Wow, a whole 4 hours of sleep and it was time to get up and get rolling again. I seem to have a knack for waking up at 5am. That and Robert set an alarm to get some deadlined work done. I didn't mind too much though since I needed to get yesterdays post and few things done before heading out. After doing some work for a while and getting up a day one recap it was time to embark on day two, exploring the show floor.
A quick shower and I was off. As usual traffic was crazy busy so I had my cab drop me off a few blocks away from the convention center and I just walked the rest of the way. This probably saved me a good half hour and 10 dollars in cab fare. It was coming up to about 9:30am which is when I was supposed to meet Terry so we could tag team the show floor for a while.
We were supposed to meet at the blogger lounge, which since I hadn't been to it previously turned out to be in the ass-end of space, or as far away from where I got dropped off as possible. So, after 20 minute walk across the show floor and several request for directions later I ended up find the place. Hey CES folks, if you are reading this...WTF was up with this? Next year can we give the blogger's a little more love and a lot more central location to work/camp out/mingle?
I met up a Terry a little late and we headed out to explore the south hall. This hall had many of the companies we were looking to chat with anyway. We started out and made some good steady progress as we worked our way though D-Link, NetGear, Logitech, etc.
After a hour and several thousand step (Terry had a pedometer) and several interesting conversations with companies later we made our way back to the blogger lounge again. Did I mention this was damn far away...ok, just checking.
We parted ways at lunch. I enjoyed the free lunch at the lounge and then headed back out to explore the central and north halls. Which were not only far, but very difficult to navigate too. What is it about building designers in Vegas that they insist on making it as confusing as possible to get out of a building? Seriously I think they study the art of misdirection in buildings at some Las Vegas school.
The North hall was my first stop, but turned out to be mostly Automobile customizers. Needless to say my time here was short, but the booth babes were aplenty here. While on the topic of booth babes this year did not disappoint in that department, in case you were wondering. I didn't take any photos or anything, but I am sure you can catch the visual run down via Giz and Engadget. Ok so short stay in north then on to Central.
Central hall was where the MASSIVE Microsoft booth was. They were pitching the usual wares. Zune, Live, Windows Vista. The two things that I was most impressed with were ones I don't have much exposure MediaRoom and Surface.
I spent about 20 minutes playing with the surface device and while I was there the crowd never seem to let up. Hey Microsoft, next time don't put them in a hidden corner like that. Made it impossible for very many to interact with the device. My take away from play with it was that the experience is very novel, and touch is clearly here to stay. I am just not convinced the form factor that the technology is tied too will succeed, but It was a lot of fun.
I spent the better part of the afternoon exploring the central hall and finally made it back to the blogger lounge around 4pm where I again met up with Terry, and he his now in tow companion Andrew. We all were invited to HP to come by a small reception for bloggers at 6pm. So we headed of that way just prior.
The HP reception held at the HP booth in the south hall where we met up with Ed Bott, Ian Dixon and a few others. After an hour or so here chatting and having a few beers Ed, Ian and I had to high-tail it to a Microsoft dinner we were all invited too.
We met up with Ed's lovely wife Judy and caught a cab at the Hilton. Dinner was at Roy's an Asian fusion place. It was a who's who of Microsoft covering folks at the dinner. Far to many for me to name and potentially leave someone out so I won't try. I am sure you know most of them :P
Out table was by far the most fun, in my biased opinion. We had a couple of geek moments playing with toys. Like Robert Mclaws showing off PointUI to us on his phone, but for the most part it was just generally good, fun, non-IT conversation. All-in-all a very enjoyable time was had by all.
After dinner it was close to 11pm and since I had only had 4 hours sleep I decided I wasn't going make it over to PURE (where the Microsoft party was) or the BlogHaus where many of the other folks eventually ended up. So I called it a night, caught a cab back to my hotel and crashed.
Posted
Jan 08 2008, 04:11 PM
by
Josh Phillips
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