I posted this earlier today on Facebook. The reaction was overwhelming.
Adam Levine, Maroon 5, stopped by the HandL booth at CE Week to say hello to me. He is such a doll. Wants me to be a judge.
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Tag Archives: CE Week
CE Reunion At CE Week
After weeks and weeks of planning, 50-plus consumer electronics veterans got together to celebrate our careers and relationships. Some of us know each other almost 50 years.
We held the event at CE Week, a trade show in the consumer electronics business. Event organizers Eric Schwartz and Robin Raskin provided the lounge area at the Metropolitan Pavilion in NYC. Thank you again.
It was so much fun to watch old friends greet each other. Some of us havent’t see each other for decades. A few cried. Everyone hugged. We all went home feeling a little bit more connected.
The World We Live In
My long time friend, Dick Krain, who was a big time executive at Grey Advertising for 30 plus years, sent me this video today because we always share interesting information. I just finished watching it. It is so exciting that we are living in a time when things occur at Internet speed.
Many of us think the possibility of Donald Trump becoming President of the United States is absolutely ridiculous. One mystery: how does he produce productive, level-headed children?
Meet The Next Larry Page and Sergey Brin 
I met these two teenagers, ages 16 and 14, at CE Week today, a mini CES convention. They were among a handful of students who won awards for their digital inventions. When I asked them who they were, they answered “innovators.” Remember these two Dwight High School students. They have a technology that will allow you to attach a gizmo to your glasses and read everything people are mumbling. The timing couldn’t be more perfect for someone like me who misses a lot of words in loud restaurants. Bravo to these two unusual youngsters.
Forget Me Not
The smallest booth at CE Week received the most attention. A tiny accessory called the ChargerLeash will prevent you from forgetting to take your charging cable out of the wall socket after your device is unplugged.
Many folks leave charging cables in hotel rooms, public areas, and in the homes of friends after they have powered up their mobile devices.
ChargerLeash features a small branded box in the center of the cable that will sound an alarm within five seconds if you forget to unplug your charger. First you connect the ChargerLeash to your mobile device and then plug it into your charging cord.
It is that simple.
The ChargerLeash is great for travelers who recharge their mobile devices in public outlets. No more thieves walking away with your phone without you being alerted. You will also never leave your power source behind in a hotel room. Buzz buzz.
The ChargerLeash is $34.99. If you think it’s expensive, remember it could save you plenty of money buying replacement charging cables in the future.
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ChargerLeash is now available on Amazon.
A Stand That Keeps Me Lying Down
Photo by DigiDame.
I’ll bet you think I'm sitting up while typing this post. Wrong. I'm lying down in my usual position. Ever since we gave up our physical office, I tend to hang out in bed more. I am totally comfortable diving right into my work early each morning without going through the daily rituals required when you leave the house.
I'm actually on my back right now as I type away. I'm holding my iPhone with my right hand and my left hand is clicking the keys. All this may change now that I saw the Tablift at CE Week.The Tablift by nbryte was designed to hold a smartphone or tablet for the person who likes to hang out on the couch or in bed.
The Tablift folks said most smartphones and tablets get 80% of their use in bed. The newly designed stand allows you to use your tablet in these places completely hands-free.
Learn more about The Tablift by clicking here.
The Tablift will be available on Amazon in a few weeks at $59.95.
Where Did These Kids Come From?
This start up tells big institutions like schools how much energy they are using each month and how to cut back.
This startup has an app that eliminates the need for a key to your home or office. You can now do it all remotely.
This startup has a music app that motivates you to do a more strenuous workout.
This startup as a monitor for you to check your dog’s health when you are away from home.
Want to stay young? Mingle with youngsters in their 20s or 30s involved in startups, especially in the tech industry. Today, I met up with a bunch of them at CE Week in NYC. I don’t remember this league of people when I was growing up, but there seems to a proliferation of young entrepreneurs every week.
When I was in my 20s, we finished school and got a job. I didn’t have friends, or friends of friends, who had a dream and got subsidized by family or outside investors until they managed to develop a revenue stream that they could live on. The usual protocol in my time was that you saved enough money to support yourself until you could to strike out on your own.
I am not sure when everything changed, but now an increasing number of kids want to be their own boss and carve out their own niche. This year alone I must have personally met 75 young founders at different startups where they had an idea and somehow, somewhere, got enough people to help support them with finances and services like housing, food, supplies, and tons of connections until they could make it on their own.
One day I really want to do a piece on how these kids manage to survive. It doesn’t matter if they have rich parents, convince money people to fund them, or work at a car wash on weekends. They all have a talent to make it happen. We will explore more about this in future posts.
It is fascinating to go behind the scenes and explore their voyages.
Control Factor
Very few people have ever seen what I am about to show you. I came across this development at the recent CE Week. This technology, from Force Innovations, will soon be incorporated into electronic gizmos for your lights, appliances, and other home furnishings. Force Innovations is a gesture and speech-enabled automation and integration company from Jacksonville, Florida.
Here is a demo that will show you how you will control your environment without traditional appliances. You are just going to wave your hands.
Click here to see the video I took.
Click here to see the corporate video.
How Qwerty Is This?
To all of you who have aches and pains from typing on a keyboard all day, good news is on the way. Ray Mc Enaney, owner of BeeRaider, came all the way from Ireland to CE Week to introduce a radical new keyboard design that challenges the dominance of the QWERTY standard. The QWERTY keyboard was first introduced in the late 19th century for mechanical typewriters.
Ray says it is time for a change. The new design is considered to be especially relevant for portable devices including smartphones, tablets, netbooks and laptop devices. The first Radial Keyboard is available for all Android users. Other formats are in the works.
The new Radial Keyboard design follows several fundamental guidelines. The aim is to produce a design that would result in:
- A keyboard that would be more logical, ergonomic and efficient
- A reduction in user familiarization-time
- An improvement in a user’s data-entry keying-speed
- A reduction in the keyboard’s footprint size
As a point of information, the QWERTY layout was developed in an effort to solve a peculiar typing problem with mechanical typewriters. Whenever a typist began to type too fast, the previously pressed key jammed with the next key pressed and the wrong character was printed. The solution was to lay out the QWERTY keyboard’s alpha-character keys in such a way as to slow down a user’s typing speed. And in case you never noticed, the alpha-characters for spelling the word “TYPEWRITER” are deliberately placed on the top row of the QWERTY keyboard so that salespeople selling typewriters could easily demonstrate their typing proficiency by quickly typing this word to impress potential customers.
Unique selling points for the Radical design according to Ray:
- Optimized alpha-character layout based on each character’s frequency of use in the English language. Will achieve greater typing speeds
- Logical, more efficient ergonomic layout with a familiar user-friendly bee outline that anyone can readily relate to (especially children)
- Testing shows that the keyboard’s alpha-character layout can be easily memorized in as little as 10 to 20 minutes. Becoming a touch-typist is a possibility for everyone. Remember, most people even after years of using QWERTY, still don’t know where the alpha-keys are located and must look at the keyboard in order to find them when typing
- Much bigger keys for the weaker less dexterous fingers
- Small portable size footprint but still maintaining an acceptable keycap size for its smallest keys.
- It solves the problem of small cramped keys on devices such as Netbooks
- It can be conveniently operated with one or two hands
- It has room for a built-in mouse and cursor-keys or numeric keypad
- It looks like fun
- It reduces the possibility of RSI (Repetitive Strain Injury)
Ray added that the future is about portability, connectivity and wear-ability. ”QWERTY no longer meets the requirements of a modern data-entry keyboard device.”
Ray is in IT support at the Dundalk Institute of Technology.
DigiDame 