We recently returned from CES, the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. As always, too much to see and not enough time to see it. The show was a somewhat smaller this year by a few hundred thousand square feet, but exhibitors and content still greatly outnumber the time available to take it all in. CES is always a great opportunity to preview the technologies we'll be seeing this year, and how the economy is affecting all of it.
The buzz words at CES this year were 3-D TV, e-Readers, Slates and smart books, smart phones and video conferencing. We're going to take a brief look at these different categories and give you our impressions.
Eco Friendly LED Lighting Comes of Age in the New Green Economy
LED lighting technology opens the door to the first truly "super-efficient, cost-effective" lighting solutions for commercial, institutional, and residential applications. The newest generation of LED bulbs have been designed to use the same lighting fixtures as incandescent and compact fluorescent bulbs. In the case of standard fluorescent bulbs the installer needs to cut the ballast wire as it is not utilized with the LED replacement bulbs. An added bonus to this generation of LED bulbs is that, in most cases, they are dimmable, unlike many of the bulbs they are designed to replace.
CES 2009 was a bit smaller than in previous years. The economy played a
big part in that both attendance in general plus the size and scope of
the presence of various manufacturers was diminished. With a slightly
lighter crowd of about 120,000, it was easier to get around although
still much too big to be able to see everything within the allotted
time.
That CES was an incremental show this year was not a big surprise.
Given the pervasive gloomy economic atmosphere we did not expect to see
huge new developments in technology. There were a number of incremental
improvements in the areas of large flat screens and refresh rates, as
well as other refinements in the video and audio sectors overlapping
both entertainment and computing devices.
So all the hype aside, three items caught our attention in very different categories.
Traditionally we have always done a ‘Predictions’ piece sometime just
before year’s end. In it we take our crystal balls firmly in hand, don
our silicon turban and prognosticate on the future of various aspects
of the tech industry.
This year we didn’t.
We just weren’t seeing
anything that exciting on the horizon and we made an editorial decision
to wait until after the first salvo of trade shows to see if there was
something we were missing and go from there. Well we’ve had 6 weeks or
so to settle into 2008, take a deep breath and scope out the industry.
There are some exciting things happening, such as the bid by
Microsoft to acquire Yahoo and the ever improving and proliferating
tools to put more and more and more (and more) content on the web. To
that end, we have asked two of our resident wizards, Analyst Amy Wohl and Contributing Editor Stan Coplan
to give us their take on the areas of mergers and acquisitions, SAAS
(software as a service), and all those neat development tools for the
web. All that being said, as far as hardware is concerned, I still feel
that 2008 will be….
Perspectives 
