CES Archives - Otis Regrets... or not

CES, Comdex and me (plus a few survival strategies)

I first attended the Consumer Electronics Show around 1980, when it really was what its name says. I was a young account executive working on the Federated Group, an “entertainment superstore” that was sort of like what Best Buy is today. Being low on the totem pole I was placed in the Showboat Hotel, a marginal facility located downtown. (Then as now, hotel prices skyrocketed during conventions; unlike now, you didn’t have the internet to comparison shop and find available rooms.)

3d pen at CES — *Demonstrating a 3D pen at ShowStoppers, my favorite CES press event*

The audience was mom-and-pop retailers who took a yearly junket to Vegas where they met with suppliers and made decisions about what to stock in the coming year. Betamax and quadraphonic were big. Even though I was not invited to the back-room discussions, I found myself fascinated by the opportunity to watch the watchers. I’d attend demos, and look at the faces of attendees as the features were explained. When their eyes lit up I would take note of hot buttons that might be used in my marketing.

Fesco Bags — *Collecting bags is a big deal at CES. Extra points if they are from obscure Chinese companies or are sturdy and actually useful.*

By the 1990s I’d moved up through the ranks and then out, with my own freelance copywriting practice. My clients were primarily technology based and I started attending Comdex (the name stands for Computer Dealers Expo, which it was not; the focus was on much larger operations and installations) on a yearly basis as well as the much smaller Interop show in May. We now had the internet but not Travelocity or Kayak. My lodging philosophy was to rent a car and drive around till I found a room at a reasonable price. I stayed at some pretty scary places. I’d park that car on a north-south street (no longer in existence) parallel to the LVCC and walk about 10 minutes to the convention hall. Parties were plentiful (the best ones were from Oracle, IBM and other large companies for their clients, which usually included my clients) and I rarely paid for food or drink. Comdex was dealt a crippling blow by the events of September 11, 2001 and limped on for a couple more years before closing for good in 2003. I believe I attended the 2002 show and it was a shadow of its former self with many sections of the LVCC hidden behind fabric drapes.

Meanwhile, CES was picking up where Comdex left off and many of the largest vendors moved there. It became a place for big electronics hardware companies to show their wares and, as before, I could watch the audiences and see what I should be saying in my copy about these products. It also took on something of the third-world bazaar personality of Comdex in its wildest years, with massage chairs among the technology exhibits and adult entertainers in the lobby at the Sands (not by accident because AdultX was held at the same time, a schedule which has sadly gotten out of sync in recent years).

Massage chairs at CES — *Massage chairs are an irresistible attraction for the foot weary CES visitor.*

I’m not attending CES every year these days, since it has gone increasingly back to its consumer roots and most of my clients are b-to-b. So in lieu of my usual posts-from-the-floor, this year I’m sharing a few of my personal practices:

• These days, I always stay at the Econolodge on Convention Center Drive which is around $100 if you reserve well in advance. The only reason to do this is that it’s a 5 minute walk to the LVCC.
• Rent a car. They’re not that expensive compared to other jacked-up prices because most people take shuttles or wait in the endless cab lines. You’ll only use it to go from the airport to your hotel and for evening forays around the desert.
• Go on Yelp and explore local ethnic restaurants. Vegas has a vast array of Thai, Japanese, Vietnamese and Korean places that are insulated from the tourist traffic and prices.
• Go to In-N-Out on Tropicana at least once, unless you live in California and get to go all the time.
• Don’t go to parties. They’re not what they used to be. Don’t go to buffets. They’re no longer a bargain and the food’s not that good. And of course, don’t gamble.

Here are a few more dos and don’ts from someone who is on the ground this year as a vendor.

One-of-a-kind at CES 2015

One of the pleasures of attending the Consumer Electronics Show is seeing new concepts making their debut for the benefit of prospective investors and manufacturing reps. Many of these are clustered in the “Eureka Park” area which, unlike last time I was here, was part of one of the main exhibit halls.

Some products are very very niched yet seem like they’d be highly attractive to their intended audience. One example was Easy Sim 3D, a web application that quickly recreates a 3D representation of an event that can be viewed from multiple angles. It’s designed for news reporters. Then there was the GoTenna, an antenna that turns your phone into a homing device if you should be in trouble and out of cell range.

GoTenna — goTenna turns your cell phone into a homing device

But there’s also the “first case for your Mac charger”, probably first because nobody knew they needed it. The first ever handheld dashboard camera. And Belty™, The New Belt Experience.

Mac Charger Case — Mac Charger case solves a problem you may not have realized you have

I wondered about the broad application of Social Media Counter, one of those “visual radio” displays you see in restaurants that scrolls news headlines and sports scores, except this one scrolls your updated count of Twitter followers. Then there’s Smart Sine Food Minder, a collection of little radio equipped scales you put a carton of milk or other staple on; the scales know how much it’s supposed to weigh and send you a message when it’s running low.

Smart Sine Food Minder tells you when you’re out of something. The question is whether this is easier than a shopping list, and I fear not.

But I could be wrong. Or a buyer could be looking for exactly that niche kind of solution.

Witness the interest in Teddy the Guardian (watch the video), the sensor-loaded teddy bear that collects a wealth of information about your baby, then transmits it when you touch the bear’s paw.

You never know when the next big thing will come along in the form of something which you never imagined, but that now makes you say “of course!” That’s the magic of CES.

Smart homes and smart marketing at CES 2015

Oomi Smart Home system — What’s Oomi? Tell me why I should care.

“Smart homes” is a useful topic for a marketing review because, while it’s exciting (or maybe ominous) to think about gadgets turning out the lights, managing security or monitoring our baby’s heartbeat, it’s up to the marketers to tell us exactly what their specific products do. Witness a few examples, good and bad, from the recent Winter 2015 Consumer Electronics Show.

Smart Home famil — Generic smart home marketing

Oomi makes the mistake of thinking others are as interested in their product as they are. “What’s Oomi?” was the headline of their booth at the Showstoppers press event. Without a benefit or point of reference, it’s not likely many will stick around to find out. The subtext “the first smart home that’s actually smart” provides context but is too clever for its own good: I don’t know that there’s a perception of lots of smart home products that are stupid. It’s a solution for a problem that may not exist. And meanwhile, we haven’t learned anything about the product. (Like many others, it’s a set of modules that work together to handle various home automation functions.)

Not much better are a number of OEM booths I passed in the nether regions of the second floor in South Hall. By focusing entirely on technology, these importers make their systems generic. There’s a “home” graphic but otherwise they lean heavily on the “what” rather than the “why”. This is a common problem with marketing at the CES where thousands of new products and unfamiliar concepts jostle for attention simultaneously. In a few seconds as I stumble down the aisle you need to tell me not only what you are selling, but why I should care.

For smart homes, it’s obviously about emotion, and the shoestring display for “Teddy the Guardian” does this very well. In fact, the signage doesn’t even say what the product is but the baby tcotchkes make a strong emotional appeal and you hang around long enough to find out it’s a teddy bear with all kinds of baby monitoring built in. There was a lot of interest in this one.

Finally, WeMo is a family of devices that monitor and automate activity in the home. Belkin created a mock home and then stuck devices all over the places with captions describing hypothetical problems and “can I WeMo that?” Compare this to Oomi, which seems to do the exact same thing, and you can see why Belkin’s marketing is so good. It’s a complete conversation that combines technology and the human factor and is fun to interact with as well. The booth was packed.

CES 2013: start the party without me

Alas, a schedule conflict will keep me from attending CES this week in Las Vegas. My annual prediction* is that this will be the year of the app-liance: a hardware mashup, possibly centered around a tablet but maybe something completely different, that puts together several apps in order to perform a hopefully useful service such as protecting your home, monitoring your diet or organizing your virtual library.

If I were there I’d arrive in time for ShowStoppers and give these good and awful marketers a probably unappreciated critique. I’d head for the Panasonic booth first thing next morning to see how they’re pushing the edge of the eco-envelope this year. I’d save time for Eureka Avenue and see what the startups are up to. (Hopefully they’ll fare better than Twykin last year.) And of course, I’d take in a buffet or two.

Have fun, be careful, and never draw to an inside straight. Hopefully I’ll see you in 2014.

* See last year’s eerily prophetic prediction here, in the paragraph about LG.

Wrapping up CES 2012

The highlight of my final day at CES 2012 was a visit to Eureka Park, the area at the Venetian dedicated to new products and startup companies. Here are a few items of particular interest.

Cubelets. Designed for kids to learn programming, Cubelets are magnetic blocks that can be snapped together to produce complex reactions. For example, the brightness block determines the available amount of light and turns on the flashlight block, then the distance block tells the driving block to move the whole structure down the table. You can watch a really silly video since my photo didn’t work out well, and you can also preorder an (expensive) prototype kit to ship in March.

Postcard on the Run. An iPhone or Android app that lets you choose a photo, write a message (including your written signature) then mail it as a physical postcard to an address in your address book. I tried it out and the app was going to charge me $1.99 (including a scratch n sniff layer at 50 cents extra) which is not a bad price compared to buying and mailing a postcard from the post office.

Twykin.com. These guys are doing a mashup of bulletin boards, FAQs, Wikipedia type user written articles and using it to develop as a test case the world’s first crowdsourced customer service application. You’ll have to trust me (and I will have to trust them) on this one since their developer was in an accident just before CES but they promised to get back to me and I’ll do a full piece at some point in the near future.

Blippar. Instead of shooting a QR code with your smartphone that takes you to a website, the Blippar app allows you to interact directly with an augmented reality application. The examples shown by this UK company include a ketchup label that allowed you to turn the label into pages you can flip through, and a retail page in which you can order directly from the app.

SurfEasy. This is a USB dongle that fits into a credit card-size carrier. On it are your browser preferences and passcodes with bank-level encryption so you can just plug into a public device and go right to work. There’s no storage on the device, but it comes with 2 GB of cloud storage. It’s a bit pricey at $60, but solves a problem for folks who use public computers in what looks like a complete and well thought-out execution.

That’s it for CES 2012. See you next year.

Bests of CES, 2012

Best marketing: Samsung Note. This is the new device that’s small enough to use as a phone yet big enough to use as a tablet, soon to be announced for AT&T. (I want one!) To show off its capabilities, they had two artists doing portraits of showgoers using the special pen that comes with the device, and all their advertising features examples of these portraits.

Kodak at CES 2012 — Kodak "Sharing Solutions" at CES 2012

Best “dead man walking” imitation: Kodak. Even though they’re openly attempting to sell off their units to avoid bankruptcy, they were in their exhibit space maybe because they’d already paid for it. There was only a single wall of cameras, which they now call “sharing solutions”; more irony, they’ve now started packaging their inkjet cartridges in boxes that look like Tri-X film boxes.

LG 3D TV at CES 2012 — Intro to the LG display area at CES 2012

Best commitment to 3D TV: LG. They ask you to put on the glasses before you enter their space, and leave them on because there’s just one 3D TV after another. I still predict a short lifetime for this fad and think it will wither once everybody who wants a 3D TV has one. The summer Olympics are being broadcast in 3D, I learned at the show, so that will be a tipping point one way or the other.

Best waste of time: Justin Bieber. He was standing doing something in the middle of the Vody robotics booth, and a huge press of people were seeing nothing except the back of each other’s heads. The C/Net camera, a few rows back, did capture a wisp of his famous locks. Meanwhile, other showgoers were actually learning something about technology.

New York Deli at LVCC — New York Deli has great sandwiches

Best food without leaving the show: Uncle Joel & Darryl’s New York Deli, toward the back of the central hall. Real deli sandwiches with a pickle and excellent cole slaw and potato salad, for just a couple bucks more than you’d pay on the street.

Casio Bluetooth Watch demo — Casio watch tells you when your phone is ringing.

Best example of missing the boat: Casio. As the world switched to smartphones, they made a strategic decision to stick with watches. New this year, a Bluetooth watch that will alert you when a call is coming in. Hey, I have a phone for that.

Panasonic kicks eco-butt at CES 2012

If you are at CES, be sure to check out the “eco ideas” section of the Panasonic exhibit. Once again, they score with irresistible concepts and catchphrases for ideas that may or may not ever become practical but should be. A racecar that rockets across the Australian outback under its own solar power, and beats its nearest competitor by an hour. A planned community in Singapore built within a solar/wind farm on the site of an old Panasonic factory, so energy is immediately available for use without being stored or transmitted. An electric car that is recharged wirelessly, and warms its passengers with its onboard heat pump.

Panasonic 3D screen at CES — Panaonic's 3D screen, in which the image is projected on building blocks

Panasonic demo queen Joey Lao — The indefatigable Joey Lao

Be sure you get your demo from the indefatigable Joey Lao, who was featured a couple of years in my still-popular post on the heat pump washer/dryer. And don’t miss the showcase video, a tour de force in which the screen itself, not the camera, is in 3D.

Marketing Makeover at CES 2012

One of my favorite events at CES is Steven J. Leon’s Showstoppers. Tech companies large and small rent a 6-foot booth space for 4 hours so they can convince reporters and bloggers (this is a press event) how cool they are in hopes of getting coverage.

A real niche product — Some of these companies, like Twonky, have a real niche product.

Because I’m here to study how companies market themselves, I like to look at how good they are in their signage. With 100+ companies in a large ballroom, I’m not going to listen to everybody’s elevator pitch. It’s amazing how many just put up a sign with their name, giving no clue what they do. Others have slogans or graphics that are edgy or plays on words but, again, give no clue what the product or service is.

I’d like to do a marketing makeover of some of these guys, similar to the lightening rounds I used to do with Carol Worthington Levy at DMA events. Someone would bring up their catalog or mail pack or ad and we’ll have to fire off quick ideas to make it better. Some of our ideas were better than others, but it’s amazing how many obvious improvements are hiding in plain sight.

One company that could use a makeover is YurBuds, with its “earbuds that won’t fall out.” Please, don’t make them look like implants. Don’t make them red like blood. Don’t make the cords look like blood dripping from your ears. Change those things and your product will be less creepy and sell better.

Another candidate is EmPower (note unhelpful jargony name), a company that makes eyeglasses with built in electronics in the earpiece that changes them from reading glasses to distance glasses at the touch of a finger. Invisible bifocal glasses that do this cost hundreds; these are $12 and available already at 1200 opticians. Nice story… but they miss the boat with a marketing display that features the fact they are glasses. Yes, we know that. It is the hidden electronics that makes them different. To demonstrate that, show them as anything BUT glasses.

Nicole Messier demos Kogeto panoramic camera.

The only truly new product I saw was from Kogeto: a camera that attaches to your iPhone and will take a panoramic photo which you can then upload to Facebook or a similar app; the viewer uses a slider to move the image around. It was so cool that, true story, I did not even notice it was my pal Nicole Messier doing the demo. Their signage could use some work however.

CES tightens screws on bloggers, lookie-loos.

I just finished registering for the Winter Consumer Electronics Show (CES) as an “industry attendee” vs a blogger. They’ve eliminated the blogger designation as part of a “stricter credentialing process” and, still waiting to see whether they consider Otis Regrets a legitimate source of industry information who will qualify as a member of the working press, I bought some insurance through a standard registration to get under the early bird deadline.

I’m been pretty diligent about logging a couple of stories a day at shows like this in return for my blogger credential; now maybe it frees me up to do fewer and deeper articles. If I don’t get a press credential, what I miss out on is a box lunch (whose main virtue is that it’s on premises, so you don’t have to take time out to eat lunch) and a tote bag. I will be okay.

CES also wants to tighten registration on attendees in general: “Due to the investment made by our exhibitors, International CES show management wants to ensure that its attendees are members of the trade.” CES is not a very tchotchke-rich show and I am guessing fairly few rapscallions fly across the country to spend several days padding around enormous rooms of strange machines; the main threat would seem to come from local lookie-loos, either retired or underemployed, and I’m sure they will find a way to get in.

See you at the buffet.

CES 2011: the chef has left the building

I did not have much luck finding a convection oven with multiple zones controlled from your iPad; in fact I had quite a bit of trouble locating the simple iGrill mentioned in my previous post on remote controlled household technologies. (If you happen to be at the show still, it’s in the Dr. Bott booth in the North Hall.)

Turns out there are just not a lot of technologies for controlling your home appliances remotely, not now and not in the immediate future. The closest I found to what I was looking for was a concept group from LG called the ThinQ; the ThinQ oven will tell you when its recipe is done and can be turned off or switched to warm from your handheld device. The ThinQ refrigerator knows what’s inside, so you can check in from the store if you forget whether you need milk or eggs. I also saw a Samsung refrigerator with a touchpad that accesses the internet and will check the weather or look up recipes; these are the key applications mentioned by a panel of working moms. But communication is one-way; you can’t input your own recipe for example. And all these devices are just ideas; they’ll never come to market in their current form.

If all you want to do is control electrical usage, we’re quite a bit further down the road as many manufacturers get ready for SmartGrid solutions that will adjust your power flow or delay electrical functions based on time-of-day metering. These devices talk to the utility’s smart meter via wireless or a powerline connection. Seems like it would be an easy enough thing to have the appliance accessible to the consumer, as well, via that same interface. And I hope some manufacturer or consortium of manufacturers will try that out soon. In the meantime, the IGrill looks pretty hip after all.

That’s it for CES; back to non-tech subjects in my next post.