Our perilous trek through the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in search of gadgets and apps of interest to the traveler.

From The Connected Traveler

Video and Story: Russ Johnson

I have never really been a car buff. My several midlife crises have not involved hot cars, hot babes and certainly had nothing to do with buffing up at a gym. But last fall I admit to having a ball at the SEMA show in Las Vegas. SEMA is the acronym for the accurate but unsexy moniker of the Specialty Equipment Marketing Association, representing the makers of everything from chrome wheels to fuzzy dice, the stuff auto buffs use to pimp out their cars. The show, at the Las Vegas Convention Center, is not open to the public: I got in as press, covering in-car gadgetry like global positioning systems and entertainment centers. But the public is free to wander about outside among the pencil thin, low slung racers, vintage Chevys with iridescent paint jobs and even a 1930s-style jalopy purposefully made up to look like an abandoned rust bucket.

Some of these cars are truly works of art. But as in art, there are the cliches, too, the Thomas Kincaids of the auto world. I have always rolled my eyes over the paint motif of flames spurting from doors and hood, usually two flames pouring over a dark core, like sides of a salmon steak. Reverse the image and it looks like swimming sperm cells. The fact that only one in ten million sperms cells ever gets anywhere sort of belies the flames. But then I read too much into this. Maybe I should get out a spray can and do something about my rusty old truck, perhaps the only one in the world without cup holders.

SEMA SHOW: Las Vegas, NV, November 4-7, 2008

When will it end? Why as our salaries shrink, our expectations dwindle, our house values plummet, our IRAs squeal like piggies being led to slaughter, does that supersize-me oasis of bare buns, aged sirloin and greedy motives called Las Vegas keep on getting bigger. Last week the strip got its latest boob job called the Palazzo, a 1.9 billion hotel implant that would dwarf the crumbling palaces on the Grand Canal and make a Doge weep. Outside of Las Vegas, what else could 1.3 billion get you? According to the UN, you could immunize every child in the world against deadly disease for 1.3 billion a year. But then, what happens in Bangladesh
stays in Bangladesh…Las Vegas is a different reality.

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Las Vegas & CES: Whither the Cannonballs

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Captain, I dare say we have two parallel but equal universes here. On the Las Vegas Strip we have TI (in another time warp it was called Treasure Island), now more appropriately labeled TA: scantily-clad buccaneeresses pole dance around the masts of a pirate ship teasing the throngs with their thongs, beckoning them to “come on in”. Over at the Las Vegas Hilton, Bill Gates opens the huge Consumer Electronics Show struttin’ his not-quite-yet Windows Vista operating system. Generating excitement about that is a task equal to getting an artichoke to strip dance. Gates was accompanied by “hearthrob” Justin Timberlake hawking MTV’s new digital download service called URGE…yet another way for us to buy music and other media online.

I hear the throbbing snores of the masses.

Nothing revolutionary with either institution this year: Las Vegas or CES.

Oh, you might say that the Wynn hotel is new. I paid a visit and found it…well…very big, very corporate and not very imaginative. Can’t say anything about its restaurants, as I didn’t eat there. I do like Steve Wynn’s old creation the Bellagio, though. Still a creamy dollop of Camembert on a strip that otherwise ranges in consistancy from Monterey Jack to Cheez Whiz.

A few years ago, Las Vegas switched its target market from families to voyeurs and not much new has happened since the makeover. Knowing Las Vegas and evidenced by the fact that the city is pitted with more craters than the Ho Chi Minh Trail, that won’t last forever. Blowing up buildings is spectator sport here and as one building collapses, new towers of temptation rise. Next to impode with be the old 1950s vintage Stardust, to make way in 2010 for another themed megacomplex.

Not to say that you should not visit Las Vegas. If you haven’t been there in the past five years you are in for a treat. Las Vegas is its own shape-shifting reality that is virtually unrecognizable to anyone who hasn’t been there in the past decade. But I still love the Old Las Vegas I first saw in the 70s when my car broke down there on a cross country trip.. My favorite hotel, outside of the Bellagio, is the somewhat tatty Tropicana, built by Bugsy Segal, the boss of Las Vegas in the days before the goodfellas went corporate. It has penguins in the courtyard, quite natty. But there there have been rumors of Tropicana’s demise as well. And for traditional dining in an old Las Vegas hangout, nothing beats Piero’s on Convention Center Boulevard. I treated myself to a New York steak there the other night. Forget about Vegas’ chain steak houses, this is as good as it gets. Justin Timberlake and his squeeze Cameron Diaz sat two tables away from us watched over by two bodyguards, one shaped like a beetle.

Organizers of the Consumer Electronics Show say about 130 thousand people turned up to see the latest gizmos and gadgets. A highlight is usually Bill Gates’ annual assessment of the future of our “digital lifestyle”, a frightening term that surely does not encompass gardening or any form of Zen. What he was mostly excited about was how he and MTV are going to capture our eardrums and eyeballs and assault our credit cards with audio, video and videogames, something everybody including Apple, Ma Bell, your cellphone company, your cable company, your power company and everyone else with a hard drive filled with MP3s wants to do. Everyone was waiting for Google’s to make an earth-quaking announcement, which was, are you ready? Another media download service.

How much Justin Timberlake do we want? How many slices of this media pie, how many empty calories, can we support or will some genius, as George W. would say, “make the pie higher.”

There were a few innovations displayed at CES, however. Our favorites: a pocket HDTV camcorder from Sanyo for under 800 bucks, a pocket-sized internet radio receiver from Aussie company Torian that has presets on it, like a car radio, that you can use anywhere there is a WiFi connection. We liked the DualCor cellphone that is a real computer, not just a dumbed-down smartphone, a bunch of different Skype phones that can eliminate long distance charges and a scheme from a guy at MIT ‘s Media Lab for cellphones that swarm with other phones to create their own independent network. Get enough of these things out there and by 2010 and we pack Ma Bell off to the Buttonhook Home for Retired Technologies. We did a radio show from there and you will post interviews with the MIT guy, Suzanne Kantra Kirschner, the chief Technology editor of Popular Science, Chuck Tannert, Automotive Editor of Cargo Magazine and inventor John Boucard, who invented the modern, digital version of the secret decoder ring for none other than Spiderman Creator Stan Lee.

As for Treasure Island, I liked the old show better. Pirates snarled “aargh”,shot cannonballs at each other and sunk a galleon several times a night. Dancing girls you can see naked on cable every night. Las Vegas disappointed me a bit this year, but I will be back in 2007 to see what has been blown up and if anything new, interesting, hinky or kinky has risen from the neon shards.

I just returned from Las Vegas where I hosted a talk show during the International Consumer Electronics Show. You can find podcasts of it at www.lunchat.com/blog, the site of Lunch @ Piero’s, a yearly get together of technology innovators and the media. I’ll be posting a few interviews of interest to travelers and the technically-curious here over the next few days. Piero’s Restaurant is standing icon of old Las Vegas, before the goodfellas went corporate. It pours martinis the size of Lake Mead and still serves the stars. I dined there the other night and Justin Timberlake and his squeeze Cameron Diaz were two tables away (guarded one guy the size of Hermann Munster and another shaped like a giant beetle). We interviewed Las Vegas “original” and Piero’s owner Fred Glusman about the “good old days”:
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