Arguably the biggest draw at this week's international Consumer Electronics Show hasn't been a super-slim television or a super-small computer.
It was Lady Gaga.
A small army of fans crowded around the display area for Monster – a company known best for its cables and that also makes celebrity-branded headphones – to see the pop diva strut her stuff. It wasn't her only stop of the day: The 23-year-old singer/video artist/fashion icon also made an appearance at Polaroid's exhibit, where she was named creative director of the instant photography firm.
Lady Gaga during an announcement of her long term partnership with Polaroid as the brand's creative director on a specialty line of imaging products at the 2010 International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.— Getty Images
After a year of economic gloom, the CES roared to life Thursday with all the hoopla and hyperbole it's known for.
Samsung set up a series of 20-foot-high multi-television displays that together took up as much space as a small apartment. LG hired beautiful women to shoo away non-media photographers from its 6.9-millimetre-thick prototype LED television. An Intel executive described the company's current line of chips as a revolution in computing.
The sprawling trade show of 2,500 exhibitors is known by many as a media spectacle, but there's also millions of dollars of potential business for the taking here every day. Around the floors of the Las Vegas Convention Centre, many people wore badges with titles such as “Government Buyer.” As expected, one of the items most prominently displayed was 3D-TV, with virtually every major manufacturer in the field showcasing a product offering. Sony promoted a varied lineup that included 3D Blu-Ray DVDs and 3D-gaming. LG will begin offering a 3D-ready TV in Canada around March.
According to industry experts here, 3D TV wasn't actually supposed to be as much of a centrepiece product at this year's show as it ended up being. The runaway success of the movie Avatar prompted companies to try to seize the medium's popularity.
CES attendees take photographs of a model as she holds Ed Hardy iPhone covers in the Ed Hardy booth at CES. After year of economic gloom, tech show roared to life with all the bells, whistles and booth babes it's known for.— 2010 Getty Images
The industry still faces an uphill battle to get consumers to buy in to 3D, partly because of the technology itself, which at one point had as many as 70 different standards. But manufacturers have now narrowed that down to essentially two standards – a situation analogous to the Betamax and VHS format wars from decades prior. According to a person familiar with the matter, executives are taking advantage of CES to hold backroom discussions over which technology should become the industry standard, hoping to resolve the situation as soon as possible. A universal standard is key for manufacturers because some consumers tend to avoid making big purchases when there's a chance the technology behind the device may quickly become obsolete.
Across the showroom floors yesterday, companies also continued to blur the lines in the field of mobile computing. A slew of tablets, slate PCs, smart phones and e-readers were on display. When Intel president and chief executive officer Paul Otellini was to give his keynote address last Thursday, he was slated to show off a concept smart phone running on Intel's Atom processor. The demonstration was expected to include playing a high-definition movie and performing other tasks, such as browsing the Web, all on the same screen at the same time.
As mobile devices increasingly overlap in capability and power with PCs, manufacturers are trying to frame such products as complementary to one another, rather than as replacements.
