Scobleizer

I recorded a 45 minute walking tour of CES where I walk through almost the entire CES from one side to the next. On the tour I met up with Bre Pettis, founder of Makerbot Industries, which is a 3D printer that really rocks. You can watch the whole thing which has no edits, just a straight walk, but did you know I can link you to very specific pieces of video on YouTube? Here, let’s take a quick tour.

Just to underscore how crazy CES is, right after I met up with Bre we saw an electronic cigarette booth next to an exercise machine booth.

1. eBay’s fantastic augmented reality shopping app.

2. Walkthrough of LG’s booth.

3. A look at Motorola booth signage. Very cool LED fence.

4. Walking through Microsoft’s booth.

5. Walking through the Intel booth where we met up with artist Hugh Macleod.

6. Walking through Panasonic’s booth, where we talk about some of the “3DTV without glasses” tech (it doesn’t work well enough for your home).

7. Walkthrough of Samsung’s booth (I want its 75-inch TV, best of the show in my opinion).

8. Walking across a freeway to get to the third hall. Yes, CES is THAT big!

9. We say hi to Epilog and see their laser engraver. Bre praises them. While there we see Dave Taylor, of “Ask Dave Taylor” fame.

10. Walk through MakerBot Industries’ booth, Bre’s company. While there we see Brady Forrest, who runs O’Reilly’s Where 2.0 and co-chairs Web 2.0 expo, plus he was the one who started the Ignite events.

11. Walk through RIM’s booth where its tablet, the PlayBook, was getting a lot of attention.

12. A walkthrough of Kodak’s booth.

13. We end up at the CNET booth. They announced the Motorola Xoom was the best of the show. (You can see my video of that from the other night).

Whew, I’m tired, and glad I’m back home where I can just did through the thousands of posts journalists did at CES.

Here’s some “best of CES 2011″ wrapups:

** CrunchGear.
** Engadget.
** Gizmodo.
** Laptop Magazine.
** PopSci.
** PCMag.
** Huffington Post.
** Boy Genius Report.
** Popular Mechanics.
** Technologizer’s Last Gadget Standing.
** TechRadar.

I’ll have the final word tomorrow morning on CNBC at about 7:30 a.m. Pacific Time. See you then!

Robert

My week started out with having dinner with a VP from HP, who told me that I should show up at an event on February 9th so I could see their Tablet.

This is a category that Apple rejuvenated with the iPad and, of course, we’re all waiting for the iPad 2 launch. There are rumors on the CES floor that Apple will delay the iPad a bit due to shortage of memory, but I don’t believe it. If Apple delays too long it’ll hand a major gift to the folks who are ready to pounce.

And ready to pounce they are. Motorola, two days ago here at CES, announced the Xoom tablet. I got a look at it with my friend Sascha Pallenberg (who knows EVERYTHING happening in the mobile and netbook spaces and writes about such on NetbookNews.com), and while the hardware is ready to go they weren’t able to show it with Google’s “Honeycomb” Android OS, although they said it is the first tablet designed for it.

In addition to Motorola, there were a ton of similar tablets announced this week at CES. Lenovo, LG, Asus, and many others. But the journalists I talked to last night at a private dinner said the Motorola is the best of the series that they’ve seen. So, let’s count that as the first of the big tablet launches that are coming between now and February 9th.

Apple is the other one. Of course that’s probably the one I’m going to buy. Rumors are that it’ll be a lot like the Motorola one, with a higher resolution screen, two cameras, better speed, and all that. We’ll see, but the real question is the price and what Apple is going to do to provide some more software magic.

Palm/HP? Folks who’ve seen it say it’s very good. The WebOS is definitely interesting and they could have some real tricks up their sleeves to disrupt Apple (much of the Palm/HP team came from Apple and they love smacking Steve Jobs upside the head with some new ideas). Look at the superior Facebook integration with the WebOS, for instance, for some hints as to what could come.

Notice that I didn’t talk about RIM or Microsoft. I just don’t see them as being big players in the tablet space. I’m having dinner with RIM folks tonight, though, and it’ll be interesting to see how much more bullish I get after they buy me a couple of glasses of wine. Microsoft? Everyone yawned at their tablet plans last year and this year Ballmer didn’t do any better and, instead, stuck to the script of talking about Kinect wins in December (eight million of them sold).

Anyone else out there? Well, Samsung has this convertible tablet that was attracting large crowds on the opening day of CES. The thing is it’s running Windows 7 (which is still clunky for touch) and they weren’t discussing price. It’s convertible because the keyboard slides out to turn it from a tablet to a laptop-style thing. We’ve had Windows tablets like this from Compaq and others in the past and the market ignored them for the most part until the iPad came along.

It just seemed uninspired to me and I don’t see that Samsung’s going to be able to get many buyers excited by this, although Samsung’s Galaxy Tab is the 7-inch leader at the moment (running Android) and I don’t see anyone taking away its lead there.

So, to recap, there are going to be three big tablet launches.

1. Motorola.
2. Apple.
3. HP.

After all these launches are done, let’s see which tablet you and I will buy this year. See you February 9th.

UPDATE: yeah, I should mention the Notion Ink Adam. Engadget loved it, but give me a break, it is a no-name company and won’t be considered alongside a Motorola, Apple, or HP.

The car companies are here in force at CES. Well, at least Audi and Ford are (Ford, later today, will announce an electric car on stage here, and they gave me a 2012 Ford Explorer pre-production model that has all sorts of interesting technology which I’ll tell you about next week).

What’s going on? Why are car companies introducing cars and showing off their wares in big booths?

Because consumers are deciding on cars on things OTHER than horsepower, handling, and design. Yeah, those are still important, but what really is going to differentiate cars in the future are the features that are inside. Almost all of them technology focused.

Listen into a lunch I had with Audi’s CEO, his head geeks (from left is Mathias Halliger, head of architecture MMI Systems, Rupert Stadler, CEO, and Ricky Hudi, head of electronics development) and several journalists from blogs like Engadget and Autoblog (part I, part II). What did we talk about? Horsepower? The joy of driving? No. We talked about assisted driving technologies. How they were integrating devices into the driving experience. What they were doing with voice recognition and bringing up data from web systems.

Whoa. Web systems. That’s why +we+ should pay attention to the car companies. Some of the tech companies already are. Pandora, for instance, has been making lots of deals with car companies and at CES announced two deals with BMW and Toyota. In Las Vegas we’ve heard stories of Pandora executives taking press out for rides in the desert in the new BMW cars.

But, clearly, the car companies are thinking of something like Siri, which you’ll talk to, and it’ll find things for you. Need coffee at 1 a.m. your car will find it. Need to make reservations at a restaurant you are driving toward? Your car will do it (opportunity for OpenTable). Headed toward a Ritz for vacation? Make a spa reservation. Opportunity for SpaBooker.

Can the tech industry do more in conjunction with the car industry? I think so. We spend so much time in our cars. Especially for those who have families, you are already probably using things like iPads to entertain your kids. That makes more sense than a built-in entertainment system. Why? Because they are connected. I hate the screens in my Toyota minivan because they display so little (usually only DVDs) while our iPads can stream videos, music, let you play games, do research for school papers, and more.

Where is this going? It’s clear the car industry is reaching out to the tech industry and asking us to help them differentiate their products in the future. This feels like a shift in an industry that we’re just at the beginning of (and I think it will culminate in robotic cars like the Google self-driving cars — Audi’s CEO is proud of their involvement with the Stanford Center for Automotive Research (CARS). We did lots of videos at that lab, too, that you should watch if you missed them. (Part I/drive by wire; Part II/autonomous cars; Part III/solar research).

We should pay attention. Big market and great way to get a captive audience. I know I’m already captive to Pandora. Aren’t you?

Back on October 11, 2007, I wrote that Lee Lorenzen was nuts. Back then he said that Facebook was worth $100 billion. He’s getting more and more right every day and I’m getting more and more wrong. Especially after Goldman Sachs just kicked in $500 million and valued the company at $50 billion.

I told Zuckerberg to sell at a $15 billion valuation. Why? I had watched other companies, like PointCast, turn down offers to sell and face doom. But, Zuckerberg and Lorenzen had real vision and I didn’t.

Ahh, always fun looking back at history and seeing just how wrong I was.

So, where do I buy some stock for the IPO? Let’s see, if every user of Facebook buys $100 worth, that’d be a $600 billion valuation at IPO. Can I get in before that happens?

People wonder why I follow so many people on Twitter. It’s for the small stuff that never would get into Techcrunch or Techmeme. Like this tweet by Brian Bondy yesterday. It would be easy to miss, except I know all my favorite programmer friends love StackOverflow (and its associated sites) the way I love Quora.

So when Brian made a series of Twitter lists of their best users I paid attention. Yes, I followed every single one of the people on these lists. They are crack for technical recruiters. Reads like a who’s who of programmers. After all, you don’t get reputation on Stack Overflow unless you can actually answer technical questions and have other people verify you are right most of the time.

In previous years it would take years to make a list of 500 programmers in the tech industry who have great reputations. Now? It took me less than 30 minutes to follow them all (you might not be able to, because Twitter limits most people to following fewer than 1,000 people in a day (actually that just caught me) and following fewer than 2,000 people total unless you also have 2,000 followers. But you can always follow Brian’s lists and just go through one-by-one.

What could you do with them? Look them up in Gist. See if they also are on LinkedIn, etc.

If I were a recruiter looking for programming talent, this would be the list I’d work on for the first month of 2011. It’s crack.

And, yes, I did send this list to the folks at Rackspace because we’re hiring.

This letter is to my dad, we got him an iPad for Christmas.

Dear dad,

Alex told me he counseled you against buying any apps that cost money. Sounds like Ben also is of that bent. Sounds great to be a cheapskate, right? After all, you’ll save money. I’d question my brother’s motives, though. Maybe they want more inheritance?

Anyway, to me the best apps cost money and you should expect to spend $200 to $400 in the first year on apps. Here’s some reasons why.

1. Paid apps are better games. Look at Angry Birds. They have free versions on Android, but on iPad and iPhone their versions cost five bucks. The thing is, on the free version you have interruptive advertising. Do you really want to live in a world where every few minutes an ad gets displayed? I don’t. So I invest in apps that cost money and apps that have a real business model behind them (IE, where I’m at least a customer that turned over some cash). Plus, I know that Scrabble is one of your favorite games. That costs $4.99. What a deal.

2. Paid apps help teach science. I know you do lots of tutoring at local high schools. One of the most expensive apps, The Elements, costs $14. This app is magical, though, and will open science up to kids in a new way. I wish I had this back when I was in Chemistry class.

3. Paid apps reward the arts. There’s a photographer, Quang-Tuan Luong. He took 10 years to photograph all the US National Parks. 3,000 photos. And you can own them all for $4.99. If enough people do that? Well, then, it’ll encourge more photographers and artists to share their work in apps.

4. Paid apps help you travel. The best apps, like TripIt, have “pro” versions that cost money. In this case TripIt costs me $49 per year. What do I get? Information. I often know my flight is delayed before the pilot tells everyone else. And it helps me get alternate flights and helps me with finding the best seat, and more.

5. Paid apps help you get better news. The Wall Street Journal costs $17+ a month. I know you buy lots of magazines and newspapers, why would it be any different on an iPad?

6. Paid apps help you read longer items. I paid $4.99 for Instapaper, which helps save web pages for later offline reading, optimized for readability. Invaluable.

7. Paid apps help you find better restaurants. Yeah, you can use the free Yelp app (I do that too) but Zagat’s app is better for finding the best restaurants. It costs $10. What’s a meal at a high-end restaurant cost? $50? Some, like at French Laundry, cost $330 and up. Having one extraordinary experience is worth the app’s price. Why? Because they can afford to have moderators that clean up the content, plus they have hooks into other systems, like Foodspotting and Foursquare, which give them better data.

Anyway, there’s some selfish reasons to pay for apps, too.

1. App developers are watching what platforms make the most money. So, if you want better apps, support the developers and they’ll work on more stuff for you. Otherwise they’ll go work on other platforms that have more customers that’ll pay for apps.

2. It gives you leverage. If they start selling all your private information, you’ll be able to scream about it. People who only use free apps should expect there’s some other business model in play behind the scenes.

3. The quality of the apps is higher when you pay for them. Do you work for free? I don’t. Neither do my cheapskate brothers. Yet they want everything for free. But, who do you think developers will do their best work for? A group of people who spends $5 to $15 on them? Or a group of people who forces them to do unnatural acts like put ads into their apps (which encourages them to sell your privacy down the street)?

Me? I’m a selfish baaassstttarrrrddd. I want the best experiences, and I’ve found the best way to get those is to pay for some apps.

-Your son, Robert