ByDon

Dear Friends,

I had a quick trip out to Las Vegas for the Consumer Electronics Show with a bunch of meetings and about as much traveling as show attendance. A bunch of people didn’t make it to the show because of the canceled flights due to weather. Hapy and I made it out to the show without problem, but our flight from Philadelphia to Burlington was canceled on the way home. Since we didn’t want to hang out in the airport for a couple days, we rented a car and drove the 8 hours back home.

This show is huge, and while I was able to see most of the exhibits, there were enormous crowds; getting close to the biggest booths was very hard. There were a lot of TVs, including this massive wall of displays — maybe 30 feet wide — that formed a single high-res 3D wall. I really like the OLED thin TVs, but I wasn’t there for TVs, after all… I saw a number of 3D printers, though, with prices below $1000. They are still not consumer items yet, since they are very, very slow, and the material to make the 3D item is quite expensive. But, they’re getting closer to the replicator on the Starship Enterprise.

The iLounge pavilion and the international pavilion should be named the iPhone and iPad case pavilion as there were literally thousands of varieties of cases. I was able to meet with some of our overseas suppliers, which saves a trip to China. True to trend reports, there was a lot of wearable technology, but the watches seemed clunky and not too versatile. No one has really come up with that useful of an item yet. I did see a few people wearing Google Glass, and that was good for a laugh.

One other technology piece that had me thinking of science fiction was the use of drones. Drones of all sizes, many of them equipped with cameras, were inside and outside of the venue. I was looking at the outside exhibits and noticed a reporter doing a story with a drone flying in front of her face recording the sound and video.

The show was worthwhile to get a sense of trends, and I had some very valuable meetings. My trip was so short that I didn’t even have time to make my annual contribution to the casinos!

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  • Weekly Tech News Recap | 01.17.14

    *Mail Pilot Mail App Now Available*
    A few months ago, I had trouble using Apple Mail on my home computer with Mavericks (“*as did a lot of other people*”:http://www.macrumors.com/2013/10/31/apple-working-on-fix-for-os-x-mavericks-mail-app-issues/), so I researched some alternatives. Mail Pilot looked amazing, but it was still in beta mode and not yet released in the App Store. I signed up to get an email announcing its release, and it happened this week.

    “*Read more about Mail issues in Apple Support…*”:http://support.apple.com/kb/HT6030?viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US
    “*Read more about alternatives in this thread…*”:https://discussions.apple.com/message/24526938?ac_cid=tw123456#24526938
    “*Download Mail Pilot.*”:https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/mail-pilot/id681243952?mt=12&utm_medium=email&utm_source=kibbles&utm_campaign=kibbs ($9.99 for a limited time)

    *Net Neutrality is Dead*
    So, you may have heard…a federal judge ruled the end to net neutrality as we know it. Verizon had challenged the rules that the F.C.C. had implemented (namely that all information be transmitted equally), and ultimately, the ruling went in their favor.

    “*Read more…*”:http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/01/14/the-nuts-and-bolts-of-network-neutrality/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0
    “*And more about the implications here…*”:http://www.huffingtonpost.com/art-brodsky/net-neutrality-is-dead_b_4597310.html

  • ADDENDUM: Streaming Sochi

    In response to my aforementioned article, reader Erik shared an additional way to follow the Games in February, should you be interested. I’ll post it here in its entirety. Thanks, Erik!

    __*Digital over-the-air broadcast television*__
    __”NBC (broadcast locally on WPTZ-TV 5.1) aired more than 5,500 hours of gorgeous 1080i HD Olympic coverage for the 2012 Summer Olympic games, up from 3,600 hours for the 2008 Beijing games.__

    __Naturally, the Winter Olympics are much shorter, but they broadcast 416 hours from Torino in 2006 and 835 from Vancouver in 2010.*__

    __Those of your readers in Canada (for whom your NBC links are irrelevant anyway) can usually watch the Olympics on CBC (English), Ici Radio-Canada Télé (French), and other networks as well — though I don’t know the exact arrangement for 2014. All this is digital over-the-air, too — most of it HD.__

    __Note that you do not need anything called a ‘digital antenna.’ The kind of antenna you do need depends on your local broadcaster and terrain, but an antenna is an antenna; there’s no ‘analog’ or ‘digital.’ In Vermont, WPTZ is a UHF station on the top of Mt. Mansfield; it can be difficult to get in some of the valleys, so an outdoor antenna might be required. You do, of course, need a digital television set or television receiver, or an old analog set with a converter box.__

    __*via__ “*Olympics on NBC Wiki*”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olympics_on_NBC#%20Hours_of_coverage

  • FOLLOW UP: Streaming Sochi (& the Importance of Wording)

    “*Last week,*”:http://blog.smalldog.com/kibbles/kb862/ I wrote about the various ways to watch and engage in the 2014 Olympic coverage. However, after receiving a few emails from readers, I realized that “distraction” was perhaps a poor choice of words.

    The topic of the article was merely about how to follow the 2014 Olympics via the internet, and that reference was just to illustrate the athletes’ readiness for events they train for their whole lives. It was in no way meant to minimize the humans rights violations in Russia and I didn’t intend any offense or trivialization. I am acutely aware of how egregious these are.

    Here at Small Dog, we are huge advocates of LGBT rights — it’s a __human__ rights issue, after all — and we often write about these issues in other articles. As Kibbles & Bytes readers (especially long-term ones), I know you’re familiar with Don’s Soapboxes. Even though he gets flack for it from time to time, he isn’t shy about mixing pet causes and beliefs with business to bring awareness and authenticity. It’s at the core of our brand to speak about what we believe in, and human rights are at the top of the list.

    I sympathize with the athletes put in this position; they have a chance to participate in something that has likely been a lifelong dream (or at the very least, a rare opportunity), so I respect the decisions that they’ve made to continue on. As illustrated by an “*IOC member’s comments yesterday,*”:http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/ioc-s-mario-pescante-slams-u-s-for-gay-athletes-in-sochi-1.2498901 support may feel in short supply, so the best thing that we can do as spectators is to support their efforts. I sincerely hope that the controversy surrounding these Games brings enough awareness that facilitates change.

  • HTML5 and the Future of the Web

    You don’t have to be a nerd to know that HTML is something to do with computers. Maybe you even know it’s an acronym that stands for “Hypertext Markup Language” but did you know the HTML standards we use today have been around since the early 1990s? That’s an eternity in computer years.

    Naturally, things have changed a bit since then, but remarkably, HTML (currently standardized on version 4 since 1997) has remained very much the same as it was back then. That is, until now.

    Starting in 2008, and hopefully wrapping up in the next year or two, HTML version 5 has been under development. This will mean many very cool things coming to the internet as well as how you experience the web, especially for users of mobile devices like the iPhone and iPad.

    While HTML5 isn’t the standard yet, most browsers (including Safari on iOS devices) already support many of its features. One of the biggest things HTML5 supports is multimedia. In the past, if you wanted to display audio, or video, you needed to use something like Adobe’s Flash. Support for this on most mobile devices, including Apple devices, has been poor or nonexistent.

    With multimedia features in HTML5, flash is a thing of the past. Audio and video can be embedded on pages in much the same way that images are now. This allows your device to be much smarter about what it does with the content, and this translates to a much better experience for you when you’re viewing that content. It won’t matter if you’re looking at something on your computer or your iPad, either. The experiences will be virtually identical.

    HTML5 also promises to provide for a much richer experience on the web with support for things like a canvas that allows amazingly high quality 2-D and 3-D graphics rendering right inside your browser! And again, this will all work on any device. It also supports embedded vector graphics, which can allow for a level of interactivity with graphics that just isn’t possible with previous versions HTML. There are already plenty of amazingly creative demos of these new features out there. It’s exciting to see all the things people come up with using these new features.

    The takeaway here is that with mobile devices becoming more ubiquitous and more powerful, web standards have had to keep up. With HTML5, the standards are actually starting to lead the devices a bit. As mobile computing power converges with these new standards, the web will be in for some big changes.

  • The January thaw and rain has caused some of the ski areas to close temporarily, but it is snowing today and the temperatures are again falling. So, this season akin to Indian Summer in its shortness and abnormal weather is over.

    Grace is off visiting friends in Phoenix so I will be able to watch the football games this weekend and basically just stay close to the fire and perhaps read some science fiction so I know what technology might be at next year’s CES.

    Thanks for reading this issue of Kibbles & Bytes!

    Your Kibbles & Bytes team,
    _Don, Kali & Stephanie_