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Tomorrow's World

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March of the noveau-geek

  • Chris Long
  • 6 Jan 07, 06:14 PM

34,000 feet over the Atlantic just passed Godthab near Foxe Basin.

God, I'd forgotten how much I hate this. The crack of dawn start, the madness of the airport, the hours sitting in an airline seat designed for an anorexic midget. But this is what we do: our annual pilgrimage to the show they call CES. One of the largest consumer technology shows on the planet.

It's the Mecca, if you excuse the theological throw away, for the nouveau-geeks, the new breed of suburban nerd that since the advent of Google have become the new technology gurus.

(Of course at the other end of the swimming pool the proto geeks are rolling their eyes and slapping their foreheads when it becomes apparent the new guys don鈥檛 realise that mp3 is an MPEG 1 layer - Google it, become an expert yourself).

Thus at CES a certain hysteria creeps in to the coverage of 鈥榯he latest gadgets鈥. You hear commentators breathe "Will it really do all that...?"

Here's the question: will there be anything new at this years CES...? Well, not really. Sure it will be shiny and you may just get away with saying we've never seen it before, but, well, see, they say that about the latest Ford Fiesta.

The problem is there are very few NEW technologies; in fact year on year development in technology is very slow compared to our expectations. The problem is, to make money, companies desperately need to interest us in what they are selling, which so often is the mark two version of the mark one we saw last year.

We can't avoid the shiny new stuff, thus a vaguely breathless piece in a national news paper, after trotting through the shows press releases concluded "anything could happen" at CES.

Yeah of course, anything. Just like anything could happen in a performance of, say, Macbeth.

See, shows like this run on rails, they are pure showbiz. The only thing to comment on is the 'performance' because the substance is invariably the same as last year.

We (obviously, I mean I) have already fallen out with a large PC manufacturer because I couldn't see what was new in its new box. And, foolishly, I said as much.

The clue was them offering brace of senior mouthpieces to talk about it. A CES rule of thumb is: the more important the spokesperson you are offered, the smaller the story.

Of course, one trick they try is to pretend that the senior person isn't available and heighten the excitement by not returning phone calls.

I've had girlfriends like that.

And then there is the joker that makes neurotics of us all. The surprise. The embarrassing conversation with your boss when you explain just how it was that the guys at home picked up a CES story, a proper one, and you didn't.

At CES we shouldn't be asking how new it is, but does it work yet?

Why Tomorrow's World?

  • Darren Waters
  • 6 Jan 07, 05:01 PM

A few of the comments left on the site have made reference to the blog being called - and perhaps I should explain the reason.

For those who are either too young to remember, or who live outside the UK, Tomorrow's World was a populist science and technology programme on the 大象传媒 which was after almost 40 years of broadcasting.

大象传媒 News has decided to bring back the "brand" for a whole range of technology coverage which you will see on TV and online over the coming 12 months.

The programme is not being brought back - but the feeling was that the moniker chimed with many people who remembered its accessible and interesting method of communicating developments in technology.

The Technology section of 大象传媒 News Interactive is not being re-branded and we're certainly not changing our agenda but there was a feeling, that for CES the brand of Tomorrow's World would work well.

For those of you who remember Tomorrow's World, do you think the programme should be brought back? Or has technology stepped out of an imposed ghetto and now deserves integration with the rest of news coverage?

Perhaps technology needs a special emphasis?

Let us know your thoughts.

UPDATE: Tomorrow's World has clearly sparked a real debate judging by the comments. Just to reiterate what I said in the original posting; there is NO plan to bring back the programme itself. There is a whole series of features on 大象传媒 News this year across bulletins, News 24, and online that will use Tomorrow's World as an umbrella.
But I will make sure that these comments are passed on to the big wigs at the 大象传媒. Who knows what these comments might spark....

Wow starts now?

  • Darren Waters
  • 6 Jan 07, 04:11 PM

A fleet of taxi cabs is buzzing around Vegas with adverts on their rooftop placards from Microsoft for its new Vista operating system - the "wow starts now" is the claim.

CES has always been about the wow and perhaps the ads signify a wider sense of anticipation for the next and the new that will be unveiled in the coming days.

But there's a creeping tone of caution emerging from some well-respected bloggers about what exactly we will see next week.

Jupiter analyst Michael Gartenberg - one of the best connected tech writers in the business - has said CES will be .

"Don't look for lots of new stuff to be introduced, look instead for products that are reaching maturation to show how they can differ from other products by allowing for better interaction, managment, integration, form factor or price," he writes.

He makes the valid point that too much of technology is alienating to the average person and touts the emergence of the "digital consumer".

He is absolutely right. Anyone who has grappled with the dark arts of a wi-fi network, for example, knows that "plug in and play" is still a hope more than than a reality. And in this digital age we are supposed to be hooking up our lives into home networks.

Some hope with the problems that face the average consumer. I read earlier on our 大象传媒 CES blog that Click editor Richard Taylor has not only got his e-mail up and running but is also planning to stream TV content from his home Sky box via a Slingbox over the net to his laptop - or perhaps even to his mobile phone.

I'm glad he found the wi-fi network here at the motel, where the 大象传媒 is ensconced, easy to use. I had some real teething problems being able to connect to the 大象传媒 network. The solution was simple in the end but still took an hour of messing around with proxy servers.

And no digital consumer in this day and age should even have to know what a proxy server is!

Another tech pundit sounding a note of caution is who asks if CES is "going to be a snore?".

He points out that the announcement of a hard disk holding a terabyte of information is the hottest story on , a website which acts as a barometer for tech interests.

His point is that if a hard drive is the talk of CES just a few days before the show, then perhaps we should not expect too much.

Perhaps we should all be a little more realistic.

One of the commenters on this blog certainly agrees.

John wrote:

"Another huge tech-fest of useless, glitzy gadgets coming up, brought to you by our dynamic corporations, to dazzle the starry-eyed sheep into letting go of their hard-earned bucks in the dumb hope that it will somehow make their lives better."

I don't share his pessimism but appreciate his comment. We've had a good start to the comments so far and hope people will continue to leave their thoughts as CES unfolds.


Do you get it?

  • Richard Taylor
  • 6 Jan 07, 02:49 PM

2100 LAS VEGAS

Just arrived and settled in. Funny, every time I come to the States, it reminds me that Americans simply "get" technology on a cultural level - far more than the Europeans, at any rate.
And I'm not just talking those in the industry, either. Ordinary people here just buy into the tech lifestyle. Sitting at dinner with the Click team at the motel, I was interrupted mid-flow by our waiter, who'd been eavesdropping our conversation about hi-def compression and the emerging rival optical disc formats. (yes folks, we鈥檙e "that" interesting).

Funny, he said, he didn't buy into the idea of Blu-ray or HD-DVD players being intertwined with games consoles (the PS3 and Xbox360, respectively). After all, he argued, without a digital HDMI port on his Xbox 360 (and consequently being forced to use a simple component output) how was he to enjoy the full benefits of HD-DVD content on his full-HD DLP projector (component outputs, will only handle 1080i, not full 1080p. You knew that, right?)

Happily (for him, at any rate) we pointed out that the latest Xbox 360s will have HDMI as standard, to support the HD-DVD add-on.)

Las Vegas may culturally be a millions miles from the sophisticated Bay Area coffee shops - but even out here, observations like this about technology are not unusual. I simply can't imagine the same thing happening in deepest rural England.

0600 LAS VEGAS

Suffering from the invariable jet lag that afflicts me as my annual bedfellow on CES trips, I've woken up thinking about the day ahead. CES hasn't even begun, but my team and I are gearing up nicely. I've already tested our motel's wifi connection (802.11g - running to a fairly hefty broadband connection) and am using it to good effect. In years gone by this might have been to download e-mails and check pre-show rumours, but now it's a far richer landscape available to me.

My 鈥淪lingbox鈥 hardware in my living room at home in London is streaming (sorry, 鈥渟linging鈥) the contents of my Sky PVR directly to my notebook via the net, in remarkably watchable quality. In a few hours I鈥檓 looking forward to having breakfast perched over a stream of the Arsenal/Liverpool FA Cup 3rd round clash (I can even watch it on my 3g phone and it doesn't look half-bad). My only is concern is that I may also be battling my two-year-old daughter (who is in the living room) over control of the channels.

This is one I'm determined to win, though ultimately if she nudges the Slingbox鈥檚 鈥渕agic eye鈥 a fraction off the IR sensor of the Skybox I'll have no way of talking back to my machine and she'd have stuffed me. I鈥檓 looking to this year's CES to see what solutions might be on offer to solve this particular conundrum.

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