Spent the day at CES looking at the up and coming technologies for 2008 and beyond. Certainly one of the themes is lots and lots of plasma and LCD screens - and big ones. Panasonic was showing a 150 inch - yes over 12 feet - and there were a lot of them over 100 inches. So if you are having trouble reading your monitor, help is on the way. Microsoft had a huge presence. Much of the booth was focused on Live. Live everything and no real hint of a partner anywhere. It seems obvious to me that they are responding to Google and their consumer direct approach. I hope they don't forget who got them where they are today - their loyal partners. There was a cool live option they were showing which I had not heard about before. Microsoft Live Workspace is an online location to save documents - resembles a hosted Sharepoint site for free. Details at http://workspace.officelive.com/. Today it is still in beta and has a 500 meg limit. It requires a Windows Live account to set up. Might be worth looking at for sharing docs between folks - can set permissions and the like. A second Microsoft product that had a huge crowd was the Microsoft Surface. I had seen this product prior but there was a big crowd around the tables. It sort of reminds me of the iPhone in a much bigger format. http://www.microsoft.com/surface/. Lots of new small video cameras that write directly to dvd or memory sticks or cards. Cool stuff. I did not see any real new industry changing things today. Lots of new versions and upgrades, but no show stoppers for me. Great new photo printers from HP - amazing quality and versatility.
Another interesting thing was UbiSync, Samsung’s USB-based multi-monitor support which isn’t really new, but I thought that I would share this 7-display setup. They are driven by a single PC running Windows, and the displays are completely integrated in the Windows Display Properties panel. Now, I don’t think that a USB-based setup would work well with graphics-intensive applications, but for text, photos and managed service monitoring, it should work well. I could go on and on but lets stop for now.
No comments:
Post a Comment