I’ve just returned from the Consumer Electronics Show, which ran from January 8-11 in Las Vegas. This was my first time attending the largest trade show in America (2700 exhibitors, 150,000 attendees) and it was quite an experience. Over the next few days, I’ll post entries about some of the more interesting products and companies I saw.

I was travelling with some colleagues, and we had four days to cover the exhibition – just as well, since it covers ten large convention halls, and conference space in several nearby hotels.

The scale of CES is hard to grasp – by lunchtime on the first day, we had cleared half of one hall and felt we were doing well – until we realised we had only cleared half of one corner of one hall!

It was time for a more aggressive approach. By planning ahead, and stepping up the pace substantially, we managed to cover about 90% of the exhibits during the first three days! This left Thursday morning for some final follow-up visits to stands, and we were all done by lunchtime, leaving the afternoon for some R&R.

The conference was well organised, with courtesy coaches between the different venues, free Internet access available in the halls (supplied by DivX), and even free international phone calls courtesy of Vonage, who had installed VoIP kiosks in the lobbies. Complimentary magazines from just about every consumer and electronics publisher you’ve ever heard of were also available outside the conference entrance, along with the six show guides and product directories.

While most of the halls were in the gargantuan Las Vegas Convention Center, one hall was in the Sands Expo Centre, about a mile away. (The Adult Entertainment Expo was taking place in an adjacent hall during the week, which led to an interesting mix of attendees in the areas outside the hall.)

General Trends

Two products were in evidence just about everywhere this year – large high-definition LCD televisions, and digital photo frames. Even manufacturers who didn’t sell photo frames were using them to display information sheets for their actual products.

There was a wide and varied selection of Windows Media Centre PC cases from assorted vendors – perhaps the most impressive (if not the most practical) were the Diamond Media Centre range from Moneual, which featured a jewel-encrusted fascia panel and control knobs at prices ranging from $30,000 to $1,000,000, they are for elite purchasers only.

While most of the larger vendors had extravagant stands with large floor areas, there were plenty of smaller stands there as well. The entry level cost for a stand is in the region of $6000-$8000 depending on location (about 2 metres x 3 metres) which is within reach for even small startups.

There were surprisingly few freebies on offer. Other than the ubiquitous carrier bags, and a few trinkets like LCD pocket torches, watch batteries, and T-shirts, pickings were slim.

Apple steal some thunder

One of the biggest announcements didn’t even happen at the show. Apple were running MacWorld in San Francisco during the same week, and launched their new and long-awaited iPhone, though it won’t be available until June. While the industry was impressed with the product, there was plenty of scepticism about Apple’s ability to break into the highly competitive cellphone market, especially with a product that costs $600! Time will tell…

The US magazine Consumer Reports (similar to Which? magazine in the UK) has been in the technology news recently. As part of a comprehensive test of antivirus software packages, they commissioned a consulting company to create 5,500 new viruses to see how well market leading programs would cope.

The antivirus industry, led by McAfee, was immediately up in arms when they heard about it. Imagine the risk to society of these viruses escaping into the wild! What blatant disregard for consumer safety! And other similar scaremongering…

It only takes a little scratching below the surface to show that their concerns are, at best, misguided. The viruses created for Consumer Reports were simple modifications of existing viruses, altered so that their signature was no longer identifiable. The viruses were kept in a secure environment, and all copies were removed after testing – only a single CD remains, which is kept in a locked and secure cabinet on site.

Surprise, surprise – McAffee’s package didn’t do particularly well in the test; it relies heavily on a signature database to identify new threats. When viruses were still something of a novelty, this approach worked well – it often took weeks before a new virus gained notoriety, giving McAffee plenty of time to respond.

By now however, it is so easy for would-be virus writers to develop new viruses, and variants on existing viruses, that a pure signature-based approach is no longer sufficient. A more pro-active approach is needed, that can identify virus-like behaviour and quarantine or block the affected program. Of course, there will be legitimate tools which end up looking like a virus – commercial tools can be recognised and permitted explicitly, while a mechanism can be included to allow users to grant access to other programs on an as-needed basis.

Maybe the industry should use two distinct terms – “Virus removal”, for packages that can remove existing viruses which are already known to the program, and “Antivirus” for packages that can detect new virus strains and prevent infection in the first place. (Somehow, though, I can’t imagine vendors thinking this is a good idea.)

Whenever Which? reviews product categories that I know well, I find myself disagreeing with their conclusions; this doesn’t give me much confidence in their reviews of other products that I’m not familiar with. People I trust have made similar comments about Consumer Reports. In this case, however, they’re on the side of right. More power to them…

(In case you’re wondering, the top rated antivirus packages were from BitDefender and ZoneLabs. The full report is only available to subscribers.)

Steve pointed me towards an interesting demo video showing off the capabilities of the HAL 2000 home automation system. It lets you control your home using speech commands from any room – quite impressive.

The author has an extensive discussion of the technology involved (speakers, distribution amps, microphones, etc.) along with some comments on the limitations of the system.

Startrek’s onboard computer suddenly doesn’t seem quite so far away…

(If that title doesn’t quicken your pulse, nothing will…!)

Following on from my mention last November of the guy who was experimenting with shaping traffic flow by varying the speed of his car on slow moving highways, Michael pointed me towards this interactive traffic simulator.

I don’t know if it’s accurate, but it’s good fun to play with…

Longtime readers (assuming there are any!) may recall a story last May about a new type of flatpanel CRT using nanotubes. The demo back then was impressive from a technology viewpoint, if not something you might actually want to sit down and watch.

Well, time has marched on and these products are almost ready for market. They are now known as Surface-conduction Electron-emitter Displays; somehow, I think SEDs will turn out to be the more popular term.

At CES, Toshiba unveiled some 37″ HDTV prototypes with a contrast ratio of 100,000:1 (yes, that’s quite good!). They hope to have 55″ production models towards the end of the year. Response time is on the order of 1 ms. Another description can be found here.

And here’s a particularly enthusiastic first-hand review from one of the CES attendees, complete with photo:

Roll on Autumn…

I hadn’t been paying much attention to this AJAX thing, until I saw an article about it in Dr Dobbs Journal (Feb 2006).

AJAX is Asynchronous Javascript And XML, essentially a collective name for a group of technologies that together allow web pages to asynchronously interact with a remote server without losing the page context. This leads to the ability to design significantly more interactive interfaces.

The best example I’ve seen is the one cited in the Dr Dobbs article: Google Suggests. As you type in search keywords, a realtime display appears below showing you suggested matches for what you’re typing. All the words retrieved are fetched from Google’s server in realtime as you type, without you even noticing. Very cool…

From the Useless But Cool dept: Andrew Carol (no relation) has built a Lego Difference Engine in the fashion of Charles Babbage’s original.

Due to structural limitations of Lego (plastic bricks and gears can’t handle the same stresses as metal), it’s a cut down version but still functional. Very cool.

And on the subject of Lego, if you’ve been playing with Lego Mindstorms (Lego’s robotic kits), Lego have just announced Mindstorms NXT, the next generation – with a 32-bit RISC processor and a number of other significant improvements. My second childhood should be due any day now, and I’m looking forward to playing with this…

Time for yet another mapping link:

SketchUp is a rather cool plug-in for Google Earth that allows you to add real 3D buildings to the Google Earth city view.

Check it out…

Last November, New Scientist reported an interesting bit of new technology which I’ve just come across.

Traditionally, digital cameras have to make a trade-off between aperture size and depth of field – the more light you let in (and the better the peformance in low light), the more prone the image is to blurring.

Now researchers have come up with a way to post-process focus after image capture, by inserting a sheet of 90,000 lenses, each 125 micrometres across, between the main lens and the image sensor. The angle of each light ray hitting the sensor is recorded, as well as the intensity. This allows clever software to refocus the image afterwards where necessary.

Fasncinating concept, and no doubt we’ll see some variant of it turning up in commercial products in the future.

CNTs are Carbon Nanotubes, a new technology that allows flatpanel screens to be constructed from what is essentially an array of thousands of tiny CRTs, each CRT representing a pixel or so.

A friend (thanks Mike) pointed me towards this company which has been experimenting in the area. Click on Demonstrations on the left to see a nifty little animated demo of their current prototype (and be sure to read the caveats as well as to why the quality isn’t wonderful yet).

Why is this stuff of interest? Primarily because the potential exists to make absolutely massive screens using this technology. Plasma and LCD screens are limited in size, because they rely on a single sheet of semiconductors to make the whole screen – the technology to seamlessly stitch together multiple panels to make a bigger screen doesn’t exist.

For those screen types, cost increases rapidly as the size gets larger, because it becomes more difficult to get screens with an acceptably high number of working pixels.

With CNTs, this is no longer an issue – you simply manufacture buckets of tiny screens (say 4″ x 5″) and stitch them together to make as big a display as you like. Tiny screens means much higher yield which in turn translates to lower prices. Plus, as a bonus, you get all the benefits of a normal CRT (bright picture, fast refresh, etc.) without the drawbacks of massive weight and depth.

Probably another year or two to go before these hit your local electronics superstore, but it can only be a matter of time.

(On the other hand, whatever happened to bubble memory?)

Eddy