CES Report

There was something different about CES this year. For the frst time it looked like the Linux value system, and not just Linux code, was making headway. I found much to be encouraged about, and much to explore further. My only regret was that I didn't have enough time to do more exploring while I was there

Not that there's any way anybody can begin to see more than a small sampling of CES. The show is just too immense, and Las Vegas is just too frustrating as setting for the show.

Saying CES is too big is still an understatement. A few numbers:

• 1.8+ million square feet including —
  • The Las Vegas Convention Center, with its Central Hall, North Hall, South Halls 1 through 4, meeting rooms and Central Plaza. Any one of these by itself ranks anong the world's largest expo spaces. The South Hall alone is one of the world's largest buildings.
  • The Las Vegas Hilton
  • The Sands Expo and Convention Center, including The Venitian hotel.
• 140,000 attendees from 140 countries
• >2700 exhibitors, not counting those at hospitality suites, rented restaurants and ballrooms
• 4500 "media", not counting bloggers, who this year also got schwag bags and were treated as a breed of press
• 30 product categories
• 6 tech zones
• More keynotes, sessions and speakers than I can bother to count

As this this weren't already too much, there's Las Vegas itself. There is no good excuse for a city this fancy and fast-growing to provide such minimal public transportation. The roads of the city are often a gridlocked mess of taxis, rental cars and construction vehicles. The Las Vegas Monorail is the Strip's only rail system. (No subways, no trolleys, no light rail.) It runs along the back side of a minority of Strip Hotels, and is convenient to only a few of the hotels listed on its stops — plus, fortunately, the LVCC. Long lines and high ticket prices (a single ride is $5) make it barely competitive with taxis.

Travel between exhibition halls is time consuming and arduous. The hotels' own inadequate signage and vast casino areas (which sit in the middle of everything) also cost time though confusion.

And some of the locations are just bizarre. For the second straight year, audio exhibits were in hotel rooms occuping the 29th to 35th floors of the Venetian Hotel. The only way to get there without walking was by elevator. Lines were long, and finding individual companies among hundreds of anonymous rooms was a needle-in-haystack ordeal. I was in the audio business many years ago, and I'm still curious about it; but after one elevator ride up and down (with no time to spend between the two), I bailed on the whole prospect.

I also missed some of the exhibit areas I usually visit, including Auto exhibits in the North hall, and the zillion companies showing off new stuff in little booths at the Hilton International Gateway. Instead I spent most of my time at the Sands, the Central Hall and parts of the South Hall.

(I also spent half of one day flying out over the ocean in a Zero-G plane, experiencing six minutes of weightlessness on a series of parabolic arcs between dives in a specially equipped 727. But that's a whole 'nuther subject I'll visit in a separate post.)

Here's what I found.

1) Linux is a selling point. This hasn't been the case in the past. In my 2004 report I found only eleven mentions of Linux among all the exhibotors at the show. And that was the year after Kunitake Ando, president and CEO of Sony, gave a famous keynote announcing the company's intention to make Linux its future embedded operating system. (The CELF grew out of the same effort.) Subsequent years weren't much better. But this year I found nearly eighty, many of which I listed in the wiki we put together for the show.

2) Open Mobile is starting to happen. Google made big noise when it announced the Android Open Handset Alliance Project late last year; but I didn't see or hear much about it at the show, except from folks such as those OpenMoko and Trolltech, both of which credited Andoid with making clear that the era of closed mobile devices is coming to an end.