Good, bad and ugly from the Consumer Electronics Show

Updated on Tuesday, January 11, 2011 at 8:53 PM by Logan Molen

Updated on Thursday, April 14, 2011 at 10:19 PM by Logan Molen

Here's a report from the two days I spent late last week at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. I attended in hopes of staying ahead of consumer trends that may affect The Californian's business. 

There was tons going on as you might expect with thousands of exhibitors and more than 100,000 attendees, so I'll try to provide a lot of quick hits that highlight general trends rather than specific product features.

Long story short: Expect more technology around the corner that feeds short-attention spans and less on tools for long-form content. The ongoing challenge of fighting for consumers' time and money isn't going to get any easier for traditional news businesses competing against whiz-bang technology. 

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A Yahoo with great lessons for media execs

It's not often someone at the top of one of the world's largest publicly owned companies speaks openly about skeletons within his own business. 

But Blake Irving, Yahoo's reasonably new chief product officer, did just that in addressing the company's "good, the bad and the ugly" at a recent gathering of Newspaper Consortium executives. The good news is Irving isn't a moaner, he's an energetic doer with a vision for Yahoo's success in a crowded digital media marketplace. 

I had a conflict and couldn't attend the consortium meeting but sat wide-eyed while watching this video of his presentation. It's long, but the first 35 minutes or so are highly recommended for anyone in the media business.

His fast-paced presentation touches on the sociology that drives digital behavior, product development and "shipping" strategies, the dangers of "boiling the ocean," brand focus, teamwork and much more. At times he comes across as condescending but he backs up that in-your-face confidence with a gameplan that clearly supports his case for focused business plans executed with relentless precision and passion. 

Be sure to spend time absorbing his version of the Table of Elements. I took a screen grab to ponder later and try to adapt to my own world. 

If you don't want to be replaced by robots, don't write like robots

Steve Rushin opined in the most recent issue of Sports Illustrated about an online site called StatSheet whose computer algorithms are able to transform game statistics into readable stories (for example, here's the StatSheet Fresno State page documenting recent basketball games).

As you might expect, there are fears profit-starved newspapers will chase automation over experienced feet on the street. But as Rushin rightly points out, if you're a journalist worried about robots, you have bigger problems. Rushin wrote:

"There are two ways sportswriters can respond. We can do nothing and hope that our human prose is seen as a quaint, retro piece of ballpark embroidery, like the Wrigley Field scoreboard or the NFL chain gang, both of which are kept around to humor nostalgia buffs.

"Or we can try to vanquish our robot doppelgänger. [StatSheet CEO Robbie] Allen says the robot is doing us a service, 'writing the kind of stories you probably don't like writing anyway.' "

Exactly.

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