VentureBlog

CES 2007: True HD, OLED and Ultra Wideband

I have survived another Consumer Electronics Show. No small achievement. But it has taken me nearly a week to recover and tell the tale. The Consumer Electronics Show has gotten so large -- so out of control -- that it will undoubtedly break apart under the weight of its own mass. Conference organizers were predicting that 140,000 people would come to Las Vegas for CES this year. But I'm betting they missed by a couple tens of thousands. Quick trips from the convention center to any hotel on the strip took 45 minutes when they should have taken 15. And the line for free ice cream at the Yahoo tent was backed up all day, every day. I heard one blogger at the airport say to a friend that he spent the day at PodTech's BlogHaus rather than contend with the crowds (I myself took refuge at the BlogHaus on a daily basis -- they had the winning combination of copious drinks, snacks and bandwidth).

All the whining aside, CES was jam packed with gadgets, technologists and big giant TV's. That's right. Once again, CES was absolutely dominated by Televisions. LCD TV's. Plasma TV's. Home Theater projectors. My partners Andy, Vivek and I wandered the conference floor obsessively comparing TV's. We got right up close and looked at the consistency of color. We stood back and looked at motion blur. We debated the extent to which differences in displays were the results of actual technical superiority or merely better tuning. We checked out Sharp's 108 inch LCD TV (for those keeping score at home, last year's colossal TV king was a 103 inch plasma but this year LCD claims the bragging rights). We enjoyed Panasonic's use of plasmas in their booth for window panes, picture frames and a blazing fire.

And the winners are? None of the above. There weren't any clear winners in TV land this year. I suppose if there were any winners, it was the consumers. There were a panoply of stunning televisions on display. Technology is getting better. Prices are going down. That's undoubtedly a winning combination for TV buyers. That said, there were three TVs that I left the CES floor excited about. First, Sony was showing the thinest, most beautiful little OLED (Organic LED) displays you've ever seen. Sadly, they aren't yet in production. But when they are, they're going to be big sellers. They had extremely vibrant colors, a stunningly precise picture (with a 1,000,000 to 1 contrast ratio), and a form factor that can not be beat. I really want one. Second, as beautiful as some of these flat panel TVs are, the best pictures on the show room floor came out of a high end projector. Optoma was running the perfect scene from "Phantom of the Opera" to show off their amazing HD81 projector. The quality of the picture was unrivaled by anything I saw on the showroom floor. Sure, at ten thousand dollars or so, it isn't cheap. But for those of you with an empty basement and an old car to sell, this projector is the way to go. And Third, my partners and I were thrilled to see beautiful TV's on display using the single panel LCOS (liquid crystal on silicon) technology from our own portfolio company MicroDisplay. Both Akai and Memorex will soon be manufacturing MicroDisplay enabled Full HD TVs that will be priced hundreds of dollars cheaper than the next closest 52" and 62" Full HD TVs.

It was not, however, the fancy new televisions that I found most compelling at this year's CES. It was the amazing disappearance of TV wires. Several companies were demonstrating wireless systems for high definition televisions. It reminded me of the initial hints of wireless audio several years ago at CES. The first year there was a single dedicated Yamaha system demonstrating wireless audio. The next year wireless audio was scattered throughout the convention center. And the following year it was everywhere. I imagine we'll see the same trajectory for wireless video. This year there were a few manufacturers demonstrating wireless televisions (several of which were powered by our own ultra wideband portfolio company Tzero). Next year I anticipate that it will be everywhere -- built directly into TVs, in stand alone systems, as part of set top boxes. Wireless video is a no brainer. Imagine the ease of installing a flat panel on the wall if you don't have to worry about burying the wires in the wall. (Now if only someone could come up with a system that safely and efficiently delivers wireless power.) I guess I'll go back to CES next year. If nothing else, to see the proliferation of wireless video -- and party like its 1999.

Recovering From FOO Camp

I can't decide what is making it harder for me to write this morning. Is it the fact that I am still completely exhausted after a weekend of too little sleep and too much mental stimulation? Or is it the more mundane fact that God-awful music is blasting out of my speakerphone courtesy of the now 57 minutes I've been on hold with Bank of America credit card services? I'm going to go with mental overload because I refuse to cede the power to communicate to B of A musak.

This weekend I was privileged to attend Tim O'Reilly's FOO Camp. FOO stands for "Friends Of O'Reilly" but the crowd is only a small subsection of those who count Tim as a friend. Tim has long been not just a uncanny predictor of future technology trends but a supporter and promoter of both those technologies and the individuals responsible for inventing them and shepherding them from concept to phenomenon. The individuals present at this year's FOO Camp had played significant rolls in the creation and dissemination of some of the most important technologies over the past decades (from Lotus 1-2-3 to Perl, Python, Ruby, Flash, you name it). But the conversations of FOO Camp were clearly pointed at the future, which leaves one's mind spinning.

One of the things that is striking about FOO Camp is that nearly everything that takes place over the weekend is collaborative. Talks are rarely lectures -- they are conversations. Ad hoc projects at FOO take interesting twists and turns because they are necessarily interdisciplinary, driven by experts in hardware, software, networking, who are encouraged by the environment to think out of the box (a child of FOO's inventive environment was unveiled at this year's gathering -- Chumby is an open source hardware and software platform that truly embodies the collaborative and interdisciplinary nature of FOO). As I wandered around O'Reilly's campus Saturday night I was struck by the incredibly inclusive, social and creative energy everywhere -- in one room a group of folks were singing and strumming Simon and Garfunkel tunes, in another a crowd was engaged in their 5th or 6th hour of Werewolf, on the patio a few pyromaniacs enjoyed a fire sculpture involving propane and a zen sand garden, others gathered 'round the laser in Make Magazine's office engraving their laptops and cell phones with various a sundry images and insignia.

Two of my favorite sessions during FOO Camp were further testimony to the collaborative nature of the weekend. One of the "talks" was entitled "Halfbaked.com: entrepreneurial improv theatre." It was organized by Dave McClure, Paul Rademacher and James Levine, who had the great idea of randomly assigning teams of participants two word company names and, with fifteen minutes of preparation time, having them then present their business plans to a panel of VC judges (namely, me and Paul Graham). The results were clever and funny and felt sufficiently close to my day job as to be a little disconcerting. The winning team pitched Bottlecap Porn, fully functional (if somewhat under-featured) website and all. The other session I can't stop talking about was called "That Sucked," which was organized by Joshua Schachter. In Joshua's session, he started off by telling about times he'd been faced with technical challenges that really sucked. He then opened up the floor to the crowd to share their stories. The tales of woe expounded were like a history of computers gone bad, from printers shooting parts across the room to infinite loops to missing source code (the inspiration for SourceForge). They were simultaneously the geekiest and funniest stories I'd heard in some time. And like the "Halfbaked" session, virtually everyone in the room participated, making the session all the more illuminating and entertaining.

I hope that Tim and the entire O'Reilly organization get as much out of FOO Camp as do the participants. We all certainly owe him a debt of gratitude for hosting this incredible event.

Post Script: I hung up on Bank of America after being on hold for 190 minutes! I hope there is less of a wait when I call to cancel my card.

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CES: One Inch Better

I've just gotten back from the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Las Vegas is a zoo when there aren't an extra 180,00 people running around. But during CES it is an absolute mess. Just getting to and from your hotel is a challenge of epic proportions. It doesn't even help to rent the bright yellow stretch Hummer. It will just get stuck in traffic (although it will be a little slice of heaven -- twinkling stars on the roof and all -- on your way to dinner).

This year's CES was bigger than ever. But it would be hard to argue that it was better. In fact, to the extent that anything on display at CES was better than last year, it was only marginally so.

Case in point -- flat screen televisions. You could not turn in any direction at CES this year without seeing the "latest greatest" flat screen television. Toshiba and Canon were touting their SED TV (Surface-Conducting Electron-Emitter Display). Sharp was showing its Mega-Contrast LCD (1,000,000:1 Contrast). Every company had its own spin on the perfect viewing experience. But the reality of television innovation can be summed up by the battle of the gigantic plasma screens. Last year Samsung proudly displayed the "worlds largest" plasma TV. It came in at one hundred and two inches. The Guinness Book honors this year, however, went to Panasonic which was displaying a . . . yes, you guessed it . . . one hundred and THREE inch plasma. (It made about as much difference as Nigel Tufnel's amplifier going to 11.)

Since size didn't matter, the TV manufacturers were left to "innovate" in more creative ways. While I frankly can't imagine the real world uses of the technology in the near term, both LG.Philips and Toshiba were displaying 3D LCDs. They used optical tricks that resulted in different viewing experiences for both eyes, thus creating the illusion of three dimensions without the need for any goofy glasses out of the cereal box. The LG.Philips TV created that illusion by inserting a visual "parallax" barrier between the viewer and the pixels. The barrier blocked different pixels for each eye, thus producing a three dimmensional effect (if you stood in the right place!). The advantage of that process was that it could be turned on and off, thus making the LG.Philips a switchable 2D/3D LCD.

Equally useful was the the Sharp "Two Way Viewing Angle LCD." This panel used the same affect as those plastic kids trading cards that look like Clark Kent from one angle and Superman from another. If you stood on one side of the Sharp display you would see one picture but if you shifted over a few feet you'd see another. And if you stood right in the middle you'd see a little bit of Clark Kent, a little bit of Superman, and get a headache. Sharp was touting it as a great in-car display because it could present different visuals to the driver (maps) and the passenger (Seinfeld). Of course both the driver and the passenger will get neck aches looking sideways at the screen.

All in all, CES has become too big for its own good and if the excitement of next year's show is a 104" plasma or a 4-way viewing LCD, I suspect a bunch of us will stay home in the new year rather than rush off to Las Vegas.

Mac Mini -- The New New Internet Computer

I have seen the future and its name is Mac mini. The mini is one seriously great little computer. I got one last week and have been singing its praises ever since. It is not the fastest computer. It is not the cheapest computer. It is not the smallest computer. But it is certainly the smallest cheap and fast computer out there. And the cheapest small and fast computer out there. And, yes you guessed it, the fastest cheap and small computer out there (my apologies to Apple, which advertises the mini as "Inexpensive, But Never Cheap" -- semantics -- at $500 it is darn cheap). Add the fact that the mini now ships with Tiger, as well as Apple's fantastic iLife software, and you can purchase one heck of a computer for under five hundred bucks.

This week I was visiting the new offices of a startup I recently funded. The company is in the process of pulling together the infrastructure necessary to support their business. After looking at their options, the guys decided to outfit the office with Mac minis. For a little over $600 it is possible to provide each of the company's telesales and customer service agents with all the computing power they need. This is particularly true because the company's sales and support functions are going to be run on web apps like saleforce.com and Five-9's. Thus, the only thing that those folks will really need in a desktop computer is a web browser and a reasonably fast pipe. In that respect the Mac mini is plug and play. All the company will need to do when it ads new reps is run across the street to the Apple store, buy a new mini and super cheap monitor, bring it back, plug it in, launch the browser and they are off to the races.

It strikes me as a bit ironic that Apple has managed to make good on Larry Ellison's network computer vision. Sure, it's more expensive than the couple hundred bucks once envisioned for a true dumb terminal. But it frankly isn't that much more expensive and delivers a whole lot more computing muscle than Ellison envisioned when he launched the New Internet Computer (NIC) Company.

Hewlett Packard Blogs

Some months ago I was at a going away party for a friend and bumped into David Gee, Hewlett Packard's Vice President of Marketing for their worldwide software division. David and I got to talking about blogging as a marketing tool and about the various corporate bloggers out there spreading the gospel for their respective companies. As David knew, I am a big advocate of blogging as a tool for communicating directly with your customers and he certainly appreciated the power of that direct communications channel. Within a few weeks of our conversation, David had a number of his key managers and technologists up and blogging.

A short time after the HP Blogs got up and running, David invited me to the HP campus to talk with a number of other marketing folks about the blogsphere. The conversation was an interesting one in which, among other things, I showed them all of the ways in which I track who is reading, linking to and commenting upon VentureBlog (e.g. Movable Type, FeedBurner, Bloglines, Technorati, etc.). We also spent some time talking about the things that I thought made company blogs either successful or not.

As I shared with the folks at HP, if there is one thing that I think is the hallmark of a successful corporate blog, it is the willingness of the corporate blogger to speaking candidly about the good and bad of his or her company and that corporation's commitment to allowing such a conversation without fear of repercussion. Needless to say, such candor is a scary thing for many corporations; but, without it, corporate blogging becomes nothing more than company slideware. I urged the folks at HP to take some risks and encourage their bloggers to speak their minds.

HP's bloggers are starting to do just that. In a recent post by Rich Marcello, HP's SVP of Business Critical Servers, Rich comments on the departure of Carly Fiorina. Rich praises Carly for her incredible leadership and communication skills. But he concludes, "What's true is that we made a great deal of progress toward realizing our strategy over the last several years; we also have more work to do that couldn't be executed without a leadership change." Interesting stuff to be reading from one of HP's Senior Vice Presidents. I hope that Rich and others over at Hewlett Packard will continue to speak openly about their business -- it is the only thing that will make the HP Blogs a must read for their customers and partners alike.

CES: Confessions Of A Bluetooth Skeptic

I spent the end of last week at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. That show keeps getting bigger and bigger. I heard one estimate that there were 160,000 people in town for the event but I wouldn't be surprised if it was bigger than that. Then again, it may have just seemed more crowded because the rain (and at one point, unbelievably, snow) drove everyone inside, further congesting the hall floors.

One interesting thing that I have noticed about CES is that it is increasingly about the people, not just the technology. There are a bunch of people I know who use CES as an opportunity to catch up with folks they haven't seen the rest of the year. I am certainly one such person. There are friends I see at CES who I scarcely have the opportunity to catch up with otherwise. As a result, the crowds keep growing. I was hanging out with a group of Venture Capitalists from August and Gabriel Venture Partners on Wednesday of last week and of the 10 people in the room, 9 of us were on our way to CES later in the week. We might as well charter giant cargo planes and move all of Sand Hill Road to Las Vegas for the convention. We must have bumped into a dozen or so other VCs while wandering the halls of the convention and the Belagio.

To a certain extent I don't actually think there is that much new to be learned from wandering the halls of CES. You certainly have the opportunity to see some amazing TVs (like Samsung's 102 inch plasma -- sell your house and you can buy this TV, but then where will you put it?) and speakers (although high end audio had been banished to another location this year, so it was not nearly as well trafficked as past years I'm sure) and the likes. But the truth is, there aren't that many big announcements coming out of CES. Essentially everything you see at CES you have read about before on Gizmodo or Engadget. The truth is, the only real excitement around technology announcements these days comes out of MacWorld, not CES. Which is why Steve Jobs doesn't participate in CES, despite running the most innovative consumer electronics company of today. He is able to drive people to his very own show and get all the buzz for himself, for Apple and for those companies supporting Apple. You've got to hand it to Jobs -- he is an amazing marketer (maybe it will even translate into a little bit of market share this time around -- he certainly owns the MP3 player market and I am sure the Shuffle will only further strengthen that position).

Walled Gardens At DemoMobile

As I fly back home from DemoMobile, I am struck by the fact that "innovation" in the mobile market is apparently stuck in the same quagmire we faced at the outset of the Web. All mobile computing paths appear to be leading to the walled garden. And no matter how pretty that walled garden may appear at first blush, mark my words, it is going to feel pretty claustrophobic in no time at all.

Evolution and Product Development

On a couple of occasions this week I have been reminded of the power of iteration in business. While we all aim to be perfect the first time around, it is a pipe dream. Great products and services are born out of trial and error. Only with iteration will a company get the feedback it needs to inch closer and closer to a product that best meets customer needs. And part of that process of iteration is trying stuff out early and often -- broken stuff will get fixed (and, occasionally, fixed stuff will get broken) and in the process solid products will emerge.

Take for example the Treo 600. Two years ago, attendees of the TED conference were given the opportunity to buy the first generation Treo at a big discount. I, like a substantial portion of the TED crowd, am a gadget freak and very happily signed up to get the first generation Treo. The only problem is it sucked. No offense Handspring, but the first Treo was a mediocre PDA and a terrible phone. It was a big fat flip phone that did many things but did nothing particularly well (ok, the address book and dialing integration was pretty cool but that was about it).

Microsoft at CES

While I was at CES a week or so ago, I bumped into an old friend of mine named Joe Belfiore. Joe was a huge Macintosh fan when we are Stanford together almost 20 years ago. We were both firm believers that the Apple UI was greatly superior to the Microsoft experience. Then Joe went to work for Microsoft. About 10 years into Joe's stay with Microsoft, I caught up with him and he was a convert. He was now touting the virtues of the Windows experience -- the virtues of speed, interoperability, that whole Microsoft spiel. Of course, it is not surprising that Joe was a convert. He had been a Windows product manager for years and was responsible for making sure it was a better experience. It was still shocking to hear my Mac-loving buddy go on at length about the weaknesses of the Apple platform. But the truth is, he was right. Starting with Windows ninety-something, Microsoft leapfrogged Apple. (Simmer down you Apple people -- I know that OSX is a great operating system and all that, but let's not get into that debate here). More importantly, because the Windows environment was an open environment, from a business standpoint, Microsoft's platform had left Apple in the dust.

Fast forward to today. Joe is now the general manager for Microsoft's eHome User Experience Team. His group covers a bunch of Microsoft home technologies but most importantly Windows XP Media Center Edition. So while at CES, Joe gave me a tour of Media Center, along with a number of 3rd party applications and devices designed to interoperate with a Media Center PC. For what it is worth, I remain an Apple guy. I love their beautiful hardware and am a big fan of the simplicity of the iLife applications (and OSX is a fabulous operating system). My home network has nary one Windows machine. That said, my tour of Media Center was a stark contrast to iLife and perhaps a wake-up call -- if not to Apple, at least to me.

When Steve Jobs delivered his keynote at Macworld a couple weeks ago, lots of folks like myself were rooting for him to announce hardware and software that would integrate iLife into the stereo and television. No such luck. And because iLife remains a closed platform, there are no third party developers building sanctioned software or devices to achieve that integration. On the other hand, Microsoft's Media Center Edition is a classic open platform. They have developed a UI that works well for the television, as well as standards for mapping to their universal remote, but they are relying upon third parties to develop interesting applications and device to support the platform. And it is working. Folks like Movielink, Musicmatch, Napster (the new, legal Napster), Ofoto and others have written applications for the platform. More importantly, however, a number of CE companies have begun developing devices to bring music to the stereo, photos to the television, etc. The devices are still expensive and debates continue to rage over things like 802.11a vs. 802.11g, but if history has shown us anything, a number of great solutions will soon emerge as the technology matures.

As much as I like Apple's iLife applications, I left CES with the clear impression that Microsoft's home experience will once again leapfrog Apple. I guess it's time for me to start shopping for a new home PC.

Seeing Blue At CES

I spent today wandering around the convention floor at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. While Comdex has suffered a painful decline in relevance and attendance (I frankly don't know which came first), CES remains a vibrant show. Vendors ranging from Sony to Pentax to Monster Cable share the convention floor with less obvious demonstrators like the United States Post Office. While it is not quite the spectacle of E3, some rooms certainly give it a sonic run for its money.

As we arrived at CES this morning, there were a crew of men and women dressed in tuxedos and black dresses. Maybe 20 strong, they stood silently in formation, two by two, all wearing sun glasses that obscured their eyes. It was entirely unclear what purpose they served. The woman beside me in line speculated that they were an acapella group. Sadly, they did not sing. Rather, shortly after we arrived, for no particular reason, at no particular prompting, and delivering no particular message, the men and women in black left.