But BlogHaus is fantastic! The PodTech people are great, and I got to meet a bunch of really nice Seagate folks last night, too — very cool. I love that company, and the great legacy they have in this industry — and in Minnesota, too, I might add (where they employs thousands). 
I thought for this post I’d just do the quick rundown of my day yesterday, the first official day of CES (which makes me wonder how many more of these days I can take!]…
It’s Tuesday morning now at the Haus, another beautiful, sunny day in Vegas. I was a little later getting to the suite this morning (about 8:30) — I guess because I stayed an hour later last night! (More on that in a bit.) But I was still the first blogger to arrive today….or maybe Sandira Calviac was here just ahead of me, so I defer to the lovely lady… 🙂 She’s from NY and has a cool new blog called TechAgnostic.com. But the best thing of all: she surfs! Learned in Hawaii recently, and came home and bought a wet suit so she could surf Long Island. I love it.
So, anyway, yesterday I attended the Aussie press event, as I blogged about. Being from Australia originally, I just had to… 🙂 Then I took in the Yahoo press luncheon — where I heard all about the new Yahoo Go for Mobile 2.0 service (now officially in beta) and the related Yahoo oneSearch — which they say together equals “the ‘Net in your pocket.” Pretty awesome demo they did. What’s the take on all this? Well, TechCrunch and others position it simply as Yahoo playing catch up to Google’s lead in mobile search. And the carriers they’ve signed up so far are all non-U.S. — so don’t get too excited yet. But one guy next to me (from a NY hedge fund!) was able to download the app quickly during the talk from his T-Mobile smart phone. Try it yourself here.
Then it was back to BlogHaus, where I hung in the conference room, blogging and chatting — mostly with PodTech folks and Lionel Menchacha, Dell’s official blogger, who’s a great guy. Been with Dell going way back.
After chatting with Linda Furrier about the how the whole BogHaus idea came about (a great story — more later), I left around 5:30 to head back to my hotel and get ready for the Showstoppers event at the Wynn Hotel. Huge crowds for this mini event, with what seemed like a hundred small booths (and killer food, drinks, and schwag). The coolest thing I saw there was the whole line of waterproof iPod cases and earphones from H2O Audio of San Diego. Pretty cool — for surfers especially, which the CEO, Kristian Rauhala, is (he surfs Black’s Beach). 
Stayed at Showstoppers till about 8:30, then figured I’d better go grab a cab to get back for the big doin’s at the BlogHaus, with all the Seagate people showing up for a special program. Lo and behold, as I’m walking through the endless casino path through the cavernous Wynn, who do I see briskly walking by me but John Furrier. So, I yells, hey John, I’ll bet you have a limo, huh? He says yeah, wanna ride? So, I join him and Robert Scoble, who caught up with us about then, for the ride back to the Bellagio. We had some good laughs….these two guys are way fun!
Back at the animal house — I mean BlogHaus — the place is starting to rock. And a beer or so later, the Seagate folks start arriving. John does the introductions, they announce the Seagate product giveaway winners (darn, I wanted one), and I had a chance to chat with corporate communications people Brian Ziel, Woody Monroy, and Julie Still. Woody’s a surfer (great name for one! I own a woody car myself…), and he tells me there are a lot of surfers at the company, since their offices in Scotts Valley are so close to Santa Cruz. He surfs generally before work. Later, I met CEO Bill Watkins, who’s a great guy, really fun, and we chatted about Minnesota a bit. See photo below of him being interviewed by one of the vlogging crews.
Here are some of my other photos of last night’s happenings, at least the ones that didn’t start getting blurry like my eyes as the evening progressed… 🙂 
We had waaay too much fun. My favorite photo is the one of Scoble going bottom’s up — no, that’s not vodka. 🙂 Seriously, it was an awesome event, with lots of great conversation and laughs. Mega-mega thanks PodTech, and of course to Seagate for underwriting the whole thing — a real marketing and PR coup. And it’s not over yet — the suite goes 24/7 till 8:00 am Thursday…
Tags: BlogHaus, PodTech, Robert Scoble, John Furrier, CES, Seagate, Yahoo, H2O Audio
I was sitting next to Andru Edwards, the CEO of GearLIve Media of Seattle, who’s been updating his very impressive site all morning, while he has about five people continuously roaming the show for the news. He and one of his guys and myself were commenting as the keynote went along. Big fun. We can’t wait to get our hands on that iPhone! PodTech reports in a post today that the product will, in fact, be called by that name after Cisco does some sort of licensing deal with Apple, allowing it to use their trademark. (See my previous post on that.)
Seems the reaction to the Gates keynote yesterday wasn’t all that great — a lot of the same themes as last year. (But as Robert Scoble said to me later, at least everything worked this time…..ha!) More of the buzz online this morning seemed to be focused on how Macworld is already starting to suck away the oxygen from CES — an event that will draw only about one-fifth as many people. 
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