Back in early January, I went to CES and was completely overwhelmed. My constant joke was (and still is) that the so-called booths are big enough to have their own zip code. I took a ton of video footage, convinced I would return home and turn that into a montage that really showed everyone the absolute strangeness of CES.
I failed. I came home, switched out suitcases, and headed back out on the road again pretty soon after returning. However, I discovered a video today from my CES partner-in-crime. I spent most of the event with my friend Jason Griffey, who is Head of Library IT at the University of Tennessee Chattanooga. He’s in the midst of planning a new library building, and the place is going uber-digital. (Someday I should get him to write a post here on digital libraries.) Jason managed to put his own CES montage together and that’s what I’m dropping here.
Enjoy the oddness, the hugeness, and the just plain silly at CES 2010:
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Cheers!
Tweet Michelle @writetechnology, send her technology news at michelle[at]writetech[dot]net, visit her wine blog when you’re thirsty, and drop by her day job.
As part of my job, I spend a lot of time researching blogs and bloggers that would be interested in a variety of topics including everything from politics to magic. There are an amazing amount of blogs out there and every now and again, I stumble across a blog that is a true gem.
Radicalparenting.com is site that approached parenting from a different perspective, the teenagers. A blog only makes up a portion of the site with those posts covering everything from teen trends to building confidence in teens. In addition to the blog portion of the site there are videos and other resources so parents and teens can get a little closer to being on the same page. Finding a way to bridge the communication gap between parents and teens is a challenge, with RadicalParenting making that gap a little smaller.
Vanessa Van Petten, author and founder of RadicalParenting.com, was kind enough to answer a few questions for the Bub.blicio.us audience. A teen herself when she began to explore the teen mentality, is 24 years old and provides a unique perspective on parenting by providing an opportunity for teens and their parents to connect through the social web.
What inspired you to create Radicalparenting.com?
I wanted to hear the teen voice in all of the parenting blogs out there. What did teens think about their behavior and what parents should do.
Who is the primary audience of your blog?
Parents of tweens and teens.
What type of feedback have you received from teens and their parents?
We have had an amazing response with over 200,000 reading the blog and we get applications for inters every week!
Where do you see Radicalparenting.com going in the next few years?
We plan to have even more teen writers to give them a voice and hopefully a few partnerships to expand our webinar and ebook offers.
As someone who is neither a teen or a parent, it’s interesting to read through issues and topics that are important to teens and how much that demographic has evolved since I was a teen and will continue to evolve. During my teen years, I would have loved having a resource like this so I wouldn’t have to explain to my parents what a Facebook wall is or what LOL means, I would just direct them to this site and roll my eyes (yep, I was an eye roller as a teen). There are also great opportunities for teens to participate in the site as a contributer and intern.
Have any Friday Find recommendations? Email me at stephanie@future-works.com
I spent a lot of time at CES in the eBook pavilion, looking at the various options. While I found most of the hardware to be knockoffs of the popular Kindle and Sony lines, there were one or two that caught my eye.
I got to take a look at the Alex from SpringDesign on Thursday, offsite at a traditional Italian restaurant called Piero’s. In retrospect, while I enjoyed the Italian lunch, this wasn’t the best place to host the event. The lighting was incredibly dark and the ceilings were low, leading to poor photo, video, and sound. But I did my best.
Alex is a dual-screen Android-based eReader and it fully integrates web browsing and reading. The 3.5″ color lower LCD screen on the Alex browses the web, but also allows you to manage your library. SpringDesign has announced deals with Borders and several other content providers. The neatest thing, for me, about Alex was the ability to pull a web page from the small (color) bottom screen to the large top 6″ eInk screen. You lose the color, but you gain in size. The Alex browser and virtual keyboard provide access to email, calculator and will accommodate a growing number of programs from the Google Android community.
Alex can connect with WiFi, 3G, EVDO/CDMA and GSM. It will cost $399 and be released on Feb 22 on the SpringDesign web site.
Below you’ll find a dark and loud video, 10 minutes, of the Alex demo’d at the Piero’s luncheon.
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Cheers!
Tweet Michelle @writetechnology, send her technology news at michelle[at]writetech[dot]net, visit her wine blog when you’re thirsty, and drop by her day job.
Yesterday at CES, Plastic Logic debuted the QUE ebook reader. This is more than just an ebook reader however; it borders on personal organizer.
Squarely aimed at type-A CEOs, the device comes in at $649 for the 4GB model with wifi and $799 for the 8GB model with wifi and AT&T 3G. The QUE is oversized, more like the Kindle DX than the Kindle 2. They demo the device with several business publications loaded, including the Wall Street Journal and the Harvard Business Review. Plastic Logic has a content deal with Barnes & Noble.
The design is absolutely gorgeous. QUE design was inspired by a piece of paper. The size of a pad of paper, about 1/3 inch thick, and weighing less than many periodicals (about a pound), QUE features a 10.7-inch shatterproof plastic display—the largest display in the industry. The display screen is rimmed with a shiny black frame. It’s gorgeous, but I suspect it would attract fingerprints – a small complaint really.
The QUE does more than just read newspapers and books. The screen displays your latest emails and calendar, pulled from Outlook. It also displays your favorite subscriptions and books so that you can access those with one touch instead of moving to a Table of Contents screen. In the midst of all this is also the content you are reading. With one touch, you can move from the Organizer style home screen to your content.
When we asked what formats the QUE supported, I laughed. This device is so geared at business that the rep told us “Word, Powerpoint, and Excel.” Upon further inquiry, she added GIF, JPG, PNG, BMP, TXT, and HTML as well as RTF, Visio, PDF, and ePub. (Right now, I’m almost positive that the Kindle is the only eReader on the market that does not support ePub. Get with the program Amazon – time for another firmware update.)
The QUE is a beautiful device. They clearly put a lot of effort into everything from the design to the one-touch navigation. However, I don’t think it will make a dent in the ever-growing ereader market. From what I saw at CES, only the Alex ebook reader really had some features that can compete with the Kindle, the Nook, and Sony. The QUE is aimed at an affluent, niche market. It’s lovely, but for us average folks, it’s not really practical.
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Cheers!
Tweet Michelle @writetechnology, send her technology news at michelle[at]writetech[dot]net, visit her wine blog when you’re thirsty, and drop by her day job.
I attended the LG press conference at CES this morning. LG has a lot of cool things coming down the pike – everything you’ve been hearing about such as 3D and wireless/broadband ready televisions, a revised Chocolate phone, and more. But really, I could only see those things on PowerPoint slides since I haven’t yet visited their booth for a hands-on experience.
But LG also showed off an advertising campaign designed to get teenagers to think before they text. “Give it a ponder.” Ideally, the campaign will keep teenagers from sexting or spreading gossip via their mobile phones.
The Give it a Ponder site is similar to the Skittles site, where there isn’t much actual content. It links to Facebook, YouTube, and Wikipedia (where it defines cyber bullying or mobile harassment). It is the YouTube videos,starring James Lipton, that wer shown in the press conference and really caught my eye. One of them is embedded below. What do you think? Does it get a serious message across in a way that still delivers humor?
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Cheers!
Tweet Michelle @writetechnology, send her technology news at michelle[at]writetech[dot]net, visit her wine blog when you’re thirsty, and drop by her day job.
