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Thursday, January 15, 2009

In the Year 2025–Who Knows What Tomorrow Brings in Tech?

While attending the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last week, BoomTown moderated what turned out to be a fascinating panel discourse of what was to come in the tech sector.

No, it was not akin to a gathering of Trekkies.

The SuperSession panel, titled: “What Will They Think of Next? Consumer Technology in 2025,” was less Spock than a logical analysis of where gadgetry is headed by looking at both the past and the present.

Here’s a video with the panelists giving their predictions.

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Tuesday, January 13, 2009

BoomTown’s Annual Waltgelina Walk at CES: Walt and Katie on the (Less Crowded) Floor

As BoomTown did last year, I took to the much-less-crowded floor of the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last week with tech review kingpin Walt Mossberg and Mossberg Solution columnist Katherine Boehret to get their take on the scene.

Of interest to Walt was the Palm Pre launch and the Yahoo Connected TV initiative. For Katie, it was a $2,000 cellphone.

Here’s the video of their ruminations.

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Monday, January 12, 2009

Kara Talks to Roger McNamee About the Palm Pre

BoomTown did a video interview with Palm’s sugar daddy investor Roger McNamee at the Consumer Electronics Show last week, after the debut of its Pre smartphone.

Via Elevation Partners, McNamee has invested a total of $425 million in Palm, aimed at reviving the company that pioneered the smartphone market, but lost its step to competitors.

Thus, Palm and the private equity firm have banked a lot on its new product, so McNamee was out in full force at CES in Las Vegas, talking up the Pre.

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Thursday, January 8, 2009

CES-tastic!: No Taxi Lines, Barry Manilow and a Geek ZZ Top (But, as Always, Scoble-Stalked!)

Here is BoomTown’s first video from the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, which kicked off last night with a keynote speech by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer.

So far, it’s been a definitely thinner crowd, a reflection of the weaker economy.

But CES is still a reliably noisy, often pointless, gadget cavalcade–with introduction of a new smartphone from Palm, called Pre, as the highlight so far.

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Live From CES, It’s All Things Digital

BoomTown, MediaMemo, Personal Technology Godfather Walt Mossberg and Mossberg Solution columnist Katie Boehret traveled to Las Vegas this week for the Consumer Electronics Show. They’re navigating the crowds in order to bring you the most important, the most interesting, and the most entertaining moments of the CES melee. They’ll probably have some interesting tidbits about boring stuff as well. All of our CES coverage will be centralized and updated in one place for the sake of convenience.

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Wednesday, January 7, 2009

TiVo Las Vegas: Walt, Katie, Peter and BoomTown Head to CES

With Macworld out of the way, a chunk of the crack All Things Digital squad is now winging its way both east and west to the annual gadgetopocalypse in Las Vegas, a.k.a. the Consumer Electronics Show.

Despite the fact that the show is feeling the pinch of the economy and that there are really no big products to speak of, CES is still one of the biggest and most important gatherings of the tech year.

Las Vegas turns into a geek moshpit every year, as legions of vendors, buyers, press and others converge to be overwhelmed for days by noise, long lines for cabs, keynotes, demos and more (like the Pussycat Dolls).

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Monday, January 5, 2009

This Week in Tech: A Dull CES, but (Gasp!) an Even Duller Macworld!

BoomTown is not saying it’s going to be like watching grass grow.

But 2009 is not exactly getting off to a rousing start this week–with two underwhelming blockbuster tech events taking place that already have more of an air of whimper than of bang to them.

That would be the Consumer Electronics Show, the annual egregious gadgetfest in Las Vegas, and the final appearance by Apple at Macworld.

Of course, while CES tries to fend off the spate of no-one-is-going-to-CES stories–well, I am!–the absence of his digital Holiness and Apple CEO Steve Jobs at Macworld has really generated most of the glumness.

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Tuesday, December 16, 2008

Yahoo Execs Tapan Bhat and Ash Patel Talk About Yahoo’s Open and Social Launch

Here’s a video interview I did with top Yahoo execs Tapan Bhat and Ash Patel yesterday, after Yahoo finally launched a lot of the new open and social elements that it has long said it was injecting into its most popular products. The initiatives Yahoo finally released into the wild have been long in the making, first discussed as just vaporware by Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang at last year’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Now, after the longest of gestation periods, they arrived yesterday, in an impressive rollout.

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Tuesday, January 29, 2008

Yahoo’s Hail Mary at CES (in Six Parts)

What else to watch on the day of Yahoo’s earnings call, but a six-part series, taken by a hand-held camera, at CEO Jerry Yang’s keynote speech at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas earlier this month.

While we did a bit of video in our post about the event, where Yahoo unveiled some interesting new mobile and email initiatives, this video person went to town and taped the whole shebang and posted it on YouTube (which is also known in Silicon Valley as the-company-Yahoo-whiffed-on-buying).

If you want to understand where and at what pace the Internet giant is going–ahead of earnings–it might be a good idea to consider this attempt to explain the revival attempts at Yahoo, which is vintage Yang.

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Wednesday, January 16, 2008

Waltgelina at Macworld, Part 1!

When BoomTown was at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last week, I followed my partner-in-tech-crime Walt Mossberg and Katherine Boehret around the floor of the famous gadgetfest with my annoying video camera (truth be told, I am the irksome one and the camera simply my tool of choice).
And because Walt is so [...]

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Tuesday, January 15, 2008

Yahoo: The Parts of Its Sum?

BoomTown is usually never in sync with Wall Street analysts, given that their job is too often to sell people on companies and mine is to, well, tell on companies to people.

But I seem to be in violent agreement with Sanford Bernstein analyst Jeff Lindsay of late–at least with a recent report he just did [...]

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Friday, January 11, 2008

Andy Jordan Gets Tasered at CES and Does Other Stuff Too

How did we miss this video of WSJ.com’s Tech Diary vlogger Andy Jordan getting Tasered by a leopard-skin device at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this past week?

Fun!

Here he mistreats an animatronic dinosaur, which calls for more Tasering:

And here Jordan checks out tricked-out trucks at CES:

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Thursday, January 10, 2008

Rest for the Wary

While we at D: All Things Digital don’t style ourselves as peacemakers, one of the genuine sateen pillows that we had tossed blithely about our party in Las Vegas at the Consumer Electronics Show on Tuesday night seemed to have a dulcet effect on bringing together faux foes.
Pictured below is Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis and [...]

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Wednesday, January 9, 2008

Kara Visits CES: Waltgelina, Part 2!

Here is the second part of my video of following Walt Mossberg, along with Mossberg Solution writer Katherine Boehret, around the floor of the 2008 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas yesterday:
In this, the second of two videos from the floor of CES, it is more big screens, more fanboys, more gadgets–just a typical day [...]

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Tuesday, January 8, 2008

Kara Visits CES: Gadgetfest and Gondolas!

Digital Daily’s John “Patches” Paczkowski and I continued our trek through the 2008 Consumer Electronics Show and the neon streets of Las Vegas last night, even though we ended up in the fake daylight of fake Venice by the end of the evening.
Here’s a video of a bunch of companies showing at CES, which [...]

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About Kara

Kara Swisher started covering digital issues for The Wall Street Journal's San Francisco bureau in 1997 and also wrote the BoomTown column about the sector. With Walt Mossberg, she co-produces and co-hosts D: All Things Digital, a major high-tech and media conference. Read more »

Ethics Statement

Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.

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