OK, I admit it - I am a geek through-and-through. No matter how much my “real job” pushes me into the business world, sometimes I digress and have to take a few spare moments to catch up in the latest technology news from the gadget world. One of my favorite websites is Engadget. com. Engadget is a technology blog and podcast about consumer electronics and they very creatively mix pop culture humor with the tech world. In the last couple of weeks, sites like Engadget and others have been reporting on the new hardware mediums that we as consumers will use in our daily life. Many of these new advances were featured at the popular Consumer Electronic Show or CES in Las Vegas earlier this month. What is interesting to note is that the R&D of the devices is not defined by what looks good or what someone else wants you to want, but the type of content that people need or believe they need --- now.
Being in the social media space, of course, the thing that I always consider is how these new devices can fit into my world. It started with Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Skype being available on my iPhone. That’s cool because it lets me access these apps from a device that I always have with me. Between my PC and my iPhone, I should be all set. Right?
Well, it seems the consumer electronics world doesn’t think that is enough, or maybe just not everyone is like me. Now, I can buy an HDTV from Mitsubishi with flickr, facebook, and twitter built in - into a TV! I can access twitter from my car too – props to Ford, I can participate in a 3D social network on my PS3, and watch YouTube from my AppleTV. The list goes on and on.
The next big thing is shaping up to be the multi-touch tablet. Sort of like a very big iPhone on which I can read books, magazines, and newspapers, watch TV, call my friends and video chat, surf the net, call up maps in my car, and of course, keep up with my communities on Connected Community.
Several of these devices have been released recently but none yet lives up to the hopes of us gadget geeks. Apple is rumored to maybe be delivering on all of it, or some of it, or none of it sometime in the next week when they may or may not announce their highly secretive but much anticipated iSlate, a new type of tablet notebook that they deny knowing anything about. Seriously, maybe they will just announce that Flash now works on the iPhone. Every time I even pretend to hope it is actually a reality (even the bit about flash), I have been disappointed, so fingers crossed this time.
The good news is that devices will only get better, faster, thinner -- like the Six Million Dollar Device; I wonder if they will name it after Steve Austin? No matter how it turns out, social media will be a large part of the driving force. We’ll have some exciting announcements ourselves in the next few weeks. Maybe not as exciting as being able to Twitter from a TV, but then again, what is?