“It make you skinny! It make you skinny!” the man shrieks at the assemblage, a phalanx of jiggling rear ends behind him.
Fujiiryoki Medical Instruments MFG Co. Ltd. makes massage chairs and sundry exercise equipment. This year, the brightest star in their product constellation is a vibrating platform, similar in appearance to a StairMaster. The presumably obese user simply has to stand on the platform and watch the fat melt away, in the style of those vibrating belt machines that housewives went so crazy for in the 1950s.
To hammer that point home, the company has hired a couple of beautiful young women in red spandex pants to stand on the machines, facing away from the crowd, their seemingly earthquake-afflicted rumps serving as a kind of illustrative sales pitch.
A Fujiiryoki representative stands beside them, hamming it up for a gaggle of middle-aged men, most of them here on behalf of electronics retailers and myriad small- and big-box stores. The men have embarrassed little grins on their faces and sweat stains around their armpits and cell phone cameras in their hands. It's a safe bet none of them give a damn about Fujiiryoki or its products – this mildly misogynist sideshow is for them a brief respite from the soul-ruining work of wading through row upon endless row of glittery smartphone cases, gold-plated HDMI cables and selfsame iPod docks.
For a week every January, the global technology industry descends on Las Vegas for the Consumer Electronics Show. Born in 1967, CES is the biggest trade show of its kind. Even though it's not officially open to the public, every year the show attracts almost 150,000 industry reps, exhibitors, buyers, analysts, venture capitalists, reporters, celebrities and various hangers-on. More than 3,000 CES exhibitor booths take up about 1.85-million square feet of floor space, most of it within the sprawling Las Vegas convention centre and the nearby Hilton and the Venetian hotel on the Strip.
Every tech company you've ever heard of shows up to CES, but over the years, the definition of “Consumer Electronics” has been expanded to include everything from the New York Times Company to the U.S. Postal Service. Big fish mingle with small; Peruvian media bloggers share happy hour drinks with Silicon Valley angel investors; Justin Bieber drops by to shill for a company that makes dancing robots.
CES is a bloated grotesquerie of hucksters and hype. In a sane world, it wouldn't exist. And yet it's probably never going to die.
The people who put CES together presumably chose Las Vegas because flights here are cheap, it's warm in January and, most importantly, there are enough hotels to accommodate the onslaught of delegates. But the Vegas-ness of Vegas has another indirect effect on the way CES works. With some 3,000 exhibitors all competing for attention during a four-day span, most exhibitors have to figure out some way to attract the attention of showgoers, many of who represent major retail outlets and come armed with chequebooks.
Even though the convention centre at the north end of the Strip isn't nearly as glitzy as the Strip proper, it's still close enough that nothing the exhibitors do by way of publicity stunt can really compare with what's going on all the time in and around the casinos. So when a cloud computing firm populates its booth space with young women in airplane captain's hats and short shorts, or when an headphone-maker hires reality TV phenomenon Snooki as a spokesperson, or when a peripherals company puts three guys in bird costumes has them dance to Lady Gaga's Poker Face for no good reason, nobody bats an eye. This is Vegas.
