It’s CES time. Let the excesses begin.
NASCAR opens its season with the equivalent of its Super Bowl, the Daytona 500. So does tech. The Consumer Electronics Show, which this year opens Tuesday and runs through Friday, is a loud, proud – some might argue shrill, Fellini-esque – opener to the tech season. It’s also a tapestry of Americana: long lines, over-the-top press conferences with outsize boasts, all-you-can-eat Vegas buffets and late-night debauchery.
It’s all about gonzo excess: too much booze, smoke, noise, shimmering lights, overindulgence, superficiality. Where else can you announce, year after year, the imminent rise of 4K television – and expect to get the same fawning press coverage?
“I do it because it is necessary to meet people and see products; it gets the handshaking out of the way for the year,” says blogger Brian Lam, who has attended (survived?) 13 CES shows. This week will be his 14th.
As they have before, the masses – more than 150,000 this week – will descend on the usual spots: the Venetian, the Encore, the Hilton. As always, they are unlikely to see the sun.
CES 2015 is about the latest in tech wizardry, dueling press conferences and, most of all, patience. Attendees steel themselves to race from one indoor location to another, while navigating interminable taxi lines. It’s also about blind capitalistic ambition and bombastic personalities.
“But our trip was different. It was a classic affirmation of everything right and true and decent in the national character,” Hunter S. Thompson wrote in his groundbreaking work,
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
The Consumer Electronics Show, which this year opens Tuesday and runs through Friday, is a loud, proud ... opener to the tech season.
“It was a gross, physical salute to the fantastic possibilities of life in this country — but only for those with true grit. And we were chock full of that.”
Thompson added, “A week in Vegas is like stumbling into a Time Warp, a regression to the late fifties.”
Thompson typed those words while on a monumental bender in 1972, but what he thought (and hallucinated) remains largely true today.
Indeed, it’s beginning to look a lot like the booming 1950s in Vegas these days. A record 40 million tourists visited the city in 2014, breaking a five-year recession lull. Spending is up among visitors. A slumping housing market in a metropolitan area of 2 million people is showing signs of recovery after being hit especially hard by a flood of foreclosures.
The Downtown Vegas project, an ambitious $350 million bet by Zappos.com CEO Tony Hseih to remake the city’s dilapidated downtown area, is slowly making progress.
“Vegas is back,” says Jonathan Galaviz, partner at Global Market Advisors, an economic consultant focused on the travel-leisure sector. “Tech is helping redefine the brand of the city from strictly gambling to a cosmopolitan-metropolitan area.”
For that reason, the tech world – Samsung Electronics, Sony, Cisco Systems and IBM to name a handful of the 3,200 exhibiting vendors – flocks here. Sure, garish displays of 100-inch TV screens abound and scantily clad women act as bait to entice unsuspecting types to sit through a 15-minute demo of some obscure app. Yet there is a method to the madness.
Beyond the shiny things and in-your-face marketing bravado, there is undeniable value off the show floor and in back rooms, where deals are often struck, say tech executives such as Adam Cahan, vice president of mobile at Yahoo.
“It’s a good opportunity to have touch point across a diverse audience: (hardware manufacturers), content providers, developers, advertisers, operators,” says Cahan, explaining why the Internet media giant has had a presence at CES for about a decade. Last year, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer gave a keynote speech.
The show – with all its warts (my words) – is essential to “reach key constituents,” Cahan says.
And what a kaleidoscope of people it is – a national convention of sorts for Geek Nation. Leave the last word to Thompson: “When the going gets weird,” he wrote in Fear and
Loathing, “the weird turn pro.”