Walking around the Consumer Electronics show provides many surprises and delights. From gadgets, software and hardware to just about anything thought up by mankind CES has it all. Just a short walk through one of the halls revealed a massaging computer mouse, a heart rate monitor for dummies, a motorized and rideable beverage cooler, an automatic gutter cleaner, a touchless trash can and an air guitar belt buckle.

Here are some highlights among things I saw at CES:

AOL
I’ll start with some cool updates from my own company. AOL is announcing enhancements to BlueString and Xdrive. A Facebook application called “My Memory Gallery” will allow consumers to access and use BlueString. Xdrive is announcing an updated user interface to be released to beta early this year. Both of those are being built with Adobe® Flex™. AOL blog Switched.com has announced a branded web mail experience and contest to win a Nintendo Wii™ or Amazon Kindle™.

Sling Media
You can’t miss Sling’s booth in the Sands/Venetion conference hall. Its right at the entrance and their exhibit design is gorgeous and inviting. At times the design looks a little too close to campaigns we’ve seen from Target and Coca-cola but it seems that they’re truly trying to make it their own so a little forgiveness is warranted. Sling’s main product has been the Slingbox which is a product that allows you to access your home television from PC’s and mobile devices. There’s plenty to talk about regarding Sling but I’ll focus on a couple of things that stood out to me. Sling is clearly interested in making a play in web content via a site called Sling.com. A demonstration showed the ability to create clips from television shows by using a product called SlingPlayer and then the ability to share the clip with friends via email. Friends would then click on a link that brings you to a pages revealing the clip accompanied by a rich cobrand for the show and network and finally allows people to comment on the clip and find related content. The advertising opportunities here seem endless. An additional announcement was that they would soon support Blackberry access.

iRobot
Known for the little robot that automatically vacuums your carpet, the Roomba, iRobot is showing a few new and interesting products. The first is the Scooba that is designed to clean hard surface floors. Another is the Verro which is a pool cleaning robot similar to automatic pool cleaning devices we’ve seen in the past. The most interesting of the bunch is the Looj a gutter cleaning robot. Its loud and seems more difficult to use than the demonstration but I’ve never seen anything like it and its potential seems enormous. Nobody likes cleaning gutters.

Guitar Hero™ Air Guitar Rocker™ by Jada
This product was bound to be created after the popularity of Guitar Hero in the past year. Thankfully, it comes via a toy company named Jada Toys. Its simply a motion activated air guitar player consisting of a blazing rock n’ roll styled belt buckle, a guitar pic with a sensor and a miniature amplifier that attaches to your belt allowing you to rock out where ever you are. The presenters were having a blast in their booth. Conference attendees were invited to where a Slash-inspired wig and Elvis-inspired sunglasses and play to your heart’s content. The speed of strumming the wireless guitar pic controls the speed in which the music is played. The Guitar Hero Air Guitar Rocker will be available in March and is expected to retail at $29.99.

Bigger & Thinner
In talking with some folks, it sounds like plasma and LCD displays have been getting bigger and bigger and each year its a contest to see who can prototype the biggest. One that I witnessed was a 150″ plasma display by Panasonic. I’m telling you, this one’s not going through any standard size doorways and a photograph doesn’t begin to do it justice. It’s BIG! Another trend by most of the manufacturers is to see who can now build the thinnest. Allegedly, the thinnest at the show was equivalent to 3 credit cards stacked on top of each other. I’m betting that next year the competition will include the lightest display.

Jypsi
One of the great things about CES is that you just never know what you’ll stumble upon. As I was approaching the Sony booth, I couldn’t help but notice how good the sound was on their displays. As I got nearer I couldn’t mistake the sound of live music and not only was the quality good but the music was fantastic. Further exploration revealed a band of hip young up and coming musicians who call themselves Jypsi. They hail from Nashville and soon should arrive in a town near you. From what I can gather, the four main musicians are members of the same family. You’ll hear Lillie Mae (fiddle, vocals), Frank (guitar, vocals), Scarlett (mandolin) and Amber-Dawn (fiddle, vocals) harmonizing through most of the tracks though Lillie Mae and Frank seem to alternate most of the lead vocals. They were also accompanied by a drummer and bassist who seem to be unavailable in their online bio. Their first radio single is “I Don’t Love You Like That” and their sound is somewhere found in bluegrass, country and pop. Hopefully they’ll soon be in a town near you as you’ll want to check them out for sure.

Pimp My Ride
Another trend seemed to be extravagant automobiles. Imagine MTV’s “Pimp My Ride” on steroids. Bigger, louder, shinier are all words to describe the cars seen in the show. There seems to be no limits on how many video display monitors a car can have and where they can be installed. I’m not kidding. I saw one in a wheel well another in a fender and every head rest seems to need one. Apparently, all a car needs is a second seat and everything else is reserved for multimedia and mega sound systems. The one with the spinning amps was my favorite.

That’s it for this year.

-Tom

Originally posted on the AIM Design Blog.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 13th, 2008 at 10:23 pm and is filed under Extracurricular. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.