http://venturebeat.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/ces-unveiled.jpg今晚我来到了CES Unveiled, 这是在拉斯维加斯的国际消费电子大展一个专为记者举办的开始晚会。这个地方挤满了通常技术性的记者。在外面全球经济下滑的时候我们还都陶醉于自我兴奋之中。

Midway through the event I ran into Gary Shapiro, who reminded me he is the president and chief executive of the Consumer Electronics Association, not the executive director as I called him earlier. (Oops). He told me that things look good for the show and he really didn’t mean to imply (as he said in our earlier interview) that attendance would be measurably down. He said the show is likely to draw 130,000 attendees, but that’s the estimate they give out every year because they really don’t know what will happen. He assumes they will take some hit from the recession compared to the 141,000 attendees of last year, but so far things look good, he says. Somehow, I don’t think he’s going to get a bigger crowd than last year. We’ll find out later in the week, although audited numbers will come much later.

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不管怎样，Shapiro让我看一下蓝宝公司的展台。这家车载音频公司的产品还是相当酷的：第一台车载网络收音机。This car stereo can play 20,000个广播电台。在从旧金山到纽约的路程中，你可以无尽地在这些电台间滚动来打发时间。但它使用来自刚刚启动的Torian Wireless公司叫做miRoamer的设备获得来自互联网的音乐。

只要按一个按钮，你就可以从AM/FM 广播电台转到成千上万的网络广播电台。你可以通过国家、分类、电台和关键词来浏览。你也可以用电脑到网关上让你的机子只播放那些预置的广播电台。这就大大减少了浏览的时间。如果你不想这么做，你可以在miRoamer.com上浏览100个最好的节目。

The radio gets its music streamed in real time via a Bluetooth connection from the radio to your 3G cell phone. I’m not sure it’s going to work, given the spottiness of 3G coverage in the U.S. But you have to give them credit for trying something ambitious. The Blaupunkt guy told me that if you’re speeding fast, you’ll need higher bandwidth to make sure the radio reception doesn’t get choppy. There may be a reason no one’s tried Internet radio in the car before, but if it works, it’s going to change the landscape for players like XM Sirius satellite radio.

在今年下半年在美国上市的时候，它的价格是$349到$399美元。将会有两种版本，一种版本就是只占用车上的一个收音机插槽，另一种版本占用了两个。现在还不清楚是否蓝宝公司要收征订费或者让这种业务免费。

http://venturebeat.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/wowwee.jpgFor those of you who aren’t easily impressed with a first of that sort, I thought WowWee also had a cool product line with its Pico Projectors, dubbed Cinemin. Ranging from $299 to $399, these are tiny projectors that can show a movie on a ceiling, wall, or anywhere else you can find a blank space. The three products include the Swivel, which can tilt up 90 degrees so you can watch a movie on the ceiling, the Stick, which has on-board memory to store movies that you can take on the go; and a Station model that is more for office conference rooms but is still smaller than a lot of today’s projectors. They will come out at varying times from the second quarter to the fourth quarter. The products are based on Texas Instruments’ Digital Light Projection technology, which is commonly used in rear-projection TVs and consists of chips with lots of microscopic mirrors to project light.

http://venturebeat.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/spyball.jpgWowWee, of course, is best known for its consumer robots. It had a few at the table this year, including a Spyball, which is a little ball with a web cam. Michael Rush of WowWee was reluctant to let it roam around the room full of hundreds of journalists because he figured someone would step on it. Its wheels are retractable. When they’re out, Spyball can go rolling around a house, spooking the pets and spying on whoever you want. Ah, just think of the civil liberties violations you can perpetrate with this sucker, which sends videos back to your computer or game machine via Wi-Fi. It costs $149 and will be out in the fourth quarter of 2009. It’s a lot like last year’s model from WowWee, the Rovio moving robotic web cam. But this one has a better, Orwellian name to it.

http://venturebeat.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/lg.jpgLG also showed off a new liquid crystal display television that was less than an inch thick. We’ll see if that winds up being the thinnest of the show. You can never tell. I’m sure we’re going to see a lot of cool new TV technology at the show. I’m looking forward to seeing the newest generation of organic light-emitting diode (OLED) ultra-thin TVs.

On the plane, I sat next to Dhaval Ajmera, an executive vice president from Verismo Networks, a Mountain View, Calif.-based company with a pretty cool VuNow set-top box that brings all sorts of Internet video into the TV. Verismo has 70 employees and is privately funded. It isn’t seeking money at the moment; rather, it’s trying to generate some revenue first through sales of its $99 and $149 set-top boxes, which compete head to head with boxes from Roku but offer much more than just Netflix’s selection of 10,000 movies. Verismo has all sorts of content, from YouTube to CinemaNow movies.

Tomorrow, check back in this space for reports from all of the big company press conferences, starting with LG in the morning and going through to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer’s keynote speech in the evening. I’ll be covering most of it.