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Five Easy Pieces: Short Product Presentations from CES 2014 (Video)
At CES and other big trade shows, small companies and start-ups are often overshadowed by industry giants whose huge promotional budgets let them dominate a show's exhibit area. In this video, Tim Lord asked the spokespeople for five small companies exhibiting at CES whose products interested him to give one-minute presentations about their products. So take a quick look at the ZeroHour USB "tactical grade" battery backup flashlight; MadeSolid, a 3-D printing material company; TangoPC, "the world’s most powerful Pocketable, Officeable, Entertainmentable, Gameable, Windowsable, Linuxable PC; Google Glass competitor GlassUp; and DoorBot, "the doorbell for
smartphones," which was featured on the ABC TV show Shark Tank in November, 2013. DoorBot got no investment from the "sharks," but managed to raise $1 million from "traditional technology investors." DoorBot's fundraising success aside, today's video is about companies that are unlikely to get much coverage from "mainstream" news channels that cover CES. If you don't see the video (probably because you're enjoying the thrill of Slashdot Beta), you can view it here.
The doorbot looks pretty cool. I hate getting up to see if the person ringing the door is someone I want to answer the door for (like my son's friends when he's not home, morons ignoring my no soliciting sign, etc).
One thing I couldn't tell was whether it was possible to query the doorbot's camera arbitrarily without having someone necessarily ring the doorbell. I suppose not for power management reasons, although the power management angle makes me wonder how long it takes between someone pressing the door bot button and getting a notification. I'm guessing the device has to warm boot, including making an 802.11 connection, which seems like it could add a delay.
So...the SlashDot community asks for "no more lame videos, ever" and the editors give us FIVE videos? What's next...keeping beta?