Summing up CES 2009

Photo by J.D. Lasica

I‘m back home after a crazy-busy week at Macworld Expo in San Francisco (Monday-Tuesday) and the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas (Wednesday to Friday). I blogged earlier about my panel at the P2P Media Summit on Wednesday.

I’m not covering this as a journalist covering the electronics space. Rather, capturing media snippets (chiefly through video, coming soon, and photos, above) relevant to the social media and tech worlds. So if you’re looking for traditional coverage of CES, head to Engadget, Gizmodo, Fast Company, CNET, Revision 3, Geek Brief or other outlets that cover gadgets.

Here are a few random tidbits from CES:

• Photos: Here’s a Flickr photo set I took of CES; I’ll add my shots of Steve Ballmer tomorrow. (Update: The set now contains more than 75 photos, including some nice shots of Steve Ballmer and Ford CEO Alan Mulally.) Alas, I lost a compact flash card on the tradeshow floor with more than 100 photos taken on Friday.

• The action’s on Twitter: While I haven’t been blogging CES the past couple of days, I’ve been Twittering it since Wednesday evening, so you can see my Twitter stream here.

• Citizen media: While there were many of the established citizen media sites covering the conference (Revision 3, Geek Brief TV), and lots of folks capturing video on their cell phones, and the blogger lounges were packed, I was surprised I didn’t see more citizen media outlets swarming over the place. Perhaps the low barrier to entry for bloggers inhibits many from attempting something more ambitious?

• techku: One Internet video site that did launch was techku, Sarah Austin‘s new venture, which strreams live and recorded footage 24/7 on Mogulus. I appeared on the first day alongside CrunchGear editor John Biggs.

• Disclosure: I’m part of the Intel Insiders social media consulting group, and Intel paid for my trip.

• Highlights: The Ultimate Bloggers Dinner hosted by Social  Media Club and Lenovo, where Chris Heuer and I interviewed Ford CEO Alan Mulally; I’ll post the video within a week. … Was great to finally meet Maggie Fox of Canada’s Social Media Group and Scott Monty, a social media consultant to global head of social media for Ford. … Loved spending time with Meghan Asha of Nonsociety.com. … I attended an outstanding blogger dinner Thursday hosted by Symantec, where I met some outstanding people. Amazing food and presentation at Mario Batali’s B&B Ristorante in the Venetian Hotel. Will be following up with Chris Noble, CEO of the causes site Kompolt, about my upcoming new site. … Wonderful to catch up with Steve Rosenbaum of Magnify.net and Staci Kramer of PaidContent.org.

• Learning: I didn’t get to take in many presentations but was impressed by the unveiling of the new Intel Learning Series, a new classroom-based education initiative that’s intended to bring the conversation away from the device and toward instruction. Some highlights from the session: There are only 20 million student PCs in the United States today. … Intel announced the new convertible classmate PC design to meet the variety of elementary school students’ needs worldwide; it converts from a clamshell to tablet mode with a touch screen and was designed based on social scientists’ observations in the classroom.  … A representative from Portugal’s Magellan Initiative attended the session and gave an update on the collaborative project, which is putting PCs into the hands of 500,000 students during the current school year.

• PC.com: The resource site PC.com, which launched in July and lets people explore, learn and ask questions about PC technology and purchasing options, is on course to reach 1.4 million hits during CES.

• Small Things Challenge: Intel, Kiva.org and Save the children kicked off a yearlong effort yesterday called the Small Things Challenge (coverage here). The program will appeal directly to individuals worldwide and encourage them to get involved by donating money to Save the Children’s Rewrite the Future program, which is focused on securing quality education for the millions of children out of school because of war and armed conflict. 

• Green: I was happy to see the latest green efforts by Fuji. I used eight Fuji EnviroMax AA digital alkaline batteries in my Nikon D300 battery grip and was impressed by how they held up under hours of shooting. They’re 80 percent more eco-friendly than traditional batteries, at comparable price, says the folks at the Fuji booth.

• Lodging: It’s the first time I stayed at the Luxor and would return again, though could do without the hourlong waits for a taxi during CES. Attendance was down over past years, but I still prefer much smaller conferences than the spectable that is CES.

JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.