Kurt Shintaku's Blog

Check this out.  I found a bunch of old photos that I never actually published the to the web site because of all the chaos that happened after CES occurred.  Hope you enjoy some of these:

Pioneer’s Project Kuro
What the heck is Project Kuro?  Funny you should ask because while I was at CES, that was the exact question I asked everyone while I was there.  No one would tell me.  Or they were too busy talking to someone with more clout or more coin to be bothered with lil’ ol’ me.

I mean, seriously:  Can you tell what Project Kuro is?  Clearly it has something to do with the display being shown but what’s the big deal?  Yes, it was a nice display and all and the black areas really were very “black” as opposed to having a whiteish glaze that many plasma displays are prone to do.

But it took until I LEFT CES to find out what the big deal was.  You can’t tell from the photo’s angle however these “Kuro” plasma displays are, like, 1 inch thin.  This is approaching the thinness of OLED displays – except these displays were colossal in size, while being light enough and thin enough to be hung easily on a wall without monstrous supports.

Sharp’s Aquos 108” LCD TV
And then there’s Sharp’s monstrosity, the 108” LCD TV. 

Even I have to admit – I don’t know what I’d do with that size of a TV.  As it stands my 65” is a little big for our Living Room and believe you me, our Living Room is pretty large for a condo.

In reality though, the Sharp 108” was dwarfed in technological superiority and size by the colossus they called…

Panasonic’s 150” Plasma Display
This thing was so huge, it had it’s own zip code.  The bald guy in the photo was permanently on stage talking constantly about the display. 

It apparently sells for something like $200,000 and the speaker strutted around the stage answering questions with an a oddly superior and arrogant attitude.  Feh – yeah, like that dude owned one of these at home.  Not.

All attitude aside, the display was sexy.  Just questionable as to who the hell has the space for one of these.  Clearly Shaquille O’Neal maybe but who else?

iRobot Vacuum Booth
This was weird.  Maybe I’m a little bias because I like these things and think they’re immensely useful but I found iRobot’s booth uninspired, unexciting, and lacking an any traffic whatsoever. 

Which is sad because as any of my close friends will tell you, I think the iRobot vacuum is one of the only things I’ve bought in the past year or so that I thought was really really cool.  I mean we’re talking Slingbox cool.

But alas, they had no announcements, no show deals, no special add-ons.  Just the same ol’ overpriced vacuums that I was planning on waiting until they arrived at Costco to pick them up at a 30% discount.

Powercast Wireless Power
Now this was different.  What you’re looking at is the Powercast Wireless Power transmission booth and the black “meter” you see in the back was a power receiver.  The folks from Powercast have created this low level power transmission technology that essentially allows people to recharge devices wirelessly.  This includes PDAs, phones, LED/LCD powered display devices, and other small consumer electronics. 

The wattage supplied changes depending on the distance between the transmitter and the device receiving the power.  The demonstration explicitly showed the diminishing strength of the electricity being provided depending on the distance involved – whereas direct contact, such as putting the device directly on a surface like a charging table, provides maximum charge.

SlingMedia’s Booth
The makers of Slingbox frankly didn’t have much to show that was new, albeit their booth – while it was way in the boonies of CES, was really really beautiful in a 70’s sort of motif.

The one thing I saw was the Sling Catcher, a IPTV like device that receives signals from Slingboxes on your network.  It also however allows you to playback video stored on USB hard drives that you connect to the Slingcatcher as well as any video that you can play back on your over a network.

And it’s now August and the Slingcatcher is still not available so it kinda remains to be seen if this thing ever materializes.

Streambox Mobile Video Encoder
This technology got quite a bit of exposure when someone from a major network (I think it was CBS) had a reporter that had an eyewitness account that he filmed while on location using his Palm Treo 700wx running Windows Mobile. 

The video was broadcast live from his device over a cellular network to his network’s TV broadcast and shown on TV as he shot the entire thing himself. 

What made the event so unique was that the incident was a fire and explosion that had happened so quickly that the entire thing was over by the time others were on the scene.