Graeme Thickins on Tech

Reflections & analysis about innovation, technology, startups, investing, healthcare, and more .... with a focus on Minnesota, Land of 10,000 Lakes. Blogging continuously since 2005.

Category: Consumer Electronics (Page 1 of 5)

Quantifying the Hype: A Data Analysis of #CES2015

January 13, 2015 / / 0 Comments

cesThink of it as the morning after. Actually, it was the Monday following the week when 2015 International CES ended, on a Friday. I was scrolling through my email, trying to decompress — feeling some pride in surviving multiple weeks of being blasted with hundreds (thousands?) of PR pitches from an absolutely cuh-razy variety of exhibiting companies, from all over the globe. The blisters on my feet weren’t hurting so bad anymore. Whew! Things were finally starting to… slow… down.

Part of this decompression process is always trying to form in my head my overall opinion of the show — this after writing a couple of posts (and shooting a ton of photos), but no one person can ever really write enough posts to describe their entire experience at this thing. Which begs the question, how the hell do I summarize yet another year of this massive tech-product sensory overload? It is not easy netting it out!

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Darn You, #CES2015 – You Made Me Buy a Pono Music Player

January 13, 2015 / / 0 Comments

ponoI didn’t go to the CES show looking to buy anything. I was already spending enough money getting there… and, um, making cabbies rich once I arrived. But the chance to listen to Neil Young’s Pono music player at the Showstoppers press event at CES on Tuesday evening last week convinced me to open my wallet. The experience was just so amazing.

Understand, now, I’m no audiophile or crazy-geeky music connoisseur. But I do know when I hear something that’s like nothing else. So I decided pretty instantly — yep, I’m a buyer! At $399, it’s a bargain to be able to have on-demand music experiences that rise above anything else, as Pono does. And as I considered the cost, I figured, hey, how many people paid this much and more for iPods back in the day? (Even though I admit I didn’t.) So, price is especially relative in this case.

Compare your iPod to the Pono sometime, if you can find someone who owns one, or if you can find a demo unit in a store. You will be convinced. Or compare it to the sound quality of any of the various modern smartphones out there today — those sure haven’t improved music listening much at all since the iPod, in any way I’m aware of.

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I Crashed the Volkswagen Press Conference at #CES2015

January 5, 2015 / / 0 Comments

vwpavilioinWell, actually, I didn’t crash it (I had a press pass), but I did stumble in late… 🙁 Would you believe, just as it was wrapping up? Damn long cab rides! But there were still lots of people milling about on stage, and both the vehicles were still there. So, I grabbed some photos, and the press kit on my way out.

The red car is the Golf R Touch, which was attracting the most attention, and the white car is an e-Golf, their electric car, which looked lonely in comparison. (But who needs that now with cheap gas, right?!) They showed a “Connected Golf” version of that car, which is a set of features that seems to be their major focus at CES.

As a big VW guy myself — I’ve owned or leased six or seven of them in my lifetime, and I’ve been driving them exclusively for 10 years now — I just had to find out what was new.

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What Does Human Trafficking Have to Do With Big Data? #gigaomlive

March 19, 2014 / / 0 Comments

Justin Kosslyn, Product Manager at Google Ideas, is telling us about the Polaris project ("For a World Without Slavery"), which is making it possible to map, expose, and disrupt illicit networks with technology. The US National Human Trafficking Hotline has 150+ structured variables for 20,000 calls a year to drive national insights and policy. Patrick Keefe, a Staff Writer at The New Yorker, is working on making public records more accessible to address the problem. Justin sees hotlines as an increasingly promising way to amass data.

Trafficking-Gigaom

My Snippets from Another CES — the 2014 Edition

January 26, 2014 / / 0 Comments

Following on from my previous post earlier today, here are some other cool things I saw of interest during  VegasMorning the latest CES show in Las Vegas — when I wasn't working, that is (which was 90% of the time):

• Phantom 2 Vision: Your Flying (drone) Camera.

DJI_Phantom_II_Vision

 

 

 

 

 

• An American auto entrepreneur’s vision comes to life

Elio_Motors

 

 

 

 

 

• A BitCoin ATM

BitCoin_ATM

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

• AirHDTV … up to 186 channels (press release)

AirHDTV

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

But the big Chinese company DJI, whose product is shown above, wasn't the only drone company at CES.  Minnesota-based QFO Labs (a client of mine) also was also there, though with a much smaller presence.

QFO-QuadFighter

The company showed its "Quad Fighter" product at the Nordic Semiconductor booth (one of its suppliers) in South Hall, and was a big hit there.  But the real excitement for QFO happened soon after it arrived back home, when it got a big surprise with its product being shown on national TV: Local toy-drone maker gets plug from U.S. Sen. Rand Paul (by Julio Ojeda-Zapata/St. Paul Pioneer Press).

Were you at CES 2014?  What was the coolest thing you saw?

 

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