Business in the large cap tech world always makes a running start in the new year thanks to the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. I’ve never actually been myself on the basis that I can think of few quicker ways to undermine your professional demure than to have to ask for approval for a business trip to Vegas.
Can you imagine the raised eyebrows? You might as well be asking for tickets to the Playboy Mansion and a magnum of Grey Goose.
Idiot box
This is proving to be a perennial problem, since there are five or six decent events there each year. It seems that in America, Las Vegas is considered a perfectly reasonable destination for middle aged geeks to spend a working week.
They probably get home and take the family straight to Hooters for dinner. Anyway, my colleague went last year and was overwhelmed and unimpressed.
Flat screens were a breakthrough with utility; curved screens are not.
This year for the third year running the message emanating from the LV Convention Center concerns TVs. We had 3D several years ago (fail), ultra HD/4K last year (fail?) and this year giant 3D UHD TVs with curved screens (fail!)
If it aint broke…
The sad reality for manufacturers is that, at least regards the hardware, TVs are a problem that has been largely solved.
They can make then lighter and thinner and, if they wish, more densely packed with pixels despite the human eye’s general inability to detect clarity above 1080p HD for anything approaching normal size sets.
But the halcyon days of flat screen LCDs breaking under £1000 just at the time when banks were issuing credit cards like toys in cereal boxes, are not to return.
A friend of mine still has his 40″ CRT set and it weighs a whopping 85kg. Flat screens were a breakthrough with utility; curved screens are not.
Box-free
Of course, what the world would really take to is a properly smart TV. Like, when can I lose my Sky box but still watch Sky Sports, rent movies from iTunes, watch Netflix, pause/rewind/record, and catch up with iPlayer/4OD etc all in one set and no boxes?
That, I suspect, would sell. Alas, it seems to be some distance away. Steve Jobs, when asked about the future of Apple TV called it a Tower of Babel problem and three years later not much appears to have changed.
Back it up
Whilst we wait for geniunely interesting developments in these areas, at Cedilla we intend to spend the year focused on more fundamental areas like hard disk drives and computer memory (DRAM).
Sexy it ain’t. Then again if you’ve seen the latest Seagate 5mm half terabyte drive you might disagree.
Is Snapchat a model for future apps?
But if the proliferation of data is to continue, it will need to be stored somewhere. Gartner suggests there might be a substantial shortfall in capacity coming, as much as 275,000 petabytes or 50% of production by next year.
In the one dimensional world of the City, rising prices will be the focus, but what about more profound questions such as whether we need to keep all this data?
Is Snapchat a model for future apps? Should we start to draw a line between storage cupboards and ephemeral social interactions in the online world?
Storage space
At this stage we do not have the answers but by the end of the year the HDD shortage will force us to be much more engaged with the issues.
TV’s could get slicker, rounder, and better-looking, but these aesthetic tweaks are diverting attention from the biggest consumer need of our time: more storage space.