I Came Not to Be Buried by CES, But to Be Dazed by It
[Philip Lelyveld comment: Kara Swisher wrote an excellent color piece on CES 2014.]
In the vast halls of the Las Vegas Convention Center, where giant televisions or radios or computers were constantly blaring, with no real sound discernible over the massive cacophony. After several days, it felt like a low-level headache, an endless buzz of very loud nothing.
I don’t pretend to hate it, because I do not, despite the noise, the crowds, the endless come-ons by PR people trying to sell a story where there often is not one. I’ll bite enough times, of course, because it’s part of the game to find meaning, a pattern, some sort of sense in what has been put on display in the latest incarnation of CES.
This year the big theme emerged almost immediately: Wearables. There is, of course, no CES without a major meme to chew over, to ponder with graveness, to pundit about by people who are frequently wrong, but never ever in doubt.
And is it hard to forget the endless kickline of tweeting refrigerators? There was a new one this year again, from South Korea’s LG Electronics. It was offering a service it called HomeChat, using the popular messaging app in Japan called Line. Using it, you can apparently communicate with your home appliances.
Let me spell it out for you here: No one wants to talk to the toaster — or at least very often.
Read the full article here: http://recode.net/2014/01/12/i-came-not-to-be-buried-by-ces-but-to-be-dazed-by-it/?curator=MediaREDEF