CES 2007 Las Vegas Recap Final

I know, I know, enough of the bragging about being able to go to Las Vegas to see CES 2007. Well, I'm almost done. I just wanted to post a few more things and then I'll shut-up about it.

The show was filled with vendors with merchandise with movie characteres on them. This particular vendor was displaying some Disney related electronics. They had Flash Memory cards that had Disney Movie characters. They also had cute little thumbdrives that had Mickey and the Gang on them.


Vonage was everywhere at CES. They had phone booths around the hall where you could make free calls. They had a pretty big booth and man was it ever busy. Probably didn't hurt having the Vonage Girls hanging around.

Here's a nice picture showing some of the booths. The place is packed lot's of vendors and thousands of people.


More people, more booths. Another good shot to demonstrate how many people were at this years CES.


Televisions were everywhere. The bigger the better. This picture was taken at one of the Panasonic displays.


The picture below shows the range of the Panasonic Plasma 1080p Full HD displays. This was pretty cool to see. The one on the far left is a Panasonic 103" Plasma Display. The thing is HUGE!


Sharp also introduced a Aquos 108" LCD TV. It's one of their Full HD 1080p TVs.

This is a picture of the side view of that 108" Monster. Simply amazing.

In this picture Adam is checking out some of the new gaming peripherals. This particular display had a demonstrationof ambience enhancing peripherals. When you go outside the light shines and the wind blows. The desktop mimics this with some lights and fans. Interesting ideas, still I wonder how practical it will be in use. I'd be willing to test it though. ;)


Intel had a huge booth at CES. They had these cool race cars hooked up to a simulator were you could race against other people. Demonstrating the power of their new line of processors. CTI uses all Intel Processors and motherboards in our custom built computers.

CES is full of vendors of accesories for everything. This particular vendor had a ton of accesories for the Nintendo line of products.

HD DVD was everywhere. Toshiba was showing of an HD-DVD player. It was pretty amazing. They had a regular DVD playing next to an HD-DVD. The difference was stunning. I was blown away at the clarity of the images of the HD-DVD.

Sony had a huge presence at CES 2007. Not only were they promoting their Playstation3 gaming console, but they were also promoting the Blue-ray High Definition Discs. It's still anybodys guess as to which format will be widely adopted. My bet is on HD DVD for now.

This picture was taken at Toshiba's booth.

This is a picture of the entrance to CES. You can also see the CES store.

The Sands Expo and Convention Center/ The Venetian hosted the Innovations Plus where the hottest new technologies were displayed. This was the venue we were excited to experience. We witnessed some pretty cool technologies while at the Sands. We also saw some crazy toys, one such toy was the Dragonfly. It actually flew through the air. Check out this video I found on YouTube Click Here. It's a remote control Dragonfly that really flys. Here's some photos of the Dragonfly in action. I believe the company was WowWee that produced this as well as several robots.

As we were leaving CES for the day our last day we walked past Patrick Norton and Robert Heron shooting an episode of DL.TV. For those of you that don't know they used to be on the TechTV network. Now they have several shows on Ziff/Davis owned companies. We ended up stopping and watching this for awhile. Check out the episode we were watching at this Link. Ironically enough they were talking about the iPhone that had been announced at MacWorld.

CES 2007 was an experience I'll never forget. The whole trip was one of the most amazing things I've ever been involved with. Thanks to Billy Williams and Adam Vocks for putting this fantastic trip together for us.

CES 2007 Las Vegas Recap 3

OK! Mr. Procrastination is back and ready to show you all some of the cool stuff that we saw while at the 2007 CES.


Above is a picture of Adam checking some of the goodies at the Thermaltake Booth. We use some of there products. Mostly replacement fans but they have some really cool cases and accessories as well. Check out the fan in this case "which shows “THERMALTAKE” logo and the ambient temperature". Tim is the one checking it out in the following picture.

The Thermaltake folks had a lot of cool cases. You can check at more Here. One of the cooler ones had a cradle built into it were you put your iPod Video. It's the last picture on This Page.

We also spent some time checking out Seagate's Booth. CTI uses Seagate hard drives in our custom built computers. One of the coolest drives that they were showing off was the Lyrion series of hard drives(Link is to a PDF). They are 1.8 inches and can hold 60GB. Here's a picture that Billy took of the drive they had on display.

Seagate makes some seriously small drives. These things were amazing to see. Most of these drives end up inside media players and ultra mobile computer devices. Here's a picture that was taken of another one of Seagates lines of tiny hard drives.

The Hewlett-Packard Booth was one of the surprise booths for me. I didn't really expect to get that excited about their booth. Don't get me wrong, I love their printers, but I really didn't expect some of the cool stuff they were displaying. They had a cool touch panel that could control your home. Didn't seem very practical from a wall mount. It looked like it was an add on for the Windows Media Center. Now being able to control lights, heat, air or anything else from my couch now that's cool. Here's a picture of Adam checking it all out.

Some of the excitement at HP's booth was the buzz surrounding their new MediaSmart Server. We can't wait to get a copy of the Microsoft Windows Home Server . There's several of us at the office that could really use something like this.

There's still plenty more that I haven't talked about yet. I'll post some more about CTI's trip to CES 2007 including more pictures.

CES 2007 Las Vegas Recap 2

Added some pictures to the other CES Recap, check it out if you've already looked at it. Has some new pictures that Billy Williams took.

After leaving the Bill Gates Key Note, we headed over to Caesar's Palace. We were getting treated to a dinner at The Cheesecake Factory inside Caesar's. Nice restaurant, good food. Lucky for us we had to wait for a table. While we were waiting for a table the famous Fall of Atlantis Fountain show started. This was really cool and a good taste of what types of bizarre things you can see in Las Vegas. The evening is still not complete. Adam had told us that we get a personal tour of the Coliseum. The tour was to be given to us by Rich Stout the Director of Video for the Coliseum's main attraction Celine Dion. The coolest part is this was right after the show so the screen was still on. The screen was absolutely breathtaking. The screen is considered the Biggest Indoor LED Screen in North America. Below is a picture of me on the stage in front of it. Luckily I had asked Billy to take a picture of me in front of the screen. None of my pictures of the Coliseum's Grandness came through.

Rich was a very nice easy going guy. He took us on a complete tour of the facilities. He seemed very proud and excited of what he does. We were stunned at the scope of the operation. We came to Las Vegas to see cool Tehcnology. This lived up to that, if you get a chance to see the show DO IT. I can't wait to go back to Las Vegas. This I have to see in action especially after seeing the behind the scenes stuff.

Keep checking back as I try and post some more of the things we did in Las Vegas.

CES 2007 Las Vegas Recap (Edit)

What can I say, I Love my Job! Last Sunday a few of us from the shop got up early and hopped a plane to Las Vegas. We were going to attend CES 2007 the biggest consumer electronics show on the planet. Those of you that listen to the radio show know that I called into the radio show on Tuesday and we did a special broadcast with me in Las Vegas.





We got back late Wednesday night. Since getting back I'm still trying to catch up on my sleep. The hardest part has been getting a grasp on all the cool things we saw while there and we saw a lot. The first day was a whirlwind.



We arrived in Las Vegas the first day and headed to our home for the next three days. We arrived at Sams Town and we greeted by a very casual atmosphere. The staff made us fill right at home. After getting settled in and playing some of the machines we headed over to the Venetian Hotel and Casino.

Once there we got into the monster lines to get vouchers for that evenings Key Note Address from Bill Gates. The transcript and video can be seen here: Link. This was quite the show with awesome sound, video and live performers. After we received our vouchers we has some time to burn before the address would start. The Venetian is a very beautiful place. The ceilings in the lobby were just magnificent. Check out my mobile blog, there are some pictures of the ceilings on there. There are also a some other shots of the different attractions at the Venetian. The Gondola's looked really cool.

After roaming around for a while we finally got back in line for the key note. The lines were crazy. There was a real buzz in the room. We were excited to see the direction that Microsoft is taking. They are doing what they do best which is integration and ease of use. They are taking the Microsoft Live platform further with full integration within Microsoft Vista. They are also providing the ability for PC Gamers to interact with the XBOX 360 Gamers.

This is a giant step towards Microsoft owning online gaming. I prefer PC gaming but some of my friends prefer the console. Before we could not play the same games together. Now we will be able to play the same games online together and on a platform we are each more comfortable with. Keep an eye on the Microsoft Live network there are some cool things going on there.

Mr. Gates and his co-presenters also demonstrated some of the cool features in the new Vista Operating System. The Ultimate versions additional features include loads of exclusive content. One of the things that will be very cool for sports fans is the "Sports Lounge". The Sports Lounge allows you to stream HD video and have current scores running across the top of the screen. Also, they had a Fantasy Sports feature so you can keep an eye on those players that are on your teams in real time. They also demonstrated some of the cool photo editing features. One of the demos was two pictures each had the same to subjects. One of the subjects had his eyes closed in one. So they cut out that section and dropped in the picture with subject number two looked better. Looked seamless, can't wait to play with that feature.

They also talked briefly about the Microsoft Home Server. This platform is going to be the centralized management system for our home networks. Allowing for easier backups and built in redundancy. The system is meant to be easy to use so you won't have to be a server expert to use it. We'll be keeping an eye on this one. You can guarantee we be talking about this one a lot as the release gets closer.

There's also a lot of buzz surrounding the new IPTV initiative from Microsoft. And it seems to be worthy of the buzz. They are talking of using the XBOX 360 for some of the IPTV services. The interface looked very nice and the features were cool. It seemed very similar to the Windows Media Center interface. As I get time I'll post some more information about IPTV.

Typically I keep my posts short and sweet. Obviously, this is not the case on this one. And if my fingers weren't cramping up I'd be posting more. The above is just the beginning of our first day of the trip to CES 2007. I'll be trying to post more stories along with some more pictures.

Edit: All the pictures in this blog post were provided by Billy Williams as most of the ones from my disposable camera did not come out.

The Answer is...

A caller to the show had recently downloaded and installed Netscape 8x. He previously used 7x. The new version does not come with a built-in email client. I searched on the Netscape web site and could not find much information. I did find a few links to sites not affiliated with Netscape that did say that it is a Browser only in the 8x version. Link1 Link2 Link 3

Netscape is based off of Firefox. Given this fact I can't see any reason to download and install Netscape. From what I can tell it is more trouble than it's worth. First I don't want to come off as a Netscape hater or (god forbid) a Firefox Fanboy. I just think that there is no reason to download and install a browser that comes bundled with all of this extra stuff (Netscape ISP, McAfee, Rhapsody, Real Arcade and WeatherBug listed at the bottom of this page Link) I'm also not a big fan of anything that Real Player does. And I choose not use WeatherBug. Don't get me wrong they give you a choice. My choice is not to even mess with it.

Using FireFox and Thunderbird would be a great place to start in your search for a Netscape replacement. If you had a previous installation of Netscape, Thunderbird will import your contacts. Firefox can even import your Bookmarks. And without all the extra stuff.

Hope this clears things up a little bit.