Monday, January 21, 2008

My CES

Behold the Consumer Electronics Show, an almost legendary annual occurrence which draws well over a hundred thousand people to Las Vegas. Being a gaming analyst the acronym CES would be more aptly defined as the Computer Entertainment Show, at least that’s what I was looking for.

My CES experience started before I even left the ground of San Francisco International Airport. I was flying Richard Branson’s new airline Virgin America, and Virgin has recognized that consumer electronics have become an important element in attracting airline customers. Their new entertainment, information, and communication system, which they call Red, allows passengers to watch, play, surf, buy, and message - all from the comfort of their airline seat.  It is way more than a novelty and kept me enchanted for the majority of the flight. The system uses a traditional armrest control, with a removable “remote”. However this is more than just a remote, on the flipside is a full function video game controller as well as a decent sized QWERTY keyboard. (see figures 1 and 2). Airline passengers are able to text message / chat and play games with and against passengers in other seats.

Figures 1 and 2: Virgin"s Red In-Flight Entertainment, Communication, Information, Shopping and Food/Drink ordering system.  (Source: JPR)

My first impression of the actual show was “Uh - oh, two days will not be enough time to do what I want to do”. Having attended big game industry shows such as E3 and graphics shows like Siggraph, I thought this couldn’t be much different. Boy was I wrong. My goal was to walk the ENTIRE show, spending quality time at any booth or display that I encountered and attracted my interest. This was simply impossible and when I told people what I wanted to do in the time frame that I had, they gave me the same look that tourists get in Paris when they announce that they planning to go through the Louvre Museum in a day or two.

There was an air of happiness in the environment, attendees seemed genuinely excited and optimistic about their products and the prospect of successful business in 2008, shrugging off predictions of doom and gloom yet letting the economists sometimes dire warnings sharpen their business acumen and perhaps temper unnecessary spending by their companies.

On the gaming front CES had almost no representative by the software companies. CES was the ruled on the gaming front by hardware and peripherals and it was a refreshing and educational change from the normal troupe of attendees.

There was a huge presence of companies selling various designs of “gaming furniture”. (see figures 3-5) On the low end this represented beanbag simple floor chairs made for pulling up in front of the television for use with the various gaming consoles. In the mid priced area there were full size chairs in various designs ranging from rockers to office like chairs. Many incorporated speaker and rumblers - devices built into the furniture that shake and simulate the rumble of deep bass induced sensations such as a cars powerful engine. Repose, Boomchair, Pyramint, and ACE Bayou were among the companies displaying their wares. Also at the show was Buttkicker Corp - they make a rumbler made to attach to your existing office chair and other types of furniture.

Figures 3-5: Competitive Comfort: Gaming and Media Furniture were well represented at CES (Source: JPR)

In the high end for gamers there were companies selling entire frames (such as HotSeat - see figure 6) with built in chair to simulate a cockpit environment and allow mounting of steering wheels, flight sticks, and various other simulation paraphernalia. As well as full packages that include everything for driving fans.

Figures 6-7: Hotseat simulator frame, seat, and mounting system and Virtual GT Driving Sim Cockpit (Source: JPR)

At the extreme high end, some companies had cockpit systems that included hydraulic actuators (DBox - Figure 8) to create motion and in one case a cockpit specifically designed for flight sims which could tilt the monitors and simulate tilt when the aircraft is banked. (Dreamflyer - Figure 9). DBox representatives claim their hydraulic actuators have a 5000 hour lifespan which is fairly robust.

Figures 8 - 9 It doesn’t get much better than this: Hydraulic Actuators and Tilting Cockpits (Source: JPR)

The next thing I noticed at CES was the amazing number of companies “hopping on the Wii bandwagon”. There were at least 15 companies displaying Wii accessories and customization. As soon as I saw the Wii Zapper last year (their gun controller) I predicted someone would soon be making more realistic looking Wii controller holders and this turned out to be correct. A few companies actually departed from the innocent white coloring and had more realistic looking black ones but the most impressive display of Wii accessories came from CTA Corporation. Not only do they have a full line of gun Wii remote holders (Figure 10), they have Wii steering wheels, airplane yokes, fishing rods, ping pong paddles, baseball bat, pool stick, tennis racket, golf club, boxing gloves, cooking items and swords and shields. All these accessories actually hold the Nintendo Wii controllers. Additionally they have Wii cooling stands, grips and myriad other accessories. Not a Nintendo exclusive accessory company CTA has items for PS3, PSP, PC and IPod. They have a battery and charger division, digital photo frames, and well – too much stuff to list. Check them out they have a great portfolio of products.

Figure 10: Wii Mote Guns from CTA (Source: JPR)

My personal favorite at the show, which is actually financially attainable for most PC gamers (versus $10,000 cockpits), were the AIB water cooling kits from Cool-It systems. These things look awesome and I look forward to tesing it out. Though Cool-It makes various styles of water coolers for both AMD and Nvidia cards, the key elements are the fact that they can be ordered factory sealed which takes a lot of the fear out of converting your system. Many models cool the entire card (figure 11), not just the GPU. Witnessing the evil that heat does to gaming performance on a daily basis, I really think water cooling is the way to go, unless your air cooling is perfectly planned out which is very difficult.

Figure 11: Cool-It Full Card Cooling - notice the tubes going all over the place (Source: JPR)

Geoff Lyon, CEO of Cool-It (Figure 12) was there to take me though their products which consisted primarily of card coolers but his current pride and joy is his sever rack automated cooling systems which he is pictured with. The rack system detects hotspots and applies increased airflow to specific areas versus the entire rack or room, saving on energy expense.

Figure 12: Geoff Lyon and the automated rack cooling system.

So CES will definitely be a regular pilgrimage for me now that I know about the large representation for the gaming industry. This side (chairs, sim pods, coolers, speakers, etc) of the products line is not well represented at typical gaming conventions yet are multi billion dollar businesses. Next year I will plan on at least three – four days.

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Friday, January 18, 2008

MacWorld — love it or love it

Every danged time I got to MacWorld I kill myself trying to get to the keynote. Okay, so I maybe I don’t give myself enough time. But it seems to be that getting on the 7:50 a.m. ferry for a 9:30 keynote, should be enough time. It’s only a 20 minute walk to the convention center.

Unfortunately, the MacWorld organizers have a whimsical sense of humor. They move the press registration every year and then they plant doofusses at key points to send you to the wrong place. Go to the West Hall, all press go to the West Hall said the doofus chorus. And every danged time, I fall for it. I ran around from the North Hall to the West Hall and finally to the South Hall where I belonged (I know this means nothing to people who aren’t familiar with San Francisco, but just substitute your own most hideous trade show experience, multiply it by at least 3 years and you’ll get the idea.) By the time I got my butt in a seat in the auditorium, I was hating life, hating my inability to schedule appropriately for unexpected surprises (well, hello, they were unexpected, right?), hating all the hundreds of people sitting in front of me, and most of all hating Steve Jobs. Dammit, why do I have to run around dancing to Apple’s tune when they don’t give a good gol durned dingity’poop about me.

You’ll excuse my French.

And then the keynote started, Steve Jobs took the stage exuding aging boomer cool, and soon I found myself texting my husband — I want an iPhone, now dammit, now!

Apple finally announced a deal, long in the negotiating, to rent moves via iTunes and smugly told the crowd he’d won over all the major studios.  Apple reloaded the Apple TV box so that now rented iTunes can play on TVs connected to the Apple TV, and Apple announced the new Air laptop. It’s a beautiful, thin, 3 lb laptop with a full size screen, full size keyboard, and remarkable 5 hours battery life.  I want it. It’s beautiful. It’s Apple. It costs $1799 for the 80 GB hard drive version. It costs, ummm, $3,098 for the 64 GB solid state drive version. The battery is non-replaceable. Who cares? I want it.

Now, for my money, here was the most important part of the show. Steve Jobs told us that we could have an optical drive for this nifty little Air. No big deal, it’s a simple matter of adding an external USB drive. Blu-Ray? HD-DVD? Sure, fine, knock yourself out but the future is the network. You’ll get whatever you want from the Apple network, from iTunes. Download what you want when you want it.

The future is also Adobe Air, Google, and the whole server-centric lot of them, said Jobs. If you’re old enough, and much of the Steve Jobs fan club is, you’ll remember that this was much the same message of the NeXT computer that Steve Jobs tried to sell after he was booted out of Apple for reasons that are way too complicated, arcane, and boring to go into here. Jobs wanted to sell a client computer that was as expensive as a regular computer. It didn’t have a floppy drive, it didn’t have a disc drive, it got everything it needed from the network. It made us really nervous.

The AIR is NeXT again and this time there is a whole infrastructure, called the Internet, to support it and it is beautiful. It just goes to show that if you live long enough all the stuff you thought was going to happen tomorrow really will happen — the day after tomorrow.

So, what’s with all those glum faces on the elevator? It wasn’t enough. You can ask Scott McNealy of Sun and you can ask Larry Ellison of Oracle and you can ask Eric Schmidt of Google, and they will tell you that the network is god but no one really understands the gospel. Steve Jobs has just wandered out into the wilderness.

The early word is that the investment community and others are disappointed with the Apple announcements. Everyone saw movie rentals coming. The Apple TV is an orphan no one loves. And the AIR? Why it’s wonderful, but it’s no iPod, and it’s no iPhone. Steve, what have you done for us lately?

In the end, the prophets in the wilderness will be proved right. They are working behind the scenes to redefine our world, but we won’t really notice just as long as we can watch Banacek any time we please. We won’t really notice that it’s not NBC who’s bringing us our entertainment, it’s Apple, or Microsoft, or Amazon. 

The revolution will come but you’ll miss it because you’ll be watching TV.

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Friday, October 26, 2007

Oh god, please don’t let us screw it up

That’s the prayer of the Internet dependent as we all enjoy another growth period.

And then comes the news that Microsoft has outbid all comers for the “privilege” of investing $240 million bucks in Facebook, the latest thing in social networking ... probably. Microsoft’s investment legitimizes a valuation of $15 billion for Facebook. I know I’m not the first to make this observation but that’s more than the valuation of many companies that actually design and build products, popular products! There are news stories all over the place about this—the AP story gets right to the heart of it.

Much is being made of Rupert Murdoch’s “brilliance” in paying a measley $580 million for MySpace for News Corp. but in the long run, Microsoft could well have the better deal. MySpace, dominated by teen screamers, pre-teens, and stalkers is slowing down and losing relevance for adult users. Facebook has a more grownup appeal and is growing faster than it’s more adolescent rival. In addition Facebook has added attractive development tools for advertisers and partners.

But the most important advantage Microsoft may have is that they didn’t actually buy Facebook (and founder Mark Zuckerberg isn’t selling for the moment either). Microsoft has made a deal to sell advertising for the site and share the proceeds and no doubt the new partners have plenty of plans for new revenue sharing opportunities but an outright buy might never be in the cards. (Here we are firmly in what-do-I-know territory.)

Shawnee sniffed that all this smelled like irrational exhuberance to her and she’s right, if a tad glib. The key to social networking is very likely to turn out to be not about individual sites like MySpace, Facebook, Friendster (remember them?), LinkedIn, or any other of growing list of affinity sites. Rather, it’s the enhanced ability of people to communicate and network online.  After all, how is a site like Facebook all that different from a site like ExtremeTech, or Hot Topic? Sites come and go, becoming popular and then fading as users wander off to play with a new toy. When a site is hot, then by all means buy in, get leverage, buy advertising, make strategic deals but when it fades do you want to be the guy holding the bag with a $580 million or $15 billion price tag? I think not.

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Monday, October 15, 2007

Web 2.0 or deja vu all over again?

I was at dinner with some very interesting and urbane executive types in Boston recently. The subject of what’s next/what’s the latest trend/where’s the money came up as it inevitably does. We were talking about Web 2.0 and how interesting it all was that MySpace had become so last 20 minutes ago in the space of uh, 30 minutes. Now it’s all about Facebook said one of my dinner partners.

Really? Why in the world should Facebook prevail where Friendster and MySpace have failed? Doesn’t all this Web 2.0 stuff have the stench of doom wafting all around it? It’s nice to think of building communities around a group of friends, but a lot of work goes into personal sites for questionable gain and building networks of strangers for the sake of adding huge numbers of names seems a pointless exercise (There’s an interesting story in Wired News on this subject by the way: http://blog.wired.com/business/2007/10/getting-anti—s.html.). Think about it, are the people you know on LinkedIn more valuable because they have more links? A look through your lists will no doubt reveal that some of the most important people you know don’t have all that many links—they’re too busy.

What we have also discovered the very hard way is the dark side of community. We probably all have some kid friends or relatives who have utterly appalling MySpace sites where they’ve revealed information no one wants to know, have indulged in public spats, and posted party pics that make Paris Hilton and Lindsey Lohan look like sober citizens. And there are just about as many ugly stories about bullying and stalking as there are stories in the Naked City.

So, there will definitely be new sites coming along that are cooler than the last ones and there’ll be new twists on the community model to make it appeal to specific niches but none of this is all that new. From the day there was an Internet there were grumpy math professors sending flames that criticized each other for dicey science or poor word choices. There were public bulletin boards where trolls roamed free spewing hatred and vitriol because they had nothing better to do. The mediums may have changed but humans seem to stay pretty much the same.

This is not to say there’s no point in innovating or building on the interesting applications that are appearing. Each new iteration of an idea is generally better. For example, it’s much better to interact with each other by trading picture, videos, and music. Many real friendships have formed thanks to better and more varied ways to communicate. And I have reconnected with lost friends via LinkedIn. That one thing alone helps justify the pointless adding of connections and friends.

I can’t wait to see what comes next but I’m not quite ready to bet on what’s happening now.

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Wednesday, October 10, 2007

The future of CAD

The computer industry may seem to change at the speed of light but that’s not true of the CAD industry. After back to back meetings with Autodesk and Dassault I am struck once again by the slow pace of change. I’ve decided to see this in a positive light. After all, it’s really just hard on those of us who are making predictions and getting it wrong. In many cases, say designing bridges or artificial hearts, it’s better to take predictable paths and get it right.

Here’s another positive view. The democratization of CAD might be slow in coming and the delay has granted breathing room to companies selling more expensive products like Dassault, UGS, and PTC.

Still, democratization is going to come and those companies who are not creating the groundwork for it will live to see newer, younger companies come along and take the prize. After all it was Solid Works and Solid Edge, hot new programs that challenged the incumbents with features and attractive pricing.

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