I am back from the CES show with my initial observations:
- Bring a good pair of walking shoes, you are going to walk until exhaustion..
- Be careful when taking pictures…only the press can take photos in some places (learned that one the hard way). UPDATE: Apparently I’m not the only one irked by this.
- Two cups of coffee cost $6.70 (classic supply and demand).
- Everyone was talking about the iPhone. Macs ability to build buzz is quite amazing…even when they’re not at the show.
- Expect lots and lots and lots of people.
- If you are not there to do business, it’s actually probably easier to follow the show via CNET’s CES Buzz Blog
Back to my original question in the previous blog entry about small business and whether or not it has a place at CES. I would say yes and no.
- There definitely were a healthy amount of small businesses there with creative ideas. Dopi Karaoke is one of our clients at Pelago and they were at the Sands Expo. They fit the CES very nicely.
- There were a lot of productivity type products there that perfectly fit small business. For example:
- Low cost and easy to setup home offices
- Network attached storage devices- such as Netgear’s network attached storage device. I’ve worked in and around a lot of small business and their data backup and management is often terrible. It’s becoming easier and easier to backup critical data without having IT skills.
- Remote access to the office
- Mobile devices that do more and more and do things better. We have become reliant on handhelds and they just keep getting better and more advanced. We currently use Blackberry’s and Cingular’s 8125. As handhelds become more advanced I believe they help small business communicate better internally and service clients better.
- Devices to create marketing materials in house (videos, product demos, CD’s, print materials, etc.) are all very accessible to small business. This isn’t new to this year, but the volume of products out there is impressive.
Obviously this is an event for the big boys to break out their latest and greatest, but there are a lot of nuggets for small business. The challenge is sifting through all of the information and thinking creatively about how to fit the things in that make the biggest impact.
-Michael
