Management shows optimism. Is it justified?

     And here we are again, or we soon will be, in Las Vegas for the Consumer Electronics Show. Last year’s CES was not exactly the best in the show’s existence, and that was no surprise. It took place just as the Western capitalist system had crumbled around our ears. What saved it from utter disaster was the fact big companies had booked space the previous summer, before the cracks began to appear. Having already paid they came, at least most of them did. But what would happen in 2010? There might now be cautious optimism (we emphasize cautious), but then again the big companies would have made their decisions months ago, when black crows were still circling the carrion on Wall Street.
Of course you wouldn’t expect the CEO of CEA, which organizes the show, to be talking doom, and as the year ended Gary Shapiro was positively radiant, claiming he had never been as excited about CES as he is this year. And he had some curious numbers to throw around.
     Shapiro says he had been figuring on 130,000 visitors at last year’s CES, but got only 113,000. We’re always suspicious of neatly rounded figures, and indeed the figure we heard last Winter had one less digit in it, but whatever. The target for 2010: 110,000. Yes, that’s less than the number of visitors Shapiro claims CES had last year. How’s that for excitement?
That said, CEA has been busy all year trying to find new exhibitors to replace the ones who either aren’t coming or are cutting back on the size of their presentations. The result, he says, is that CES 2010 will have 330 exhibitors coming for the very first time. Of course, many of them are in all likelihood small, with a tiny booth, not the elaborate sprawls of the Samsungs and Panasonics. Still, CES has not been passive.
In particular, CEA is hoping to kill off Macworld. For a number of years that show has been held at the same time as CES, and has frequently upstaged it. The year Steve Jobs showed the iPhone at Macworld, the reports blew the huge CES right off the technology pages. But Macworld is now in trouble. Apple won’t be going to it anymore (it’s not coming to CES either), and Macworld has moved to February, giving Shapiro an opportunity to go for the jugular.
     Specifically, CES has set up a new section called iLounge (that’s the name of the company that is co-sponsoring the section), dedicated to everything having to do with the iPhone, the iPod and the Macintosh, including software. The section had barely been announced when it was sold out, and the alloted space was doubled. However consumers can’t attend CES, at least not officially, whereas they can not only go to Macworld but buy things on site.
But iLounge is just an example of what CEA has been up to. It has been recruiting exhibitors for other theme sections : Living in Digital Times, EHX@CES with custom electronic products for home and commercial installation, Sustainable Planet, featuring green technologies, eBooks, Mobile television, and the Gaming Showcase.
     Oh, and 3-D video, which is the technology du jour.
And some of the large companies that had skipped one or more shows are coming back, including Philips and Sanyo (the latter now owned by Panasonic). That much is cheerful news for CES, but even so the show will take up less space (Shapiro presents that as a good thing, claiming CEA had long known that the show had gotten so large that it was out of hand). CES won’t be using the Sands Convention Center this time. We’re not certain what that means, since it has never been clear where the Venetian leaves off and the Sands begins. We hope they won’t kill off the press room at the Sands, because if they do it will make our reporting a lot harder.
     The Venetian, of course, is where most of the high end exhibits will be. The desirable rooms are in the hotel tower, where they typically occupy several floors. The unlucky ones get stuck in the ballrooms, which are subdivided by partitions with all the sound-stopping power of construction paper.
The recession notwithstanding, the high end exhibits have been chugging along with scarcely a hiccup, but that may have been, in part, because of the fact that the “rebel” high end exhibition, T.H.E. Show, was in trouble. It had taken over the Alexis Park, where the CES high end exhibits had once been, but the Alexis Park is a long way from the action, and last year’s T.H.E. Show was an unmitigated disaster. We toured it in four hours, in part because some dispirited exhibitors had closed their rooms and possibly gone looking for good news at the bottom of a glass.
     This year could be different. Traditionally it’s difficult to convince a hotel to take a high end show, because exhibitors are prone to leaving the rooms worse for wear. Vegas hotels are hungry this year, though, and T.H.E. Show has moved into the Flamingo (the legendary casino once owned by Bugsy Siegel (in The Godfather, Moe Greene is based on him). The Flamingo is right on the Strip, a five-minute walk from the Venetian, no shuttle needed this time. Show management says it’s sold out, but of course we don’t know how much space they had booked.
As usual we’ll be covering the shows from start to finish. The first report, of Day Zero (the press day plus the CES Unveiled event the day before) will be filed on the morning of January 7th. As usual we’ll have text and pictures.
That’s assuming we actually get there. The US is enforcing draconian travel regulations on foreign flights: for instance, a flight leaves on time, or it’s cancelled. That will affect many of the non-US exhibitors and visitors who are the lifeblood of CES. Two years ago, a Las Vegas newspaper revealed that there was pressure to move the show from Vegas, perhaps out of the United States, to a place like Singapore. Expect the talk to get louder this year.