CES 2017 Las Vegas Week: What I’m Looking Forward To – Zennie Abraham

Ah! I have decided to just plain blog about CES 2017 for this entry, and mainly because I’m trying to put myself to sleep. I have to get up early and travel to Las Vegas via stand-by, which brings its own form of excitement. But the journey is the reward – as Steve Jobs used to say – and I do enjoy it. Besides, at the end of the stick is the CES carrot, and I can’t wait to eat it.

(I have to thank my sponsors The Oakland Post and Sigma Technologies Global for helping make this possible!)

CES 2017 is my mecca – well one of them as the other two are the NFL Draft and Comic Con – it has a complete, giant ocean of new products, gadgets and tech. And it brings the entire tech World to Las Vegas. And increasingly many different celebrities from various walks of life.

But with all of this, I have main staple events I enjoy:

– CES Unveiled, where startups present their creative new tech products. This is the annual media preview before the CES Expo Hall opens on Wednesday and Thursday.

– The Panasonic, Sony, and Samsung Press Conferences. Much of the CES buzz tends to come from these companies. But Sony has really fallen down here over time. At my first CES in 2010, Sony was ran by Sir Howard Stringer, and boy did he know how to put on a show! In 2011, he had Seth Rogen, The Green Hornet Car, neat camcorder announcements and advancements, and a cool preview of what we now call VR. Under Sir Howard Stringer, Sony put on a great CES, even if the whole deal served to mask the chaos the company was dealing with. Once Sir Howard departed, Sony became, well, dang boring. The shows were a snooze-fest of badly-said lines, me-too product rollouts, and zero entertainment. The Sony Hack of 2014 spiced things up quite a bit, but even then, it wasn’t about the product, but about something that served to show, even more, how messed up the company had become. Hopefully, maybe, Sony will kick ass this year, but I doubt it.

– The CES Expo Hall. Here’s where I do a lot of vlogging. There are so many neat products and people it’s not funny. Love it!

– Digital Hollywood, where sessions and panels focus on tech and entertainment in different ways. Because I’m at YouTube Partner, the reasons why I find this fascinating are many: new platforms, new techniques, new ideas, new shows, and basically all that form the center of how our entertainment culture gets distributed to you.

– People and parties. I used to try and get into all of the parties, only to realize that, a lot of the time, the events were anti-climatic. The best times were just hanging with people I already new, and with a mix of the new people I met along the way.

– Politics. CES is also a powerbroker place and you should keep watch on what laws are being discussed and planned that will change your digital and regular consumer tech life. I do.

– Celebrities. Ok, I’m a sucker for meeting and blogging and vlogging about celebrities. I like to celebrate people who’s works help form our culture, and CES has a ton of them.

– Hot, Smart Booth Babes who make insecure men look stupid. Yep. I blogged it. I always cracks me up to see some dude try and treat a female spokesperson AKA “booth babe” look stupid, only to be made to look ridiculous in the process. This year, I’m gonna vlog someone doing that if I see it, I swear.

Las Vegas itself. I want to find out more about the whole Raiders stadium issue from the Las Vegas perspective while I’m there. But beyond that, Las Vegas is a cool city that’s always remaking itself in some interesting way. I can’t wait to see what the latest changes are.

Stay tuned!

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