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Gary Shapiro and Kazuhiro Tsuga

CEA’s Gary Shapiro introduces Panasonic’s Kazuhiro Tsuga to deliver the opening keynote at the 2013 International CES.

Today’s post comes from Andy Marken, president of Marken Communications. Andy has been involved in the strategic marketing and promotion of hardware and software storage technology for more than 20 years. For more information, visit www.markencom.com. For more photos that accompany this post, click here.

Everyone – except people who have a clown or big crowd phobia – loves the circus. The International CES is one of the world’s biggest circuses on the globe with acts of all shapes, sizes and quality; each hungering for the cheers of the crowd.

It isn’t often you see a lawyer as the ringmaster, but Shapiro (Gary, head of CEA – Consumer Electronics Association) does a pretty good job of handling the tempermental acts.

The main acts (those in the center ring) are the big boys who pay bigger fees to put on their keynote speaker acts. Just like the real circus, some of the acts are good, some bad, some “What the ….!!!!” A few of the CES 2013 keynotes – Panasonic, Qualcomm, Samsung – were acts you found interesting, put you to sleep, dazzled, puzzled. The others were phone and car guys.

The Good
Coming off a pretty rough year (you lose a couple of billion and smile), Panasonic president Kazuhiro Tsuga was the first to take the center ring with one of the more focused acts of CES.

Even though he had the parade of paid personalities you expect at keynotes, Tsuga highlighted the company’s new message as an eco-engineering company saying his people were committed to delivering innovative, eco and smart solutions to the market. Sure, he showed off his new 56-in OLED TV; but he stayed focused on folks who buy stuff:

  • “Your TV” that lets you personalize and customize, and deliver a range of service choices
  • “Your Home” energy solutions that let you create, store, save, manage energy
  • “Your Car” solutions for electric vehicles and connected automotive solutions
  • “Your Business’ B2B2C strategy for end-to-end solutions for retailers
  • “Your Journey” avionic, in-flight entertainment, communications solutions
  • “Your Community” informational kiosks, digital signage, business/industry energy solutions and global entertainment support like the Olympics, soccer

Of course, to show that Panasonic really understands what folks want, the company’s North American boss, Joe Taylor, made a cameo appearance with TV personality Lisa Ling. Oh yeah, and he lugged out a 20-in 4K tablet that someone said was compensating for certain inadequacies.

To quiet the snickering crowd, Tsuga proved he was serious about bringing the company back by saying, “If we are to achieve our goals, the imperative to transform and innovate has never been greater.”

What the…
Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer forgot he had turned over his normal keynote slot to Qualcomm’s Paul Taylor and showed up anyway. Good thing, because the mobile chipmaker’s boss worked hard to make an IC (integrated circuit) look cool, hip. Unfortunately, Ballmer didn’t give Qualcomm any more lift than his Win 8 did for boosting PC sales.

Still, Jacobs was fired up to be on the stage – he said so – of course, you would be too if your company sold 11 billion parts over the years. Lots of them go into the 6.4 billion worldwide mobile devices. That number will soon pass the number of folks on our little blue orb. Working hard to make a great first impression, Jacobs noted that 84 percent of the people say they can’t live without their connected device.

To prove how popular their Snapdragon 800 processors are with faster WiFi links, advanced broadband wireless capabilities and speeds up to 150 MB/s, Jacobs brought in the big guns. He had a parade of singers, dancers, drivers, actors, directors, gamers and … Big Bird! Yes, Big Bird and friend helped blur the lines between the real world and virtual world … It worked for us because at that point, we had no clue as to where we were! Before our brain could settle down, Jacobs threw a recorded message from Archbishop Desmond Tutu talking about how mobile will have a “transformative effect” on health in Africa and around the globe.

With all that going on everywhere and sales growing 27 plus percent to $13B, it’s no wonder Shapiro felt he simply had to have Qualcomm’s Jacobs in one of circus’ outer rings. It was “different!”

Wooing, Wowing
If you had just finished your fiscal year with a record $8B profit and soundly beating your lawsuit dancing partner, you’d probably be as upbeat as Samsung’s System LSI business president, Stephen Woo.

While the company was hyping everything from washers, dryers, ultra- ultra-HD TVs, bendable displays, oh cripes everything; Woo and several of the firm’s senior executives were on stage to show Apple what it was going to miss by ignoring their 8-core Exynos 5 Octa processor. Woo said the chip was designed to deliver a level of pure processing power never seen in a mobile device and would finally enable the units to do heavy-duty multitasking. Designed for high-end smartphones and tablets, Woo said the processor would easily handle HD streaming movies without dropping frames and would deliver razor-sharp picture quality.

Focused on selling stuff with his keynote, Woo was wowing the audience with facts about the world’s first mobile chip based on ARM’s big.LITTLE architecture. According to Woo, “It’s an architecture that gives you all the power you want to run intensive apps, but is smart enough to conserve energy when running more basic tasks. Ultimately, we are saving energy and prolonging battery life.”

Woo confirmed the whispers about the company’s next-generation flexible display technology that would let you bend and fold your mobile devices. Proving that Samsung is a whiz at engineering, but not so good at naming products, he said the new technology was called YOUM. It’s super cool and “virtually unbreakable” but there was no pricing or availability mentioned at Woo’s keynote.

With a flawless sequel, Woo again wowed the crowd by introducing former U.S. president Bill Clinton to discuss how technology was advancing the Clinton Global Initiative. He was also at the keynote as ambassador of Samsung Hope for Children effort, which educates children in the developing world and partners with the Bill Clinton Foundation. Proving his ability steal the scene, Clinton joked, “When I became president, the average cellphone weighted five pounds.”

During his 30-minutes of owning the stage, Clinton also pointed out that South Korea is number one in the world for download speeds and the U.S. is 15th. “Our speeds are one fourth of South Koreas,” he said pointing out that technology would help the world move forward. Turning to his other pet subjects, he urged the audience to help address gun control, climate change, and the ways technology can topple governments and boost developing economies and bigotry. “The world has huge challenges,” he said, “and I think technology can help solve them.”

Too Big?
After hearing a number of the keynotes, some attendees said that CES was on its last leg, pointing out that organizations like Google, Apple and a few others weren’t visible at the show.

You saw Google on every screen when folks started a search. They were busy your searches and clicks, fanning the flames of CES excitement.

Apple? Sheess, there were a gazillion great to mediocre to stupid cases for the iPhones, iPads. Every new phone, new tablet, every phablet was touted as the Apple killer.

We’d like to see Shapiro limit the amount of space any given company could rent for the show. It’s impossible to get around an exhibit that takes up 37 football fields to even hope to see a fraction of the 3,000 plus cocky to desperate exhibitors from around the globe.

CES doesn’t need to have a bigger venue, Shapiro needs a bigger whip!

by ·Comments Off on CES Recap 4: World's best copyright panel

While most of the attention at CES goes to the flashy exhibit floor and all the cool stuff that gets introduced every year, there are always a lot of quiet conferences going on in the upstairs meeting rooms. This year, I was pleased to witness one of the best conference panels on copyright policy that you will ever see.

(Coincidentally, today is the one-year anniversary of the day Google and other sites rallied opposition to the overreaching Stop Online Piracy Act. Declan McCullagh, Chief Political Correspondent at CNet, wrote about the anniversary.)

As part of the Innovation Policy Summit, the event was “Beyond SOPA: Creating a Pro-innovation, Pro-artist Copyright Policy”. McCullagh moderated the conversation as superbly as he writes. And what an all-star panel it was:

McCullagh expressed disappointment that the invited corporate rights-holders had declined to participate, which made the discussion one-sided. But it was a great, nuanced examination of the current state of copyright, and how an enlightened system would work better for everyone. Here are a few quotes to give you a taste:

Sohn: I think we have a huge opportunity, in light of what happened (stopping SOPA) a year ago … to push for some affirmative copyright reform. … Make the other side explain why we shouldn’t bring balance back to copyright. … Let’s put it to those that want greater and stronger and longer copyright enforcement and put it to them: Why shouldn’t we have some balance? Why shouldn’t we turn the clock back to the original purpose of copyright? … I think this is the year that we push our own affirmative agenda.

Khanna: (Copyright) is a congressional-created instrument in order to maximize content creation. Which is why we can look at it from a cost-benefit analysis and say, are we actually maximizing content creation? Is there actually an author who says, “Well, I probably am not going to write that book if I only get earnings for my entire life, and then my children get earnings for 50 years. BUT I would write the book if I made money forever and then my children made money for 70 years or 90 years.” Which is the kind of argument you have to make to justify our current copyright system. … Intellectual property is actually different from tangible property, for a variety of reasons. Not the least of which is that the Constitution very clearly says it has to be for a limited period of time, whereas most property you can have forever.

Barlow: There is a big difference between a song and a toaster. Treating songs as though they were no different from toasters is absolutely not the right way to monetize creativity. … It’s simply impractical unless of course you’re a large institution that pirates the creative work of artists and holds that as your property for a century or so while you reap huge profits from it. Copyright at the moment has been serving very well to do that.

I could go on for a very long time about all of the great ideas and optimism for reforming the worst abuses of the current copyright system, but as it turns out, you can experience it for yourself. CES is presenting that session, along with the rest of the Innovation Policy Summit sessions, keynotes, and a lot more, at its CES TV site. Or you can click the embedded video above to watch the panel discussion. For more information on these topics, visit InternetBlueprint.org or the Electronic Freedom Foundation.

by ·Comments Off on CES Recap 3: Verizon is going to be a broadcaster?

Verizon booth at CESIn his Broadcast Engineering Blog, Phil Kurz writes about a part of CES that I missed, but which might be important. The event was one of the keynotes, which I avoid at CES because they rarely include anything new and substantial. Kurz caught something in Verizon Chairman and CEO Lowell McAdam’s afternoon keynote on CES’s opening day. (You can watch that keynote here.)

In his keynote, McAdam unveiled LTE Broadcast, a new way to use wireless phone spectrum to deliver video to viewers. As McAdam explained, “We are also developing a service to broadcast live video over LTE. Now to do that today, we have to dedicate a separate channel to each individual user, which uses up capacity pretty fast as you can imagine. With LTE Broadcast, we’ll be able to stream to everybody over the same channel at the same time.”

Kurz offers the proper perspective to this announcement: “What a revolutionary concept! Transmit, excuse me, that’s stream, ‘to everybody over the same channel at the same time.’ Where have I heard of that before? Oh, that’s right. There’s already nearly 1800 full-power commercial and public television stations that are streaming, excuse me, that’s transmitting, digital video and audio content on their own ‘same channel at the same time’ to everybody.”

There’s a lot more to Kurz’s blog post about the silliness of taking broadcast TV spectrum away and handing it to broadcast video. You really should go read it!

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Mobile TV logoThe Mobile TV TechZone was a part of CES this year. Its name sounds a lot more important than it looked, occupying a small island of modest booths near the back of the Central Hall of the Las Vegas Convention Center. I went there to chuckle at the exhibitors’ plans, but I came away with a deeper respect for mobile TV, even if that’s not saying much.

Let’s start by cataloging the organizations involved in promoting mobile TV:

  • Dyle. That’s the trademark of Mobile Content Venture, which is pushing a subset of channels with “no subscription fee through the end of 2013.”
  • The Open Mobile Video Coalition. That’s “an alliance of broadcasters dedicated to accelerating the development and rollout of mobile television”. The National Association of Broadcasters recently assumed control over the OMVC.
  • The Mobile500 Alliance. That’s a group of TV station owners, “all with the common goal of bringing broadcast television to consumers on their mobile devices.”

I didn’t get too close to the Dyle booth. The folks there were busy demonstrating their latest iPad dongle to some other attendees. It looked like the same old Dyle stuff, and frankly, I don’t care for Dyle. I’m a big fan of the implicit contract between over-the-air broadcasters and their viewers. We own the airwaves, but we allow the OTA broadcasters to use them to entertain and inform us. Subscriptions shouldn’t be part of that relationship.

On the other side of the island was the Mobile500 Alliance, and there I got into a long conversation with John Lawson. At the time, I figured that he was just another suit working the booth, but after our talk, when he gave me his card, I saw that he’s the executive director. Maybe that’s why he was so persuasive.

Lawson agreed with me on a lot of things. He thought that broadcasters didn’t do enough to promote their exisiting digital subchannels. He recognized that in most of the circumstances that mobile TV is available, regular digital TV is also available. And he agreed with the free model for broadcast TV, mostly.

The Mobile500 Alliance system will require a one-time user registration for the tuner to work. Lawson said that will be used for accurate audience measurement, and possibly to choose the best advertisement from a small set of ads pushed to the mobile device. He also allowed that some channels could be subscription-based, but only if they were “premium, cable TV channels,” and that the majority of mobile channels would stay free.

I’m a little uncomfortable with having a lot of the airwaves used for something I’d have to pay to watch, and I don’t like the fact that mobile broadcasting takes away bandwidth that could otherwise be used for regular digital subchannels, but Lawson thought that mobile TV and subchannels could exist together in each market.

“I believe that mobile can save broadcast TV,” Lawson told me. Now there’s a goal we can both agree on. I’m not 100 percent behind the Mobile500 Alliance, but now at least I have a bit of cautious optimism about its work. We’ll see.

Update, sort of: Hiawatha Bray of the Boston Globe experimented a bit with some mobile TV devices from CES. He had four channels available in Boston versus one here in Denver, but I don’t think he thought it was worth it. YouTube-quality video, loss of signal in tunnels, and some occasional above-ground signal dropouts were among his findings. My optimism is getting more cautious all the time. Here, go watch Bray’s video report.

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CES 2013 exhibit hallFirst, let me apologize to anyone who tried to visit here in the past week only to be turned away, often by a 500 database error. According to my web host, FTABlog suddenly began devouring huge chunks of memory for no good reason, and its server had nothing to do with that. After wrestling with the problem for a few days, I moved the blog to a new host, and this time the transition seems to have been successful. Who says I never learn my lesson?

Now I’ve got a lot of CES reporting to catch up on. The first, most interesting bit is that I was proved right; the onsite staff of CNet reportedly voted Dish Network’s Hopper with Sling receiver as 2013 CES Best of Show. Unfortunately for Dish, CBS owns CNet, and CBS (among others) is suing Dish because of the Hopper’s advertising-skipping function. So CBS got wind of the award and squashed it, directing CNet to pick somebody else.

The Verge has a superb story on the whole affair, and it gets bonus points from me for dragging in Alki David, our friend from FilmOn.com. Quite a while ago, fresh from getting smacked by CBS (among others) after his first attempts to stream over-the-air programming, David sued CBS for allowing CNet to report extensively on piracy, including how-to pieces, and for the related site Download.com, which supposedly hosted circumvention software. In that lawsuit, CBS lawyers argued that CNet was independent of CBS’s control. The Verge writes, “Holding CBS responsible forCNET, CBS’ lawyers argued, ‘would create grave uncertainties for writers and publishers — including search engines, web encyclopedias, blogs and most technology journalists — that seek to communicate truthful information about emerging technologies including P2P file-sharing services.'”

I don’t know whether David can use this to show that CBS isn’t quite so hands-off when it comes to CNet, and I think it’s a darned shame that Dish was denied another CES Best of Show (it won in 2009 for the ViP 922 receiver). But I think the Hopper has a chance of beating the courts and becoming a real game-changer. As a Dish shareholder, I sure hope so.