It’s the end of my first day of my first ever CES and I’m left, well, “whelmed.” Our friend Rob Goldberg prepared me by saying, “You’ve never been? Prepare to be both under-whelmed and overwhelmed.” He was right and I’m left totally “whelmed.”
I met up with Jeremy at the Venetian at 10:00AM on Sunday when he returned from the Netgear announcements and we spent the day cruising the press conferences and basically securing decent seats for the Bill Gates keynote.
The sheer scale of CES is overwhelming. For those that haven’t been, there are over 140,000 attendees from around the world and 2700 presenters. Because of the size, this means that the presentations, parties and events are spread around the strip. You have to be ready to do a ton of walking. I wanted to be Jobe from AD. I’m glad I read Jeremy’s CES tips, because they don’t allow Segways on the Ceaser’s people-mover.
So, I’m pretty sure I spent most of yesterday walking to or from somewhere, but can’t really remember much of value, including the Gates keynote, from these places. Hanging with Dave Winer, seeing Bill Gates were highlights as well as the HP party and running into Bob Morgan at Shozu. Getting into the Bill Gates conference meant dealing with the chaos, that could have been avoided by the CEA team, of picking up your press tickets in a mad scramble around 3:00. Standing in a separate line at 5:00. To go upstairs and stand in another line at 5:30. People go mad for this and I’m not sure I totally get it. After all the waiting and walking, you get to see Microsoft present OS X. Except for the gaming stuff, nothing really seemed fresh or interesting.
After the keynote, we went to Pepcom and HP Pure party. Again, flat screens a little wider; cameras a little smaller, and meat on stick. Okay. Whelmed again. Oo
And then, if Lorie’s reading this, we went right to bed at 11:00 so we could be up bright and early for the floor’s opening and today’s press conferences. ‘Cause that’s what you do in Vegas, right?
I’m looking forward to cruising the floor and will be demo’ing Canon’s new A640 10 mega-pixel camera. Look for the review coming soon.