On Sunday we decided to finally get the cars out. That was an adventure since no one at either of the 2 houses here had a shovel. So we were using buckets, trash cans, and even hockey sticks to get all of the cars out. It was actually a lot of fun and gave me a workout! All of our neighbors helped and we got everyone out safely. Here are some pictures I took during the 2 days…

Popular Posts
So what was everyone checking out this month? Let’s take a look…

1. My 2009 Year In Review
2. The CES 2010 Swag
3. Tracking Events on Twitter
4. In Vegas for a Week
5. The 2010 Night Before CES Party

Awesome that the PodCamp articles are getting some traffic!

Traffic Sources

1. John Chow
2. Facebook
3. Twitter
4. Jon Waraas
5. Mahalo

Nice to see some new traffic sources up there!

Top Commentators

The Top commentators for January were Caterers Sydney, Voyage Montreal, Bathroom Wall Floor Tiles, Colin Dean & Michael Kwan.

Stats

RSS Readers 959 (+96)
Twitter Followers 6042 (-59)
Facebook Friends 1471 (+94)

I’m sort of disappointed that my twitter numbers went down.

On to February
As I said I still have a few CES and Vegas posts to publish and I want to blog about a ton of other things so let’s see if I can get February’s post number in the double digits!

The Services
So do you use a service that Backupify supports? They have all the big online services covered, Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, Gmail, Google Docs, Flickr, and Wordpress. Other services include Delicious, Zoho, Photobucket, Basecamp, Blogger and Hotmail. They also have support for YouTube, Xmarks, Rss Feeds, and Tumblr coming very soon.

How It Works
Getting Backupify setup is pretty simple. All you do is create an account and go to the settings tab. There it will list all of the services. Then you go ahead and click on what service you want to back up, enter your credentials and hit create. You can also select how often Backupify backs up your data. You can select weekly or daily backups and you can have them e-mail you a digest of what gets backed up.

So when Backupify starts backing up your files you can go in and see what all has been backed up. Just click on the Archives tab at the top then select your service. Depending on the service the files will be backed up differently. They make a nice PDF for Twitter updates. Other things are stored in .xml files or things like photos are simply backed up.

Sign up Fast
As I said Backupify is currently free, after January 31st the service will go back to a paid pricing structure. If you signup during this free period your account will remain free and unlimited. Even if they do not support your service you should sign up. They are planning on adding many services in the future and you can’t beat it since it’s free!

Where was everything?
If you were on the show floor at all you definitely had to notice it was smaller. There were completely open spots on the show floor! The North Hall of the Las Vegas Convention Center, which normally is car audio, was almost completely empty! Apparently what was left of car audio was moved to the Palms, which not only is off the strip you can’t even take the monorail to get there. The Sands Expo at the Venetian, which usually held a lot of niche products and vendors, was not even used; take a look at our Sands Expo article from last year. Many large companies who normally have decent size booths either opted for a very small booth or had meeting rooms instead.

Another thing that bothered me were the press rooms, rooms specifically for press members that have free WiFi, computers, printers, etc. In past years the press room was a nice comfortable place to work, they even had free drinks and snacks. This year the only free drink in the press room was water and there were no snacks at all. Press lunches used to be a big buffet, now you get a lunch ticket and a boxed lunch. The computers in the press room were running Windows XP Professional. You’re telling me you can’t get a large company to sponsor the press room? A sign of the times I guess?

Another thing that many companies have done in recent years is use a hotel suite to show off products. From what I’ve heard on average a booth at CES costs around $75,000 – $100,000 depending on the size and that is just for the space. Then you have to pay for construction of the booth etc, bringing costs up even more. I couldn’t imagine what large companies that have massive booth’s pay for them, I would guess some pay upwards of $500,000 in total cost if not more! Because of the hefty cost many companies display their products in a hotel. Let’s just say on average a hotel suite costs $1,000 a night during CES, include food and some other expenses, you are still under $10,000 for all of CES. You can see why many companies are doing this.

CEA Kicks Out Companies
The CEA who runs CES does offer a hotel suite package. The official CES hotels are The Venetian and Palazzo. Each had specific CES floors that allowed companies to display products, and get their name listed on the official CES Venetian / Palazzo suite guide. From what I was told this cost was $8,000 on top of the cost of the suite itself. And there is a catch, you are not allowed to sleep in the suite, it is just for display purposes only. So companies have to pay $8,000, plus the cost of the suite, plus the cost for another room for their employees.

Many companies had no need to be listed on the CES guide and did not feel like paying the $8,000 to CEA, which is very understandable. So they just went ahead and booked a suite themselves making sure ahead of time that they were allowed to display products. Well apparently this year CEA was cracking the whip on companies that did this. All hotel staff was told if they saw products being displayed in rooms that were not official CES rooms to report it. I was in one such room being given a product demo when the hotel manager and security guards asked anyone not registered to the room to leave the room. Not only was this very unprofessional it was embarrassing for the company in the suite.

I also met with a company later in the week that was kicked out of the Palazzo. They told me that they called ahead of time and made sure they were allowed to display products and have meetings. When the hotel found out they were displaying products and having meetings during the week they were asked to remove to products, but for some reason were allowed to have a party that night. Maybe because the party was being catered by the hotel? The next morning the company was asked to leave the hotel and still pay for the 4 days they had the room booked, when they only stayed 2. Funny they did this AFTER the party that was catered by the hotel.

I personally know of 2 companies that were asked to leave their suites at the Venetian / Palazzo, but I heard of up to 30 companies being ousted from the hotels. Because CEA has a deal with the Venetian and Palazzo I guess they can do this, but it is very unprofessional and many companies have done this in the past without any issues. It makes me think that the CEA put pressure on the Venetian / Palazzo to kick out companies that did not pay their fee.

DailyTech and Hardware Secrets both have articles on their experiences getting kicked out of hotel suites while meeting with companies

So is CES Going Away?
I really hope that CES is not going away, but this year the show was noticeably smaller and there was all of the drama within the Palazzo and Venetian. This could just be a sign of the times, but I hope that the 2011 CES is much larger and more exciting. I think next year you are going to see many companies using other hotels for meetings rather than the Venetian and Palazzo.

I originally posted this at ThinkComputers, but I figured I would post it here as well.

I had never been to AquaKnox before and it is a really cool place. There were tons of free food and an open bar as well. Lenovo’s idea for the blogger nights was getting everyone together in a relaxed atmosphere where reps are not trying to shove products in your face. Lenovo did have products setup and a demo room, but you were not required to demo any of the products.

One thing that was missing from this event was free WiFi. I had brought my laptop to actually do some work at the event and I was unable to get on the internet. If you are brining tech media and bloggers together you should have some free WiFi! All in all it was a good event though! Here are some photos from the event.

This year the event was live streamed on Ustream, but we have the recording of it embedded below.

In the end Chris Ramseyer of TweakTown took first place with a build time of 6 minutes 53 seconds. Here are some photos of the event!

ThinkComputers very own Colin Dean!

Fellow Pittsburgher @iJustine

Rob of Techgage

Dan of TechwareLabs

Paul of Hi Tech Legion

Chris of TweakTown….the winner!

Jason of TechwareLabs

The first thing that is always a keeper in the CES press bag. This year it was a vertical messenger bag, that had room inside it for a laptop and a few other accessories. It was a decent bag, but still does not beat the rolling backpacks CES had a few years back, those were awesome! It seems like every year since then CES has been giving media cheaper and cheaper bags.

Some of the best things I received this year would have to be a new motherboard from Cyberpower, Keyboard from OCZ, Geforce 210 video card from Shuttle, a pillow from Cooler Master, a 128GB SSD from Kingston, and a 500GB hard drive I won at the night before CES party!

This was definitely a year I actually received swag that I’m going to use, maybe I’ll do a giveaway with the rest of the swag, stay tuned for that!

This year’s party it seemed like everyone knew who I was. It was not me going up and saying hi to people it was the other way around, which was actually pretty nice. I finally got to meet Cameron from TweakTown, he flew all the way from Taipei to come to CES! One thing that is great about this party is the view, you can see the entire strip from the balcony of the suite!

Getting through the Pittsburgh airport was very easy, there was no line at the security check at all. We went right through and were in the terminal within 10 minutes. Instead of going right to our gate Colin and I decided to grab food so we stopped in O’Briens, which is sort of like an Irish Pub. The food wasn’t that bad, I got a steak salad.

Once we boarded our plane we seriously waited for over 30 minutes waiting for them to load luggage on to the plane. After that our plane had to be de-iced, which took another 15 minutes. Takeoff was a little bumpy, but we are finally up in the air.

If you want to track my trip you can easily do that by following me on Twitter, friending me on Facebook, following my Flickr stream, or just by checking back to this blog. Also if you want to meet up when you are in Vegas please email me or shoot me a message on twitter.

I am in Vegas for CES, which I go to every year for ThinkComputers so make sure you follow the ThinkComputers twitter account as well.

A few months ago when the G20 was happening in Pittsburgh there was sure a lot going on in the city. There were many demonstrations, riots, and other interesting things going on. When everything first started happening I really did not have any urge to go downtown and check things out. So since I am on the computer a lot I loaded up Seesmic Desktop and put in #G20 and #Pittsburgh in a search column and the tweets that included those hashtags started coming up. As the G20 started getting closer the more and more tweets came up, I saw pictures of blackhawk helicopters over the city, pictures of protesters, etc. It was very cool, and more informative than the news about the G20 that was on TV.

As one of the first protests was getting broke up by riot police twitter was going crazy! People were explaining it as it was happening and telling people who were stuck in the crossfire where to go. Reading all of these tweets I felt like I was really there in all of the action! It was like I was in a war room overseeing the battle! Like I said it was better than watching the news!

I finally decided to go down to check out the action the second night of the protests. With my iPhone I was able to still track the hastags and found out where the protests where happening and was able to know where to go to be safe and out of the line of police, who were basically taking arresting anyone who was out that night.

This really shows what a useful resource Twitter is and how it can keep you safe! It will be fun to track things going on at CES when I’m there in just a few days!