Blog

With our marketing folks busy entertaining various media reps and sales people chatting up the prospective clients, I managed to make a quick escape to check out the rest of the Sands Expo convention hall. I tried to photograph anything that appeared even remotely interesting [ all photos ].

Here is a small selection of the lesser known yet interesting products. For all pictures, please click here.

Russian company Art Lebedev Studio has displayed their Optimus Maximus - the one-of-a-kind fully customizable keyboard that has a miniature screen embedded in each button. Although the steep price tag puts this out of reach for most consumers (yours truly included) you have to give them all the credit for a revolutionary approach to an otherwise ordinary device.

SeeOn Technologies from Korea was showing off their uber cool windows XP based in-dash computer called CarPC Neo. Despite the fact that I already work and browse on at least 5 devices on a daily basis (Dell Desktop, HP Tablet, BlackBerry, IPOD Touch and of course the Wii), I would not mind adding one more to my arsenal. Somehow, I am sure we’ll all have these in our cars a couple of years from now.

Star Trek fans rejoice! The universal translator is finally here! Actually, it is called Compadre: Interact made by MN company SpeechGear Inc. Interact is the ultimate electronic interpreter: you speak to the system, it repeats what you said in a different language and at the same time generates a complete transcript of the conversation.

This last product provides a space-age spin on good ole’ coupon clipping. These nifty gadgets from Ecrio Inc. of sunny California are powered by their proprietary MoBeam Technology. Small enough to fit on your key chain, they can store thousands of coupons from a variety of manufacturers. Use it in your local friendly grocery store to zap coupons or gift cards directly to the conventional POS scanner. Coupons will be available to download from the internet or via email. Can you say “No more junk mail?”… Nah.

P.S. Tomorrow, we are planning a trip to the LV Convention Center to check out the main hall. We will be uploading more pictures and posting as well, so keep coming back for the latest news from CES.