Robert Scoble walks through CES 2012, finding it crowded and gadget-heavy but increasingly driven by small startups. He praises developer tools like New Relic and Janrain for letting tiny teams scale, criticizes Microsoft's keynote as low-news, and explains why tablets work as interactive second screens while TVs stay passive.
All right, Robert, I'm ready for you.
What do you think?
What do you think of CES Robert Scoville?
I just got here like two hours ago.
Now you're swarmed, man.
I'm swarmed. You can't move. There's a lot of. This is a gadget show. My expectations have gone down to the proper level for this show. I don't expect something really mind blowing too much here. If it happens, great. You know, it's like getting a kiss from a beautiful girl. But.
I want to pick up on something the Gilmore game was talking about and that is the expected exodus of Microsoft. I mean, is that a big deal?
I don't think it is. I mean, if you look around like this event that you're at, it's all little startups and it might go back to a buyer show, right? And the buyers all know who Microsoft is and what they're going to sell next Christmas. They don't need to go to a booth to see that. Right. They do need to see, you know, Belkin's gear line, you know, or what the parrot is or what these new companies are doing. That's what this show is going to turn into.
I heard that they were at. Microsoft was actually asked in some kind of way not to appear. That was a scuttle button. They turned it around in pr.
You believe that? I think the argument was over the keynote. Yeah. Because Microsoft's keynotes are really boring. They don't announce anything. They don't cause any news. Bomber. Like when he showed off the tablets last year. Oh my God, I was going to sleep. Right? And I don't know why we all go to that keynote, but we all do because it's Microsoft and they might announce something. They might announce something, right? So you sort of gotta go just in case they do. And it's just, I don't know, I like these small little tables where the company spent three or five grand to get in the table. And that's where you find the cool little stuff that never gets on in gadget.
Now what issue are you burning on? I think it's other than sopa. But I mean, what.
I mean, my job at Rackspace is to go around and find things that help small teams really kick ass and have a huge impact on the world. And that's probably not going to happen here. I'd look for companies like New Relic or janrain that help developers. There's two engineers at Universal. You think of Universal with all those websites. Two engineers, just two engineers. So they're getting a lot of leverage. They're outsourcing everything and they're kicking ass. They're having a big impact with a small, small team. And that's what I'm looking for, is how do I help those guys have a huge impact on the world. Right. And so there's a range of like new relic, for instance, lets you watch thousands of cloud servers and see what, when you check in some code, did your servers go to hell and you see that in real time and you can dig into it and see what's going on. And so that helps those two guys manage a lot of infrastructure without a big team. Right. Or janrain lets you put this new identity stuff on each website. Right. So if you visit a website that says check in with Facebook or Twitter, that's probably janrain. So those two guys didn't have to write that and debug it and keep it running. They just bought that or licensed it from janray. And now two guys can do identity on all their websites.
I want your thoughts on this. You kind of talked about this when I was listening about tablets versus television.
Well, yeah, TVs are big here.
Right, right, right.
When you walk around the hall, you see just acres and acres of big ass TVs. Yeah.
And I think of the tablet as a way of communicating what's happening on television.
Yes. But I'm currently using it. I mean, I hear study says they are. I think they are. And you know, even those guys, right, they had an iPhone with their chat room, you know, in their hand, and the TV is for watching. That's the way it should be. TVs for watching. And you can sit and drink beer and watch tv. Or if you want to get interactive with your tv, you do that on your laptop or your tablet. Right. That's what people are doing. Where are we?
In terms of my dream, my assertion is that we have the perfect content market, but there are certain organizations like Nielsen and Google that are blocking it.
Yeah.
With Google Trends, they've actually delayed. They're reporting by up to a day, but approximately five hours.
Yeah.
Nielsen is telling their clients don't measure social. And yet they're.
But that's gonna break that just can't. You can hold off progress for a while, maybe a couple years, but at some point those two guys at Universal go, screw this. I can get like, if you go to a site called gopoll Go, you can ask a poll question and in real time you can see everything about the answers. You can see what? What is it? Male or female. Did a guy from Russia come answer?
Remember how TechCrunch disrupt New York, they put the Twitter feeds up live?
Yeah.
They stopped doing that. Was that because people are getting crapped on on the Twitter feeds?
Probably for many speakers it's unnerving because the whole room starts laughing and you don't know why because you're not paying attention to that. That's what happened in New York. Yeah, probably. That's why I like it, but only if I can see it. So I can laugh along with the audience and say, oh, a funny joke, man.
And I really want to get on.
One last question.
Yahoo's new CEO, what are your thoughts?
I don't know him. They have a lot of advantages, but they're in a deep hole. They have hundreds of millions of people who visit their web properties every month. So they have a huge audience. It's an old school audience. It's not an audience that's really excited about Twitter and Facebook and Google. It's an audience that's been like, I'm going to Iowa and I've been doing that for 10 years and I'm not moving. It's not an early adopter audience. It's hard to monetize. But they have a lot of managerial problems and they have to put out a vision. Actually, one of the guys who runs a group in Yahoo News showed me how they are doubling or getting a huge amount of traffic from Facebook using Facebook's open grab and how that could be the way that they stitch Yahoo together and show a vision of what Yahoo's going to look like in the future. But that requires a lot of people to buy in the company. It's really a tough thing.
Tell them your website.
I'm@scobalizer.com but I'm usually more active on Google plus or Facebook or Twitter. So twitter.com scobleizer or facebook.com robertskobel if you just search for Robert Scoble, you'll find me.
