Reading books and newspapers on a handheld device has gotten to be a hot arena in the consumer electronics business, especially after the introduction of the Kindle from Amazon.
Plastic Logic will come on the market next year with its e-reader offering, so the Silicon Valley-based company gave a sneak preview of the device, including a first look at the gadget’s innovative touchscreen user interface.
Look ma, no keyboard!
Greg Harper, president of Harpervision and co-founder of Gadgetoff, is–let’s be honest–a gadget freak of the freakiest level.
Check out this demo at the seventh D: All Things Digital, where Harper pulls out one odd but innovative product after another from his cornucopia of gadgetry–from a bad-breath checker to a tricked-out diving mask.
Onstage in an interview at the seventh D: All Things Digital conference, Eve Ensler shed much-needed light on the dire situation in the Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.
Ensler’s aim is to end the use of rape as a weapon of war there, in part as a consequence of the region’s coltan trade. Coltan, or columbite tantalite, is a mineral essential to the manufacture of a wide array of consumer electronics, such as mobile phones and laptops.
It is well worth hearing about exactly how some of our everyday gadgets come to us at a terrible price.
In what is quite possibly the most spot-on comment about Twitter that BoomTown has heard thus far, Harvard University Professor Jonathan Zittrain said about its use by Iranians protesting the election results there:
“It is easy for Twitter feeds to be echoed everywhere else in the world. The qualities that make Twitter seem inane and half-baked are what make it so powerful.”
In other words, Twitter is so simplistic and silly that it is a perfect digital tool to overthrow a government–which kind of makes the trendy microblogging service the Forrest Gump of international relations.
With bootleg copies ripped on the Internet or not and with an $87 million opening weekend for “X-Men Origins: Wolverine,” it looks like the nerdiest summer movie season ever is off the races.
Hollywood, caught in the digital maelstrom, certainly is fine and dandy making bank by co-opting all the techie themes, gadgets and special effects, with a slate of movies over the next months that are like catnip to geeks of all kinds.
Including BoomTown, for example, which plans to fork over a lot of dough to pay for all the techtastic entertainment that those old media moguls can dish out before they collapse.
Besides getting, well, the whole country to run today, President Barack Obama is now taking a geek-tastic new ride down Pennsylvania Avenue to his new home, which should more than satisfy his clearly gadget-loving persona.
Say hello to the spanking new Presidential limo, which the Secret Service is calling the “Beast.”
The last time General Motors improved on the car was at outgoing President George W. Bush’s 2005 inauguration, which means the struggling automaker is faster at upgrading than Microsoft is with Windows!
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.
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.
Last night, Walt Mossberg and I hosted yet another annual “What’s Hot and What’s Not in Personal Technology” event for the Churchill Club.
It was a gadgetfest with BoomTown, Walt Mossberg, Gadgetoff’s Greg Harper and Twitter Co-Founder and CEO Evan Williams presenting the digital show-and-tell.
Here is a rather longish video of the event, which is well worth watching. (Yes, I am–along with my No. 1 son, Louie, and an animatronic Elvis–wearing a Yahoo hat.)
One of our favorite D: All Things Digital speakers, and now a regular attendee, has been Hollywood director, producer, writer and big-cowboy-hat-about-town, Barry Sonnenfeld (pictured here at D6).
So, BoomTown extends belated but Texas-sized congratulations to Sonnenfeld for winning an Emmy earlier this week for directing the pilot of “Pushing Daisies” on ABC.
We’re posting all the interviews from the sixth D: All Things Digital conference that took place in late May.
Here’s Part 3 of 3 of an interview I did with Thomson Reuters CEO Tom Glocer.
In this video, Glocer talks about how to avoid the fate of the music industry, the troubled economy, his favorite gadgets, new ways to deliver information on a variety of devices, and also takes questions from the audience about machine-trading and possible new acquisitions.
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:
What better way to brave the massive canyons of the Consumer Electronics Show than to hike them with the help of Walt Mossberg, along with Mossberg Solution writer Katherine Boehret?
Or, as Walt likes to call it: the Bataan Death March.
But he secretly loves it, as the gathering at the heart of Walt’s universe of gadgets, [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 »
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.
D is unlike any other executive conference. Since its debut in 2003, D has brought to life the energy and excitement of the digital revolution in an unscripted, upfront and unparalleled way. Read more »
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