Mobitrends

While I was stuck in Houston and struggling to make it on time in Vegas, I guess the French CES club had a great time at the NewYorkNewYork’s steakhouse. Thanks Mathieu for the pics!

Will it blend did live session at CES2009 on the side show “lunch at Piero’s” and blended a tape mesure… pretty hard tech as you can see on the video below.

I met Jeffrey Stephenson at piero’s today and his skills are amazing. He is turning tech into pieces of art, skinning them with crafted wood all hand made on a per-unit basis. His new jewel, the Ingraham, was introduced today at CES. He’s making 5 pieces a year, with a minimum of 5kUSD per piece (depending on custom options) and thus if you want this device to reach your living-room you’d better pre-order fast.

Was pretty sad when the iRobot guys told me that their WiFi-camera-on-a-robot project was terminated lately, apparently after doing field testings it seems to the market was not as they expected and they decided to move back to their core business.

I also learnt today that iRobot is actually making all their money from the military and that the origin of the roomba hoover robots is a military project of a de-mining robot who gave birth to an algorithm that ensures that 100% of a given surface will be walked through… so funny ! Their consumer electronics business is actually barely break-even.

This is called the npower PEG from greenpower. It’s a bit big, but if you have a big girl’s bag you can hook one inside and charge your mobile as you go. Apparently, the device would charge your mobile in under one hour walk. One drawback though, the device has to remain in vertical position to be able to harvest energy efficiently.

Mattel has taken a huge step in CES this year, while competitors have kinda faded out (the wowwee booth for instance is empty and not showing anything really exciting). But Mattel has come up with exciting new products that really blowed me away.

First for little girls, they have the “F.A.M.P.S”, made of a starter kit (14,99USD) which holds a RFID reader and a famp and additional famps at 4,99USD… From a technical point of vue it’s exactly the same as Violet’s mirror, only they came up with a cool environment where girls can use their cute little famps to convey emotions during chat sessions with their buddies. For instance, I’m mad, I get the red famp and by putting inside the reader’s circle automatically I’ll be typing in red bold font and in caps. And they have a really girly easy-to-use interface to associate actions to their famps.
It’s cheap, it’s cute, it’s fun, I love it !

For little boys now, they have released the funkeys who are kind of lower tech in my opinion, but just as fun. The core package retails at 24,99USD has a USB hub funkey where you can plug a funkey on top of the head, and additional funkeys come at 9,99USD. What’s impressive about funkeys is that they are totally bound to an online game where kinds can design funny 2D scrolling games with assets being unlocked through the buying of additional funkeys. Once again, universe is really cute and seems a lot of fun !

It’s impressive to see how Mattel has evolved towards those kind of “gadgets” and designed coherent univers and reasonable use-cases based on dead-simple devices. Kudos !

PogoPlug is here at CES demonstrating their upcoming (March) product which from my point of view is the best I’ve ever seen in that category. Basically it’s a fairly easy concept, a tiny (and a bit ugly – even Jed the VP of Products could not disagree on that one) box that you power upu, connect your USB drive, a network cable to your home router, and that’s it, your drive is available.
You can access it either through an smooth Ajax web interface hosted by pogoplg where you can browse your content just like it it were local, indeed the box has an embedded processor to help with on-the-fly data processing to save your limited tiny upload bandwidth while keeping the experience optimum. If you prefere, a small deamon can run on your PC and mount the drive just like if it were local.
The real difference here comes from the software which is really amazing compared to what other vendors such as Netgear, LaCie or Linksys have been providing. The whole experience is really smooth and simple which is what an end-user is looking for.
The box will be retailed at 79USD and reminds me a lot of the RiiMOTE project we used to work on. Preorder will be up soon on their website.

Like each year, it’s always good to get a morning coffee with the flamingos living in the patio! Can’t help it, like nature ! (even when it’s grown-ups Disneyland style).