Wednesday, January 9, 2008

CES Insights

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.


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