The Consumer Electronics Show, the turgid January gadget fest in Las Vegas, has been widely seen in the industry as a great place to show off your wares if you’re not Apple. But is that true? SigFig, the stealth investing startup that’s growing out of stock portfolio manager Wikinvest, has run some numbers on the market performance of the show’s big-company attendees during the event.
The main trend is pretty clear: there’s lots of buying and selling, but no significant gains. And actually, losses are not uncommon. → Read More
Makerbot creator Bre Pettis and his musician friends from Scary Car made this cute little video featuring 3D printed action figures being created in (near) real-time and then discovering love.
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Our readers are probably familiar in passing with UltraViolet, a new content rights management system that is supposed to unify the rights architecture on the web, allowing cross-platform sharing and authentication of movies and TV. But for such a major effort by so many device makers and content producers, very little has been heard or said about it. Probably because it’s still in its infancy: only 19 titles with UV compatibility were released in 2011, and the first signups occurred in October. Yet despite its tender age and low profile, the most common sentiment has been one of preemptive rejection.
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As I noted earlier this week, I’m not a fan of all of the “Company X Won CES!” jibberjabber that goes on around this time of year. It’s posturing for the sake of posturing, with the “winner” generally determined by anecdotal evidence and perceived mindshare.
If only someone could find a way to graph the show! To chart each company’s buzz (be it good or bad) over time, using cold, hard numbers to extrapolate trends from the barrage of tweets fired off during the show. Oh! Here we are.. → Read More
We’ve all seen the Kinect, or at least heard about its wonders. Well, the same company that hooked up Microsoft during “Project Natal” development has showed off some pretty wonderful technology at CES last week.
It uses a 3D camera on top of your TV to let you interact with your television through gestures. To be honest, it looks a lot like any touchscreen interface you’re already used to (with similar transitions and gestures) but you just happen to be 10 feet away from the screen. → Read More
There are plenty of smart watches out there in the world. The iPod Nano doubles as one, and the new MotoACTV watch is a pretty solid offering, as well. But over at Wimm Labs, they’re taking the concept to a whole new level.
We got the opportunity to sit down with Wimm Labs VP Tim Twerdahl who let us get up close and personal with the new Wimm One Smart watch. It’s “a wearable platform” as Twerdahl would call it, based on Android and packed with fun features like WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS, accelerometers, magnetometers and plenty of other fun stuff. → Read More
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CES was a blast this year. It was the best show in recent memory. Everyone from the press to vendors were upbeat and seemingly truly happy to be there. Attendance was up. The show was the largest ever (too big for some). Best of all, we shared a wonderful booth with the Engadget crew, which allowed us to conduct more interviews and chill on some comfy couches when not livestreaming from the show floor.
Below is the best of our booth interviews and roaming coverage. We truly hope you enjoyed our unique coverage. Any outlet can stuff people in a room (or trailer) and write up press releases nonstop. We strive to bring the entire show to you by webcasting our shenanigans from the floor and interviewing the smaller guys from the booth. Here’s our nine favorite videos from this year’s show. → Read More
At CES 2012, there are quite a few products that would totally change the way you do things (or at least save you some money) that just don’t get enough coverage. We reported on Ooma’s new HD2 VoIP handset, but nothing beats getting the facts straight from the CEO of the company.
Luckily, Eric Stang had a chance to meet with us and chat it up. → Read More
If you were paying attention last week, you can probably surmise that we have about a billion hours worth of footage to process from last week’s CES International show. There’s live streaming coverage that has now been archived, as well as quite a few recorded interviews including this one with Greg Duffy, Dropcam CEO.
Speaking with John Biggs, Duffy shows off the new Dropcam HD and speaks on the transition from hardware buyer to small OEM. → Read More
CES 2012 has come and gone, and it’s time for the inevitable summary and think pieces on the directions the industry is heading, the highlights of the show, and so on. We’ll also be posting some interviews and highlights from our live coverage this week, but before that it is, of course, necessary to publish some sort of top 10 list.
So here are five winners and five losers of CES, as judged by those of us who went to the show, and with consideration both for the limited, short-term nature of the show itself and the longer-term sea of trends on which these companies and devices are sailing. → Read More
If you needed any more proof that the future is already upon us, take a gander at the LG Styler. It looks like a refrigerator at first glance, but opening the door reveals that it isn’t meant for food — rather, it’s your clothes are meant to go inside. → Read More
Walking around CES this week it’s easy to see the future: just look at the components being sold in the nether regions of the show. These include specific things – Bluetooth powered electrical cords, for example – and “pieces” like smaller motherboards, cases, and materials. When planning a launch line-up, major manufacturers peruse catalogs of potential hardware and materials solutions to decide what to create next, then task their hardware designers to choose the proper parts in order to build in the features that meet their initial requirement. Does this TV need a 64-inch LED backlit screen? Four HDMI ports? A blue bezel? Designers figure out which parts fit where and place their parts and assembly order. It’s been like this for decades.
When I write that Samsung could be the next Apple, I meant that Samsung seems to have finally bucked this trend, at least in part. The problem with the above shop-design-build process is that there is little synergy among various business units. The mobile guys have a certain menu from which to pick while the TV guys have a different menu. The phone OS has always been different than the TV “OS” (really UI, but TVs need a little code in them). Work may be duplicated multiple times, even from year to year. → Read More
It’s true. CES is out of control. I have no reference point since this was my first visit, but from the first second you disembark the monorail and look down over the sprawling campus of the LVCC, you know you won’t see everything. The inkling gets stronger as you enter the building, and find that the Samsung booth is about as big as a mall.
Luckily for you, John Biggs and I ventured into the deepest corners of the show to find the little booths you most certainly missed.
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Blue Mics showed up to CES 2012 with three swanky mics. No, really. They look great but that’s because Blue Mics knows how to make a good looking mic. Brian Biggott, Blue Mics’ CTO, sat down with me on the TechCrunch CES couch for a quick chat about the company’s upcoming mics. → Read More
Here at CES 2012, phones are a bit in short supply. At least, new phones are. LG is one of the few companies to officially announce a new smartphone at the show, and I have to say it’s one of the best phones we’ve seen out of LG. Unfortunately, that still leaves the Spectrum quite a ways behind some of the other new phones we’ve seen recently like the Xperia S, Titan 2, or the Galaxy Nexus (of course).
The real stand-out feature here is the 4.5-inch 720p display with a True HD Graphic Engine and Corning Gorilla glass, boasting 326ppi. The phone also touts Verizon’s 4G LTE, which is mostly solid unless it’s December. → Read More
We couldn’t go to CES and not see what Razer had on display, and fortunately, CEO Min-Liang Tan was on hand to take us on a quick tour through the company’s booth. In between talking about the company’s new gaming accessories and their Synapse cloud storage system for game settings, we were (thankfully) able to get our hands on the Project Fiona tablet and the long-awaited Razer Blade gaming notebook. → Read More
In our last TechCrunch Gadgets Webcast on the CES 2012 show floor, we interviewed Henri Seydoux, CEO of Parrot. We had the opportunity to watch the drone in action – it was wildly terrifying having this thing floating above our heads while we talked – and we recapped the show including some of our Best of Show picks and, important, interviews with actual event-goers who loved to talk about what they saw.
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ESPN, the Worldwide Leader In Tim Tebow news, attended CES this year in the name of 3D TV. The network is fully committed to providing content in 3D and in fact hosted a live boxing match here at CES, which was broadcasted in 3D. I sat down with Bryan Burns, ESPN’s VP of Strategic Business Planning to talk about ESPN, lack of 3D content and the boring 2012 BCS Championship game. → Read More
This was the year of the sensors. From Fitbit’s new Aria Wi-Fi scale to the Basis sports watch, I saw more devices to keep you healthy and lean than ever.
I sat down with the folks from Fitbit and Striiv who both saw the power of self-reporting and mindfulness when it comes to weight loss. Striiv, for example, has a new feature that allows you to connect to your friends wirelessly to compete in contests like walkathons and races. For example, you and the wife can compete to get to 5,000 steps first during the day and the winner has to do chores or gets some of the losers “energy.”
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