What I saw in Vegas @ CES

I have had a chance to decompress since my trip last week to Vegas and the Consumer Electronics Show (lots of people ~180,000 folks attended this year). My four hectic, non-stop, seemingly no sleep days in Vegas consisted of waking up at 6am or 7am, grabbing a taxi to another hotel for a breakfast meeting and then another taxi to the convention center (which is like 3 large Jacob Javits centers) and then lunch some days, then drinks at 6, dinner at 7-30, drinks after and exhausted by 11, to sleep by 12 and repeat.

I stayed at the Venetian hotel and discovered the Venice canals, the Circle and the Vbar. I also visited the Paris hotel and Eiffel tower for breakfast, the more modern Cosmopolitan for lunch at Milos and dinner at Jaleo, another dinner at Sushi Samba at the Palazzo, and the Hulu Party at the Bellagio. I skipped both the Google party the first night at Marquee because I was too damn tired, as well as some iHeartRadio concert. Taking cabs was not an easy feat there – it requires waiting on a line for up to 20-30 minutes since there were so many people jetting from one hotel to the other. I am sure there were lots of swanky other events that I was not invited to, and I did not partake in later night /early morning activities like gambling, strip clubs, clubbing, or even the musical or theater extravaganzas. I did not have the energy for all of that because I was working yes.During my 4 days - most all the time was spent indoors walking through smoky casinos into larger bright hallways where I saw endless booths of gadgets - TVs, phones, tablets, lots and lots of phone covers (every color, texture, country origin imaginable) and tech accessories, plus endless types of electric plugs. I was rather disappointed in the lack of freebies, I got nada.. No one was giving away much of anything at least not to me.As I was filming a video for life tracking, my primary focus was in the area of health care and lifestyle gadgets and wearable computing devices that record and optimize daily life, as well as connected and smarter home systems. There is this notion of the 'quantified self' – self-knowledge and improvement through daily tracking via wearable computing technology.I saw lots of interesting companies: a personal weather station by Netatmo, Withings activity and weight tracker, Fit Bit wireless activity tracker and sleep band, earbuds that you can listen to music from while they also track fitness levels, the Habib smart fork that tells you when you are eating too fast, LG intelligent refrigerators that tell you when your food is expiring and let you order more food, home security and energy system controllable through your mobile device (i.e. lets you unlock your doors via phone), a smart pill ubox that lights up/ buzzes/texts you and your family as a reminder to take medication, a smart watch with a small screen from which you can email and answer phone calls, live video capture you can broadcast simultaneously from anywhere, car video tracking (ideal for accident insurance claims), and Robots doing all sort of stuff (most robots seemed to be either entertainment or personal servants to clean your house). I was also really pleased to be able to interview Joe the Editor of Gizmodo for the Life Tracking video.I probably ended up seeing about 20% of the show. I did not have much time to look at all the huge TVs, but I did check out LG’s space that was pretty damn impressive with a massive wall of 3d oled TV screens. They were handing out those 3-d glasses and I felt like I was at the IMAX movie theater. 4K was also a hot buzz word this year - its ultra high definition quality TV - 4x that of current basic standards. The quality is so sharp I wonder if the human retina can handle that on a daily basis without having some sort of extreme fatigue reaction.A few other interesting things I saw: 50Cent and Mike Tyson signing autographs on the convention floor, Bill Clinton was also there talking about phones not guns but I missed that. I was a bit disappointed that most of the women I saw there were the ones standing at the booths doing demos, smiling or crowd pleasing in dresses or other outfits. But I guess that’s often Vegas and the CES is predominantly men.Overall, the phone – whether iPhone or Android or other – was the central point of connectivity for everything – the remote control – the magic wand. The phone turns on the lights, opens your door, records sounds and video, tracks your weight, monitors your daily routines and is the primary interface for almost everything. So mobile was certainly the central core to the show.In any case, I am excited for our Life Tracking video.. it should be out next month – hopefully all the cool stuff I saw I can share.  And the visuals are much better than what i have here.... Spanish vegas restaurant serving chicken fritters in campers.. no so impressive.