Cutline Speaks

Cutline @ CES 2009

posted by Michael on January 13, 2009

EMI Music's Douglas Merrill talks with Billboard's Antony Bruno at CES

A couple of us were at CES 2009 last week, so I thought I'd share some of the highlights from our time there:

* The day before the main show started, we were at the Billboard Digital Music Live track, there to staff a keynote from EMI Music's Douglas Merrill. Lots of interesting stuff here, focusing on the impact that digital technology is having on the industry and EMI's efforts to use tech-industry expertise to build stronger relationships between artists and fans.

* Microsoft's Steve Ballmer kicked off the main show with a keynote on Wednesday evening. Not a ton of news, and not one of Steve's higher-energy performances, but still relatively interesting. Among the cooler bits were a look at the Windows 7 beta (though there wasn't much demoed that hadn't already been seen at PDC) and another quick look at Halo Wars and Halo 3: ODST (both of which had been announced previously).

* The morning keynotes on day one -- from CEA president and CEO Gary Shapiro and Sony CEO Howard Stringer -- were also pretty solid. Lots of info in Shapiro's keynote, which struck a relatively positive note on the economy (more than a billion CE devices are expected to be sold in the US in 2009, and the decline in revenue is expected to be only.6 percent). And Stringer's keynote was much more entertaining, with a surprise appearance from Tom Hanks (who kept referring to Blu-Ray as "Bluetooth" -- whoops!) and a decent summation of the zeitgeist from Stringer.

* As for the show floor, reports were that the number of exhibitors and attendees were down this year, but you'd never know it while on the ground. I won't share all of my greatest hits from the show floor -- we'd like them to become our clients ;-) -- but there were some very cool micro projectors from Butterfly Technology on display, as well as some very cool-looking IP products from IPEVO. And the Shapiro keynote opened with an extended demo of technology from Yoostar that, personally, I can't wait to get my hands on (that's Shapiro in the video).

Tags for this post: gadgets