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Jeremy Toeman's LIVEdigitally

Reviews and opinions about consumer technology, gadgets, Websites, new media, services, and more.

12 Reasons why CES 2009 will be Awesome/LameDecember 2

The annual Consumer Electronics Show is coming up.  I’ll probably add some new tips to my annual CES Tips list, but ultimately there’s a lot of same-old, same-old going on.  Which, to people like me, is great.  To a lot of people, it’s awful.  I think the show could use some change (this year’s I-Stage event was definitely a step in the right direction), and I’ll post on that soon enough.  But for those of you debating attending, here are 6 reasons why CES is Awesome, and 6 reasons why CES is Lame.

The Awesome List

1. The CrazyNation Pavillions.  Located every year in the Sands hotel, many countries purchase booths for local vendors to show up with their wares.  Invariably these booths have some of the weirdest hybrid gadgets you’ll ever see, most of whic

Blackberry’s Imperfect StormDecember 1

I had some time to play with the BlackBerry Storm last week, and I’m surprised how much I disliked it.  I feel it was a complete misstep on the part of RIM, and is indicative of the problems of handset manufacturers short-sighted thinking as they compete with the iPhone.

Competing with the iPhone is like competing with CSI
CSI is one of the top broadcast TV shows every week.  Millions of people tune in to watch a fairly vapid crime drama show with cool lighting effects and gruesome murder scenes. Many millions of people.  So if you are a clever TV exec, and you want to compete in the same timeslot, do you (a) create an equally vapid crime drama show with more cool lighting and gruesomer murders, (b) create a completely different show, such as a romance, comedy, reality, hospital, etc, or (c) offer alternating reruns of Matlock and Baywatch? As tempting as (c) might be, the answer is (b) - they call it cross- or counter-programming.

The World’s First Touchscreen Blackberry?
This is the main marketing campaign around the product (don’t ask me why).  The commercials (much like the gPhone commercials) are blatant ripoffs of the iPhone commercials, and they shouldn’t be.  This is the core problem of the whole

2008 Holiday Gift Guide (part 1)November 26

Grinch or no grinch, tis the season to be shopping.  In some sectors, the next 30 days represent more sales than the entire rest of the year combined.  I’ve decided to put together the first of at least one posts on what stuff I’d recommend buying this year (although the best recommendation I could possibly make is donating gift money to charity instead of buying more stuff we don’t actually need). I’ll give a major disclaimer by saying some of the products here I have a personal affiliation with (which shouldn’t be too much of a surprise, as I tend to get involved with things I like).

Most Versatile Gift:  Flip MinoHD ($229 on Amazon).
With the massive surge in personal video creation and HDTV, having an inexpensive, reliable, easy-to-use personal HD recorder just makes sense.  The Flip is a great product, works exactly as advertised, and is probably new to most people you’d buy it for (here’s a hint: if the recipient sends you a lot of HD videos already, don’t buy this for them).  You can also

Lack of Trust key to eBay’s declineNovember 25

I read on The Technologizer that eBay is suffering from a drop in visitors (SAI has some more stats too).  This comes as no surprise to me, as I believe eBay has abandoned its core over the years.

eBay is one of those “the community really matters” success stories.  The company slowly and steadily built a community around niche products, antiques, hard-to-find stuff, collectibles, etc.  eBay was so successful that neither Yahoo nor Amazon could even dabble in the space.

But that was a few years ago, and many things have changed.  For one, we have a whole new generation of Internet users.  The “millenials” are less likely to seek out collectibles or memorabilia, as they’ve been brought up with the Internet right at their side.  An old Sega Genesis kit is much less exciting to a 25-year-old than an Atari 2600 is to a 35-year-old.

More relevant to the decline in eBay traffic is the erosion of trust for the brand.  As the company served the needs of its shareholders, instead of its users, it catered to the bottom line.  And that bottom line meant foregoing the concept of nurturing the community, and instead to increased sales and transactional revenue.  Which, in turn, means less value is placed on the individual seller, and a higher value to the institutional or sem

Netflix on the new XBOX 360 Live - disappointing so farNovember 24

On a scale from 1 to 10, the Netflix / Xbox experience is slathered in weaksauce.

I have an Xbox 360. When I heard about the new Xbox Live experience (new UI, new architecture, more features, more customization, etc.) I thought it sounded really cool. I’ve always thought it was a neat product, but I also thought there was a better interactive experience waiting to be enjoyed, if only someone would come along and develop it. Last Thursday, November 20, 2008, that experience became available for everyone.

One of the features I was most interested in was the Netflix streaming directly to your Xbox 360. I believe that digital home media have a long way to go. Networked media PC’s are a pain to set up, streaming media