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Technology Events BLOG Archive
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2004
CES RECAP -
January 18th, 2004 Here are some of the top stories from CES: One of the hits of the show was the proliferation of GBs of storage in 1" and under form factors. The picture below shows how Compact Flash, SD cards, and small disk drives are all competing for the same space. One of the biggest announcements for the week was Apple's iPOD Mini that uses the Hitachi 4 GB Microdrive that is shown at the bottom left of the picture below. We should see 40 GB versions of these drives by 2006. Panasonic announced 1 GB SD cards for $199.
Joining CES this year, the Storage Visions and Home Gateway (SV) Conference precedes CES for two days. I'm an advisor to SV and was one of the many people who worked with Tom Coughlin to get the conference going. Tom has a grassroots like effort to get the the conference going every year. The conference had good attendance of over 180 tech savvy participants. Unlike the big-city feel of CES, you get a small town feel to SV. After watching hours of great presentations, you eat meals with the attendees and visit issues in better detail. This provides an intimate setting to hash over the nuances of the presentations. When a CES talk ends, people scatter to the 4 halls of the Las Vegas Convention Center. All of the major disk drive vendors gave keynotes and bought us meals. The last one by GS Magicstor was the most interesting to me. Kenneth Wing gave a documentary like presentation on the foundation of the company which is the Chinese Government. While Magicstor has an R&D facility in Milpitas, CA, their manufacturing is in the Guizhou Province of China. They are building a major manufacturing facility near rice paddies and thatch huts. It's a great example of the modern world being slapped down in the middle of nowhere. Magicstor is focusing on the small disk drive market. They see their 1" disk drive being used in many consumer electronics devices - primarily cameras. With their manufacturing facilities coming online and labor costs at dollars per day, the disk drive industry could be going into another tailspin of commoditization. We can only hope. An example of one of the interesting conversations was about the convergence of functionality in the entertainment server. One marketeer said how people like point products and gave the example of the George Foreman grill that only does one thing- cook meat. He said we don't need one appliance that does everything (the entertainment server). Then he showed his friends home entertainment system that had multiple thousand dollar components that were stored in his closet. This seemed ridiculous to me when compared to the ES with a big disk drive. I agreed with his point though that most consumers are overwhelmed by the variety of features that can come from one of these boxes if they aren't presented well. Entertainment Servers have to be easy to use to make them widely accepted. Another big trend in the show was appliances for home networks. Many companies displayed products that would share content throughout the home. Bill Gates's opening speech was about the Windows Media Extender Technology. This is all about home networking and sending audio, video and gaming throughout the home to set-top boxes and your Xbox. An interesting comparison was between Gate's vision of the future and the Home Networking Alliance's vision. Gate's wants a PC to be the center of the home and have it stream content to the TVs, stereos and gaming consoles. The Home Networking alliance sees the PC as a peer on the home network that is equal to networked set-top boxes and other appliances. What would you like? Microsoft or a standard? Sorry Bill, I hope you don't dominate this space and screw it up too. WiFi Appliances - MacSense demonstrated a Wireless Network Music Player. Using WiFi, you can send stereo or Surround Sound over your WiFi network. It comes with two tiny speakers so you can carry it around like a radio, but I'd suggest plugging it into a stereo. *********************************VOOM********************************* I don't want to forget to tell you about their main selling point either - 39 channels of HDTV streams 24/7. ** An after thought - VOOM's PVR service was not deployed in the summer of 2004 as they planned. It might come out in Q1 2005. A last point that I thought was really cool at first was teh announcement of a 76" plasma TV and a 55" LCD TV from LG. While the plasma was 5"s larger than any previously exhibited TV, it's still not as big or as good as many projection TVs. I went to the Faroudja booth to see their exhibit of the best systems they could build. (Faroudja makes video processors that will make DVDs look like motion pictures.) From a dark theater setting, they demonstrated 4 video systems. Three were based on DVDs and the final one was from HDTV content from a theater quality projector. To me they all looked fabulous, but what I remember the most was the content. What it reminds me of is that it doesn't matter how good it looks if you're watching crap. That's why I would prefer a PVR and SDTV over commercial HDTV anyday. I did watch my first football games in HDTV. While it was cool, I still cared more about the Chief's loss than the video quality.
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