CES: Confessions Of A Bluetooth Skeptic

I spent the end of last week at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. That show keeps getting bigger and bigger. I heard one estimate that there were 160,000 people in town for the event but I wouldn't be surprised if it was bigger than that. Then again, it may have just seemed more crowded because the rain (and at one point, unbelievably, snow) drove everyone inside, further congesting the hall floors.

One interesting thing that I have noticed about CES is that it is increasingly about the people, not just the technology. There are a bunch of people I know who use CES as an opportunity to catch up with folks they haven't seen the rest of the year. I am certainly one such person. There are friends I see at CES who I scarcely have the opportunity to catch up with otherwise. As a result, the crowds keep growing. I was hanging out with a group of Venture Capitalists from August and Gabriel Venture Partners on Wednesday of last week and of the 10 people in the room, 9 of us were on our way to CES later in the week. We might as well charter giant cargo planes and move all of Sand Hill Road to Las Vegas for the convention. We must have bumped into a dozen or so other VCs while wandering the halls of the convention and the Belagio.

To a certain extent I don't actually think there is that much new to be learned from wandering the halls of CES. You certainly have the opportunity to see some amazing TVs (like Samsung's 102 inch plasma -- sell your house and you can buy this TV, but then where will you put it?) and speakers (although high end audio had been banished to another location this year, so it was not nearly as well trafficked as past years I'm sure) and the likes. But the truth is, there aren't that many big announcements coming out of CES. Essentially everything you see at CES you have read about before on Gizmodo or Engadget. The truth is, the only real excitement around technology announcements these days comes out of MacWorld, not CES. Which is why Steve Jobs doesn't participate in CES, despite running the most innovative consumer electronics company of today. He is able to drive people to his very own show and get all the buzz for himself, for Apple and for those companies supporting Apple. You've got to hand it to Jobs -- he is an amazing marketer (maybe it will even translate into a little bit of market share this time around -- he certainly owns the MP3 player market and I am sure the Shuffle will only further strengthen that position).