company has created a new category of entertainment fitness. They want to help couch potatoes burn fat while playing the games they are going to play anyway. You can order yours today for only $800 (less than a Bowflex, and less than a gym membership, which many people give up on after a month or two). I liked it so much I am seriously considering investing. TAD Audio Beryllium Speakers TAD is way ahead of the pack in beryllium drivers for high-end speakers. Beryllium is an ideal material for tweeters and mid-range cones. I’ll spare you the details, but the other two companies (JBL (yuck) and Focal Utopias (I own these and they rock)) are about two generations behind TAD. The company, owned by Pioneer, will ship just over 100 pairs of its $40,000 Model 1 floor-standing speaker to the lucky few people who can get their hands on them (I predict you’ll see them on Ebay for $70k). Their bookshelf version (under $15k) won’t be out until the fourth quarter. The Model 1 has already beaten most speakers under $100,000 (and tied with several over that price) in various shoot-outs and tests. As an aside, I’m excited about the coming wave of Beryllium applications for consumer products and am looking for other like-minded investors. Morell Speakers Best bang-for-buck speaker I’ve ever seen. These small speakers (they have many models) are incredible and should be taken seriously. They have speakers from $400 to $4,000; each model delivers about the best possible sound for the price. If you are putting together a home theater and you want the most bang for a reasonable buck, I recommend Morell Speakers paired with Paul Speltz’s winningly inexpensive Anti-Cables: http://sphl.audiogon.com/cgi-bin/buy_cl.pl?cablspkr&1108271719 Chapter Audio Cables Chapter is a high-end British company making amps and cables. Their foil cables are not cheap but they are amazing. They rival the famous Valhalla cables (www.nordost.com/Cables/speaker-reference-valhalla.htm) at about half the price. A wonderful product if you still believe in analog audio. Turn any Surface into a Speaker These have been around for a while and are finally gaining acceptance as real products. A small pair of drivers cements to your glass panel, sheetrock, metal door, or any other planar surface. Hook the wires to your amp and – voila! – your walls become speakers! It has lots of commercial applications and probably no reason to be in the home. These little drivers are strong and turn a piece of glass into a reasonable speaker! They lack bass, but you can add that almost invisibly. Check them out, they definitely have a high cool factor. Flat Panel Displays I can safely say technology has reached a point where the displays are truly awesome, and so are the prices. The big problem now is getting content good enough to show on your screen. In general, look for 1080p (progressive scan) to be the next resolution plateau. If you’re investing in a high-end display this year, I recommend an LED-backlit LCD display (see below) that can handle a 1080p signal. It remains to be seen whether the plasmas can match that native resolution, but this year it looks like they won’t. Get the biggest display you can get. With today’s high resolution screens, you’ll want to sit even closer than you did before (about 1.5 to 2 screenwidths back), so a bigger screen will let you sit farther away. Again, the only problem you’ll encounter is price. LCD screens are getting brighter, showing more contrast and brilliance and even better angles than before. This is because Samsung has started to use LEDs to backlight the LCD display, and an LED-backlit TV is the only LCD screen I recommend at this point (the rest are just too dull). They are sharper and as bright as the best plasmas. Sony and Samsung both market these displays. Samsung’s 57” LED-backlit LCD will be my first choice when the street price drops below $10k. Plasma displays are now more efficient, and harder to burn in. They have yet to catch up in native resolution (only one, the LG 71-incher at $75k, supports 1080p), but if yours can display 720p you’ll be happy. LG is making excellent consumer displays, while Pioneer (regular, not the Elite line) and Panasonic are close to equivalent for the money. Runco certainly makes the best 720p screens, but their prices are still stratospheric. Samsung also makes excellent displays. My biggest problem with plasmas, however, is that their pixels are usually bigger and it’s easier to see a blue halo on the right side of a white object and a red halo on the left. This won’t be fixed until the plasmas can display 1080p. Rear-projection TVs remain the best bargain and 1080p units (you guessed it, Samsung again) will be on the market this year. I’d rather have a 1080p RP unit than the same sized plasma or LCD at lower resolution for the same amount of money. But remember, at 1080p, bigger really is better. Don’t get a 1080p screen smaller than 53”. If you’re determined to spend under $5k this year, go for the biggest clearest 720p rear-projection display you can afford. You may have heard terms like 3:2 pulldown, Faroudja processing, artifact removal, and scalers. These things are important. You’ll either get these features in your new screen, or you can add them by getting a scaler box like the ADS Tech Upconverter (www.adstech.com). Pretty soon, your display and your DVD player will already have these features (my favorite DVD player, the Pioneer Elite 59AVI has them). If you’re looking for a display, I’d make sure my display could do these things. If you want the king of upconverters, go to: If you have a dark home theater environment, you’ll want to look at the projectors. I didn’t pay much attention to them, but there are a ton of new products in this category, all trying to provide Runco quality at a Costco price. I don’t think 1080p will “take over” in 2005, but it will help push prices on 720p equipment down to more affordable levels. Media Servers www.interact-tv.com (extremely versatile, expandable, low-cost Linux-based product) www.buffalotech.com (cheapest terabyte on the market) www.digitaldeck.com (essentially a TiVO) www.hushtechnologies.net (high-end no-fan quiet servers) www.kiss-technologyamerica.com (you’ll find the products at amazon.com) www.sonos.com (slick interface, ready for prime time, nice solid product) www.stack9.com (low-to-high-end products, well thought out, pricy but solid) www.adstech.com (wireless) I went to the show to evaluate the media-server market. A media server is really a large hard disk onto which you can load all your CDs, DVDs, home movies, MP3s, radio programming, TV programming, and HDTV programming. It’s a DVD player, a CD player, a TiVO, and an MP3 player all in one. Ideally, a media server broadcasts to any device you own: your phone, the television in your bedroom, your home theater, etc. Everyone knows that a 300-CD “juke box” is a dinosaur. You don’t want to manage your CDs – you want to manage your music, movies, photos, etc. With a media server, you upload all your content once and then put your disks in storage (the same way you do when adding a new game to your computer’s hard disk). It’s no surprise, then, that Microsoft wants to get into the act and announced a number of partnerships to do so. My take on this market is that it’s going to be huge and practically invisible. The list above doesn’t even include new products announced by Sony, Philips, Toshiba, Netgear, Sharp, and probably Kitchen Aid. Whether you come at it from the PC side, the video side, the audio side, or the networking side, all products are converging and features are being copied faster than RNA base pairs. Even though there is a huge chance RIGHT NOW to create a brand around the simple message of “Put all your media onto this box and play it anywhere,” no one will succeed at doing it. The pie will simply spread out wide and then rise like dough, leaving no clear winners and an ever-evolving set of features that everyone else must match. In my opinion, there’s no clear way to make a winning investment in any particular piece of the pie. The one potential fly in the ointment is the Motion Picture Association of America and its studios, who want to make sure none of their video content gets Napsterized (put on a media server and then served up free to the world). Whoops. Too late: Wireless Home Theater I was expecting this category to be more robust. I can see a day when your media server sends everything digitally, right to your speakers and displays in each room. That day is not here. There were a few spotty efforts (Philips was showing a wireless home theater that looked pretty integrated, but the components are nothing special). I think we can wait until next year to see how things have progressed. I predict that as digital programming takes over, both media servers and wireless transmission will make speaker cables a thing of the past, but it may take a few years to become mainstream. Speak Srowry Prease If you want to get a sense of what the show experience was really like, just go to this web site: Next Year in Vegas! That’s my report. I hope to go back again next year. If you have any questions, feel free to write: david@dsiegel.com For more CES reviews, check out these sites:
Very interesting site. Hope it will always be alive!
Posted by: Joeuk | June 27, 2007 at 11:44 PM
I like this site!
Posted by: Joeaj | June 28, 2007 at 06:10 PM
If you have to do it, you might as well do it right
Posted by: Joekl | June 29, 2007 at 12:08 PM
If you have to do it, you might as well do it right
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Good Day. You can't just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they'll want something new.
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With love :o, Kaede.
Posted by: Kaede | April 03, 2009 at 04:31 PM