1) Not much new stuff. I mean, a couple of new power strips and some inventors with lots of text in their signage, see #8 and #10. 2) Bigger TVs, cheaper, with a higher refresh rate. I was very impressed with Olevia, belevia or not. Also see #9. 3) A lot of green marketing and use of earth tones and pastels and sans serif fonts and talk of innerwebz 3.7. The Corporate world wants you to compost and blog to their flikrdigg about it! 4) The cell phone makers really, really want you to send and receive a lot of streaming video with your phone. What they don't really want you to do is talk. "Talk is cheap", heh. 5) Good news! Booth babes are back! 6) Good news for pervs! Booth babes have braces now! I'm not talking about professional adult female employees of the companies simply working the show and undergoing orthodontic correction, I'm talking about "booth babes"- that is, local models in skimpy clothing trying to get you to look at tiny video streaming phones. This year a lot of them had braces and a few were even wearing pigtails and plaid skirts. And yes, I was still at the CES. 7) The faux-hawk is now an acceptable corporate haircut. And not just for young guys. I think I saw about fifty 35-45 year old guys with topsiders, John W. Nordstrom khakis, the copper/magnetic golf bracelet and Port Authority polos with the company logo, rocking a fauxhawk. The truth is that even though I've got two kids and am 34 and occasionally rock a hawk, I only pair mine with checkered Vans, and never at work. Sadly, the fauxhawk has become the Mullet for our modern age: retail on the ground floor, party in the penthouse. After this week I shall spike no more, forever. 8) Biggest Sausage party ever. Staggering the opening of the AVN expo and CES has ruined CES. There are only a few things in life that are how they are portrayed on movies and television. Vegas during the AVN show is TV Vegas. Vegas during CES before AVN starts is Comic-Con Vegas. 9) Everybody is courting the gamers. What this means in tradeshow terms is that all the big booths not only have gamer equipment and marketing people talking about gaming, but "vignettes" about new gaming equipment, a sort of full size living diorama complete with Korn poster and a 3-4 person paint-by-numbers gamercrew composed of a trustafarian white guy with dreadlocks, a multiracial with a realhawk, a commercially viable black guy with emo pants, chucks and a skateboard and an optional betty with a Mark Ryden tatt. These guys seem confused. The buyers seem confused. The PR people seem to understand perfectly. It is an inversion of the natural order. Actually the second coolest thing I saw was Alienware's huge curved monitor. I was instructed not to touch it, and left before the people standing around it worshiping sucked me into the 11th level of Nerd-dom. Still, pretty awesome, and I would love to see what Super Mario Kart battle mode would look like on that. 10) Hooray for entrepreneurs! Inventors are still hawking their own stuff. While consumer electronics are highly commiditized, homogenized and corporate, these guys are still out there and they still do neat stuff, doiong magic as they make us laugh- You can spot them at the Sands, (as opposed to LVCC), in the New **** area, identified by the soldering irons on their table/cart, and the stylistic and physical similarity between them and Milton from office space. You know what? Those guys have the coolest stuff at the show. How about the power to send true surround sound through conventional, cheap-*** headphones: Boom 11) Want to know how to ruin a paid-expenses trip to Vegas? Here's the Bozo Casanova way: I ate some very pink room-temp chicken at the Denver airport on the way out, with two days of predictable results. Avoid.
Interestingly enough, all the messaging about the bigger TVs was about, more or less in order: 1) Bigness 2) Refresh rate 3) Tree-huggingness
