This year, all Las Vegas was abuzz with the expectations of attendance to CES – and how they were not met. From cab drivers to convention exhibitors, everyone was touting the scale of the downturn.
To us, the convention presented a more mixed picture. As often is the case in downturns, in an overall downbeat environment, a few interesting developments could be observed:
1) The Slingbox by Slingmedia: offering some 14 Mil. subscribers of its parent company, a midsize cable operator in the US, the opportunity to access Web TV content through their cable content.
2) The advent of HD to TV and other screens, including a number of interesting personal camera devices.
3) The increasing dissemination of “cloud” (now there’s a buzzword) logic to the consumer world: first through “thin client” notebooks that are not much more than windows to web services, and second through a push towards homes servers, ranging from Windows solutions to proprietary home hifi systems. Its too early to name this a significant consumer trend, but slowly we are seeing the first applications for the “internet of things”, “cloud computing”, and “semantic web”.
Recession is the best time for entrepreneurs, Ken Morse (and others) says. Now is the time to see and grasp the potential of these new technologies as they slowly approach end consumer relevance.
Tags: Analysis, cable, conference, Consumer, consumer appliances, Digital Revolution, Entrepreneurs, entrepreneurship, home servers, living room, network, set top boxes, slingbox, TV, TV Screens, video, Web, Web 3.0, Web TV
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