There s a whiff of finality, or desperation, as CES winds down. The heavy-hitter keynotes have come and gone, many attendees have taken off and the ones left seem to be doing a fair amount of napping on the benches. So it s time for the exhibitors to kick things up a notch.
At the Pioneer booth, DJ Roonie G is working with turntables and video displays to remix Kanye West s Gold Digger, Survivor s Eye of the Tiger, footage from Napoleon Dynamite and a clip from Dave Chappelle as Rick James ( What! ). Somehow Blu-ray has drawn an equally large crowd with Blues Brothers impersonators singing Blu-ray Man to the tune of Soul Man.
The drum n bass playing at Microsoft s exhibit is clashing with nearby Intel s dance beats.
But trumping them all was Wednesday s celebrity appearance, Hulk Hogan, who drew a paparazzi-esque crowd of gawkers and shutterbugs at, naturally, the Polaroid booth. The wrestling and star amiably signed photographs while his family looked on and in the case of his son and daughter, fought (just like on TV!
).
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wsj.com/ces2007/2007/01/10/hulkamania-elvis-and-gold-diggers/--> There s a whiff of finality, or desperation, as CES winds down. The heavy-hitter keynotes have come and gone, many attendees have taken off and the ones left seem to be doing a fair amount of napping on the benches.
So it s time for the exhibitors to kick things up a notch.
According to , there are no fewer than five styles when it comes to the lost art of : up and down, windmill (alternately called the helicopter ), drunk-style, whiplash (an extreme version of up and down ) and all out arms flailing, your entire body in motion for starters.
She s one of the hosts of , a weekly videolog devoted to youth culture, and she s watching herself discuss this in a DivX panel session with , co-creator of Jetset, and , co-founder of fellow vlog (covering buzzword-compliant topics such as Web 2.
0, tagging, AJAX, social software and the bubble juice known as VCs, its Web site reads).
What does any of this have to do with DivX, a San Diego video-compression-technology company? It s promoting its home-grown YouTube rival, , by holding live sessions like this.
After this panel session, attendees will be treated to a live concert by the leading artists of the nascent Nerdcore rap movement (don t ask us).
To recap: the hosts of two online-video programs are looking at online videos in a panel that is being streamed to an online-video site.
There s a real meta quality to it, a spokesman said.
Not to be outdone by Panasonic s , Netgear has unicyclists in front of wireless routers. Yes, really.
They re doing all this while extolling the virtues of the company s new Skype cordless phone.
No PC or headset required, said one of the cyclists, a former Cirque du Soleil performer who was pedaling while she tossed knives and metallic bowling pins back and forth with a co-juggler. (Another spokeswoman confirmed that the Santa Clara, Calif., company doesn t have this kind of talent in-house.
We can t juggle everything! )
Once they catch their breath, the performers will also be promoting Netgear s other two new products, the , which streams photos, music and other media to TV sets; and the Storage Central Turbo, a network storage device for consumers and small businesses.
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u=http://blogs.wsj.com/ces2007/2007/01/10/juggling-for-routers/--> Not to be outdone by Panasonic s dancers in front of plasma screens, Netgear has unicyclists in front of wireless routers.
Yes, really.
Unicycles? Well, it s noticeable, right?
a spokeswoman said. They re gonna juggle, too.
They re doing all this while extolling the virtues of the company s new Skype cordless phone.
No PC or headset required, said one of [ ] If you feel your teeth rattling every few minutes at CES, you re not alone. Earthquake Sound Corp. has launched its Quake 10.
0 home-theater system. It includes a deceptively small tactile transducer that bolts onto the floor of your living room, or under the floor if you really want your house to shake and some customers do said marketing director Jean-Paul Lefebvre.
For best effect, he added, watch an action/adventure movie or play a first-person-shooter videogame.
The Hayward, Calif., company is providing demonstrations of both. The main attack sequence in Pearl Harbor is skull-rattling intense enough to distract you from the acting.
Playing the videogame Mercenaries on an Xbox, you feel the ground shake underneath your feet, the impact of driving into a billboard and the recoil from firing your machine gun. And this is turned down fairly low, he said.
Quake 10.
0, priced at $599, is available only from Earthquake dealers and distributors, but it s making its presence felt here. One nearby CES exhibitor has already asked Earthquake to turn it down, Mr. Lefebvre said, because their demo can t be heard above the rumble.
Another Earthquake employee, just back from the bathroom on the other end of the hall, confirmed he could hear it over there, too.
Nice! That s how we do it, Mr.
Lefebvre said.
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wsj.com/ces2007/2007/01/10/turn-it-up/--> If you feel your teeth rattling every few minutes at CES, you re not alone. Earthquake Sound Corp.
has launched its Quake 10.0 home-theater system. It includes a deceptively small tactile transducer that bolts onto the floor of your living room, or under the floor if you really want your house to shake and some [ ] 
While plenty of exhibitors are showing off their TVs, wants to hide a few of them.
The company is promoting a new system it says can mount a TV on a wall, and then elegantly disguise it. The mounting bracket, with the somewhat unelegant name CMS Automated Art Over TV, includes a mechanical system that raises and lowers a framed artwork in front of an LCD or plasma screen.
The gizmo can reveal a 42-inch screen in about 20 seconds, and will accommodate framed art weighing up to 20 pounds (the art should be at least eight inches wider than the screen it will cover, Mr.
Baker said). While the art tries to make the TV disappear, the reverse isn t true when lowered, the art will still be visible under the TV screen (likely making over-the-fireplace mountings out of the question).
The device will retail for $1,500 when it goes on sale in a couple months.
The company also sells TV enclosures designed to look like ornate picture frames. The devices are Chief s wife-approval products, said product manager Seth Baker. Big flat-panel screens get no arguments in bachelor pads, but more and more consumers would like to de-emphasize theirs, he said.
We ve seen the transformation now where people want to make it part of their decor.
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wsj.com/ces2007/2007/01/10/wife-approval-products-for-big-tvs/--> While plenty of exhibitors are showing off their TVs, Chief Manufacturing wants to hide a few of them. The company is promoting a new system it says can mount a TV on a wall, and then elegantly disguise it.
The mounting bracket, with the somewhat unelegant name CMS Automated Art Over TV, includes a mechanical [ ] January 10, 2007, 9:25 am
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