My Favorite Booth at CES 2011

The South Hall Lower Level at the Las Vegas Convention Center was filled with sounds like I imagine it would be like if everyone carried boom boxes instead of iPods. Every imaginable musical noise, and some not so musical, emanated from aptly named booths such as Earthquake Sound Corporation, Zound Industries, Sonic Emotion, and Skull Candy. But one booth usually only produced a faint scratching and jingling din. That would be the Gibson guitar booth, where there would always be a dozen or so smiling guitar players wearing clunky headphones emanating from black boxes attached to electric guitars. "Picking and grinning" may be a trite expression, but it was happening continually at booth 20949. I joined them a few times (maybe more) myself, not being able to resist the re-creations of the legendary Les Pauls and the amazing self-tuning, bluetooth-enabled Firebird. Gibson bought a lot of other products, aside from the demos, and shared the booth with corporate stable mates Wurlitzer, Dobro, Epiphone, and others, but I could never get past the those guitars. Maybe next year.

CES 2011

Freshbaked and the Baseball Observer will be at CES starting January 4th. Watch this space for a running commentary along with tweets and re-tweets to the left on this page. What will the electronics industry come up with after the introduction of 3D HDTV at last year's show? Maybe a bigger question will be what can all of Apple's competitors do to counter the iPad? Will Microsoft finally come up with something to make them relevant again? These and other questions may be answered, but maybe not.

Acronyms for Scrum

Everyone thinks Scrum is an acronym anyway, so we might as well come up with one that works. There must be some out there already, but I can't find them, so please let me know if you run across any and I will publish the links here. Let's start with a few off the top of my head:
Scientific Catalytic Revolutionary Uplifting Meetings
Speeding Confusion Relying on Useless Methods
Society for Creating Really Ugly Messes
Sailing Can Rarely Uphold Meaning
Soporific Conversation that is Really Uninteresting and Mundane
Scrums Consist of Rapid Ugly Meetings
Speedy Conversations Relating Useless Memories
Slowly Consuming RUM
Standing, Contemplating, Relating, Understanding, Movement

Colorado Businesses At CES 2010

Surprisingly, there are only 28 businesses at CES who list their home office address as being within the borders of the state of Colorado, or somewhere between 1 and 2 percent. Even more interesting, for all its high-tech pretensions, most of the firms from Colorful Colorado would not be described as "high tech" by most observers. Examples are a multitude of firms manufacturing traditional stereo equipment, a massage chair manufacturer, and two carrying case companies. More to come.