San Francisco
Thursday, February 11, 2010.
11:15am. It’s hard to believe that I’m about to enter the exhibit hall for at least my 40th “Macworld.” My first was in Boston - I believe that it was in 1985. I began to attend the San Francisco shows around 1989, and only missed a few in either city after that, including the brief New York Macworld and the sadly impotent return to Boston’s shiny new convention center.
So here I am, with memories of crowds at registration, rented Hummers, signs all over San Francisco and exhibits that packed both big halls at the Moscone Center. But today’s reality is that there are only a few signs for about a block around the convention center, uncrowded sidewalks and no Hummers. And the larger Hall A is being used by a “Gift Convention.” The sidewalk in front of Hall A where eager folks once handed out non-working replicas of the soon-to-be released Zip Disk is empty.
Exhibits open in a few minutes, but there is no push to get into the hall. Out here at the bottom of the escalator there tables with more seats empty that not. Upstairs where I picked up my badge I had a choice of lines and was the only person in the one that I chose.
.
Fortunately I heard a cheerful “Hi Joe” as PMUG’s Devores passed me on the other side of the escalator, verifying that I’m really in the right place.
11:30 I'm going into the exhibits now - they opened 45 min early -apparently not enough people bought the "early entrance" perk to please the exhibitors...
12:30 It took just under an hour to make my first pass through the exhibits. This was longer than I had expected, and included only one conversation with a vendor. The aisles are comfortably full with a few inexplicable pockets of enthusiasm for aftermarket enhancements for iPods and iPhones. The vendor - I'll get his identity later - was at his first Macworld and wishes they had put his document scanner closer to other business-oriented products such as document scanning software. He turned out to be an industry old-timer from SuperMac and PaperPort. This is a "pre-introduction" showing so I'll go back for more specific info.
I saw only one unexpected product: an overlay for the iPhone places raised "bumps" over and between the virtual keys, providing a tactile feel. It's an effect something like the raised bumps that are found on the "f" and "g" keys of many conventional keyboards to aid touch typists.
MacSpeech is showing a variety of products and has a live demo of their voice recognition software. Omni products has a large booth
The highlight of the exhibits may be 20-30 small developer stands under the "Special Interest Pavillion" banner. I'll spend lots more time there later.
The music has started.
2:40pm The crowd has grown and filled the exhibit area. There a very few empty chairs and lots of campers sitting on the floor to eat their picnic lunches out here, in the lower lobby, and there are about the same numbers of people going both up and down the escalators...
Navigon AG (Hamburg, Germany) is showing their turn by turn nav system for the iPhone and offering a $69. show price. It includes a set of Navteq maps which - unfortunately - have the same bug as the Navteq maps in our 2+ year old Motorola TN30 GPS (try to find SE Briggs St, Milwaukie, Oregon with your favorite GPS unit)
Berklee School of Music (Boston) again has a large booth with demos of software for music creation and editing. Their presentation are on line at http://berkleemwsf.com/
Scosche Industries has a big crowd interested in iPod/iPhone accessories. They showed some interesting bluetooth products at CES but I didn’t fight thru the mob to see if they’re available here.
No sign of FileMaker although their web site last year stated an expectation to be here.
I talked with Omni - they are working on versions of their productivity software for iPhone and iPad... should be interesting since lots of bells and whistles won’t fit on the smaller screen and could reduce the modal clutter that has kept me away from their Mac products.
Microsoft has a modest booth for MacOffice, giving away mints in heart-shaped tins that proclaims “OfficeMac (heart) You! For more there’s twitter.com/officeformac --Correction: they are Red Hots - not mints...
5:20pm The crowd thinned out fast after the lunch hour. The floor stayed busy, but not jammed up.
I spent some time with Mike Jacobs, co-founder of Appsaurus (in the small developer area) His product will assist an iPhone user to extract a short list of potentially-interesting iPhone/iPad apps from the iTunes Store. In the old days this would have been called AI (Artificial Intelligence)! The booth was so new that it didn't have a sign, and its identity was displayed (hidden?) by colorful renderings of dinosaur-like creatures. www.appsaurusapp.com
At another Small Developer stand, CEO Tod Hadley of Juicy Development explained that his Talk Radio app would soon be able to help radio listeners to avoid selected talk shows while driving... the app now makes it possible to do the inverse selection. www.juicydevelopment.com
Guiseppe Giunto, CEO, and his son demonstrated Hyperbolic Software's "Tidy Up" software for the Mac and convinced me to buy a copy. In addition to its more-or-less obvious functions, Tidy Up makes it possible to scan multiple hard drives and identify one copy of every unique file, so that a collection can be created without making duplicates. www.hyperbolicsoftware.com
Time to call it a day. More tomorrow, maybe.
Friday, February 12, 2010
1:04 I've been in the hall for about 3 hours and the traffic pattern looks similar to yesterday except a little lighter at mid-day. Still the aisles have been busy. The mobile special interest area is packed with iPhone app developers'
I was taken by 3DiPhoneInc from Vancouver BC, whose president, Arcady Kropov demonstrated 3D imaging using pairs of iPhones - one set taking stereo pairs from a platform above the booth, and another pair used with an inexpensive magnifier-viewer. (Think of an 1800s stereo viewer - the one with the wood handle - recreated in brightly colored plastic!)
Talking with HP about their "Media Server" product, I realized how difficult it is to define the product without using the words "server" and "media." That said, it appears to offer less functionality than the recently announced Apple "Mini Server" as a tool for collecting and brings entertainment content to the living room.
Some miscellaneous items that were interesting enough at the time for me to pick up literature, but not to engage the booth personnel:
General purpose business apps from RLM Tools (www.rlmtools.com and Quickoffice (quickoffice.com)
Eye-Fi X2 enhanced SDHC 8GB memory card that provides 802.11n network connectivity and wifi-based geotagging/location service
Despite the show floor activity I sense a sort of depressed feeling among us "old timers." Big change is upon us. I hope it's not well-represented by the 20-something guy who sat cross-legged in the middle of one of the heavily-traveled aisles like an earth-toned pylon, nor by the hundreds of people who simply walked around him without a sign of concern.
I'm out of here.
