Midway through the event I ran into Gary Shapiro, who reminded me he is the president and chief executive of the Consumer Electronics Association, not the executive director as I called him earlier. (Oops). He told me that things look good for the show and he really didn’t mean to imply (as he said in our earlier interview) that attendance would be measurably down. He said the show is likely to draw 130,000 attendees, but that’s the estimate they give out every year because they really don’t know what will happen. He assumes they will take some hit from the recession compared to the 141,000 attendees of last year, but so far things look good, he says. Somehow, I don’t think he’s going to get a bigger crowd than last year. We’ll find out later in the week, although audited numbers will come much later.
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The radio gets its music streamed in real time via a Bluetooth connection from the radio to your 3G cell phone. I’m not sure it’s going to work, given the spottiness of 3G coverage in the U.S. But you have to give them credit for trying something ambitious. The Blaupunkt guy told me that if you’re speeding fast, you’ll need higher bandwidth to make sure the radio reception doesn’t get choppy. There may be a reason no one’s tried Internet radio in the car before, but if it works, it’s going to change the landscape for players like XM Sirius satellite radio.
It will cost $349 to $399 in the U.S. when it ships in the second half of the year. There will be two versions, one that occupies a single radio deck in a car and another that occupies two. It’s not clear whether Blaupunkt will charge a subscription fee or will make the service available for free.
On the plane, I sat next to Dhaval Ajmera, an executive vice president from Verismo Networks, a Mountain View, Calif.-based company with a pretty cool VuNow set-top box that brings all sorts of Internet video into the TV. Verismo has 70 employees and is privately funded. It isn’t seeking money at the moment; rather, it’s trying to generate some revenue first through sales of its $99 and $149 set-top boxes, which compete head to head with boxes from Roku but offer much more than just Netflix’s selection of 10,000 movies. Verismo has all sorts of content, from YouTube to CinemaNow movies.
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Tomorrow, check back in this space for reports from all of the big company press conferences, starting with LG in the morning and going through to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer’s keynote speech in the evening. I’ll be covering most of it.
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