In Search of the Perfect Investment

You trudge CES in search of  fun products and exciting companies. After two days and one $8 shoeshine (not including tip), I found two companies just started by American entrepreneurs and a bunch of neat new products. The two new companies:

First, ReplayXD. It makes this:

It’s a tiny movie camera, which you attach to your ski helmet, your racing car, your dirt bike, the underside of plane.  Push the button. Take off. When done with your daredevil stunts you watch your movie  in full 1080p on the largest TV screen you can’t afford. What you can afford is the ReplayXD — only $299. Check out the company’s web site for some awesome videos shot with the camera. Click here. The entrepreneur is called John Spar. He’s charming. This is one neat product.

Second, these are the two “booth babes’ hawking California Headphones.

One of the headphones costs $100. The titanium one cost $200. They’re specially designed for country music — hence the straw and the pickup truck. I listened to them. I thought they sounded OK. What do I know? I’m tone-deaf. The web site is here. The entrepreneur is called Tim Hickman. Gutsy going up against the likes of Sony, Sennheiser, Panasonic and Bose.

It’s remarkable how months of work, several hundred thousand dollars,  some Taiwanese engineers, a factory in China and lots of sweat can produce the most gorgeous products for you, the entrepreneur. Now comes the hard part — marketing. The good news is that there are a zillion blogs and two zillion TV channels all looking for neat stories and infomercials. In short, you don’t have to launch with massive, expensive national advertising. Creativity is the key. For hints: read Steve Jobs’ biography.

Consumer Electronics Show is the largest electronics show in the world. It attracted (allegedly) 130,000 attendees who came to see products displayed in 3,100 booth, some of which were larger than a football field. There’s no way one person (i.e. me) can visit all the booths and see all the new products.  Here are some trends:

+ TVs are getting bigger and better. Everyone makes great TVs. I prefer Samsung. My next TV will be a 55″ E8000, Series 8,  LED Samsung, out sometime this Spring. Samsung didn’t know exactly what it would cost — probably $2,400. High-end TVs all deliver 3D. All are addressing how the user (you and me) can control the TV set. Some now respond to voice commands, hand gestures and smartphones. Many have WiFi hookups so they can play movies you’re downloading over the Internet from Netflix,  iTunes or Amazon (etc.). Our TVs are becoming more complex and less standardized than our PCs and laptops.

+ Windows Phones are truly spectacular. When coupled with AT&T 4G/LTE service you can get speeds as fast as 22 million bits per second download and 8 million bits up. The phone to wait for is the Nokia Lumia 900. But Samsung makes one called the Focus S which is 4G, but not LTE. Thus slower, but very attractive. I don’t think they’ll kill the iPhone. But they’ll give it a little competition.

+ Movies are what stills were five years ago. You can make movies on virtually every still camera in the world, including the iPhone. Canon’s C300 coming out in a couple of months will do for professional movie makers what they pay $100,000 now for. The C300 will be $20,000. It has 12 stops of dynamic range. That’s incredible. You could never get that on film. Many TV commercials are now being shot on $1,700 DSLRs (digital single lens reflex cameras). These cheap cameras will all shoot in 1080p (the highest resolution today). They are doing to the movie making industry what the PC did to the mainframe computer industry. Check out where time lapse photography is going. You’ll see astronomy like you’ve never seen it. Click here.

Now to some shots of products that I liked:

+ This is Zagg’s $69.99, less-than-one pound keyboard for an iPad, which stands up in the little slot at the top. I can  (and did) type a lot faster on Zagg’s keyboard than on the iPad’s screen.

If you have an iPad, you should have one of these Zagg keyboards. Get the silver one. It’s neat. It will be out in a few weeks.

I’m not a fan of chiclet keyboards. They work here because they are a better typing solution than the iPad’s screen. But they’re a horrible solution on the ultra-small, ultra-notebook/laptops that were all over the show. I prefer the serious keyboards in the business ThnkPad laptops from Lenovo.

+ This is Sony’s new thin, stereo digital voice and music recorder called the ICD-TX50. You get 172 hours of recording for $149. Record, speak and output your voice to Dragon voice recognition software and you have  typed text, ready for a document on your PC.  It will be out soon.

+ Slip your iPad into this keyboard. Learn to lay the piano. This product won a prize for innovation.

+ I helped put myself through college and grad school with photography. We had film, chemicals and photo paper. We didn’t have books, t-shirts, murals and other places you could print your pictures. CES had acres of stuff photographers could buy. These were my favorite. They had two AA batteries. Turn it on and it would light up and shake the snow.What more could you want for your precious wedding photos?

No CES would be replete without booth babes. “

Why did you get that tatoo,” asked Harry.

She replied, “Because my name is Star.”

Makes about as much sense as many of the meaningless marketing slogans which many well-known companies adopted:

or Microsoft’s

Or Sony’s Make Believe

And in conclusion, and to sum  the progress in the human condition, I present you…

Harry Newton who needs to get a little sleep before today’s plane back to cold and nasty Eastern weather. This 3-hour time difference is killing. But walking around in just a shirt is a real pleasure.