Now that accountability is dead in politics as Bush keeps demonstrating for us, where will this lead? Unless you are sleeping with interns you are not going to be held accountable for anything in the White House. Does accountability in politics matter anymore? Do you care?
There was a time when I would deride the developer for their limited imagination, but then I started teaching myself to be a programmer, and I could then see into their world through their eyes. Needless to say, it was an eye-opener.
With a technology industry being scolded about needing to help create rain, out comes a very pivotal website link that only verifies that the work of angels deserves recognition and rewards from those who profit from materialism.
For a show as huge as CES, how do vendors rise above the noise to attract their key audiences, and not just draw them into their booths, but also into their technologies?
Creative had one of the busiest booths. The booth babes and spin wheel game for freebies does the trick every time. I could have won a 20GB Zen Touch MP3 player preloaded with classical music tracks, but the line was about 90 minutes long.
Kodak’s booth gimmick was a little more in line with communicating what their products actually DO. I barely once solved the Rubic’s Cube, but the very impressive individual they found amazed the crowd with his mastery. He asked attendees to jumble cubes as best as they could, and within seconds, while explaining some of the features of Kodak’s Easyshare Printer Dock Plus, he had made identical jumbled cubes! Well, photography is all about duplication, is what I got out of it. Bluetooth enabled, you can print your photos directly from your mobile phone cameras to the Printer Dock Plus. No computer middle-man required.
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Then there were the rockstars. Olympus had Cheap Trick and the leads from Black Crowes playing acoustic to push their new m:robe devices. I don’t ever really want to mix my images into music slideshows, but I guess somebody will.
D-BOX didn’t have to do more than invite attendees to try out their new armchair. Yes, an armchair. A modern, leather recliner, but it’s more than meets the eye. With built in motion simulators, the “Quest” provides motion and vibration synchronized with action and sound, frame by frame, of about 250 movies, so far. Again, more convergence of audio and video for a fully interactive experience. I saw a demo with “Pearl Harbor” and another movie with sports car racing. The chair was rolling up and down with the picture, cutting corners with the planes and race cars. And just when I thought the expectations of anything “virtual reality” were shot! Apparently, CEO and President, Michel Jacques, programs movies himself, frame by frame, and has a lot of fun doing it, but it will take a while to cover the entire movie library. This has got to be the ultimate luxury to impress your friends with, if that’s your priority, or just something unique to add to your home theater, if that’s your answer to an extra $5000. As you know, while CES was going on, so was the AVN Adult Expo. I wonder what else Michel will have programmed into his chair?!
Other companies chose to forgo the floor, and instead use guerilla tactics to corral potential partners, customers, and press into pimp-daddy limos to take them to pimp-daddy suits at nearby hotels for private demos or parties. Smart move for some “quality time” they would never get with the people they really want on the show floor.
Case in point, Realm Systems held an outrageous launch event at the Rain Night Club at the Palm’s Hotel Friday night. For a product that promises to be as big as its Mobile Personal Server, this was marketing to match. Realm unveiled the “world’s first mobile computing platform” with a 19-minute movie, starring Jon Lovitz as “The Janitor”, a James Bond personality saving the world’s desktops held for ransom by the evil Monopoly and villain, MS. FiT (get it?) played by Elaine Irwin Mellancamp. Gary Coleman stars as I.T., the equivalent of Bond’s “Q”. Realm’s solution consists of two elements, the Mobile Personal Server (MPS) and the Realm SOBA Router. The MPS is a USB device the size of a small cell phone, a full-blown computer with an embedded OS, 64MB of DRAM, 2 PowerPC processors, and up to 1GB of flash or 20GB hard drive. It plugs into any Mac, PC or Linux host computer, and up pops your desktops and applications, just as you left them. The second piece is a back-end server through which applications are updated to MPS devices through single-stroke deployments and security policies are managed. With a 2048 bit VPN tunnel to the SOBA router and thumbprint reader on each MPS, it seems very ‘Bond’ indeed. Check out the movie so you can really wrap your head around this, and for some good laughs.
At the end of the day, the proof in the pudding will be in how the marketplace accepts these new technologies. Who knows what next year’s CES will bring.
Valerie Cunningham, managing partner at HighWire Consulting, specializes in the development and execution of integrated marketing and communication programs for high-technology companies. HighWire provides the strategic roadmap and tactical expertise that reach target markets and achieve key organizational goals.
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O-World
Creative had one of the busiest booths. The booth babes and spin wheel game for freebies does the trick every time. I could have won a 20GB 
'Build,' Not 'Buy,' to Be IT Motto for '05 
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