Zoom panels, product unveilings all to take place while you have no pants
This year CES2021 is scheduled from Monday January 11-14. It’s a bit later than usual due to lot and lots of strange things happening in the world, and, oh yes, cause they had to shrink it into a phone-sized screen, or at least a zoom-panel for your desktop.
While attempting to put a happy face on it all the exhibitors described it thusly: ”an all-digital experience connecting exhibitors, customers, thought leaders and media from around the world. The new format will allow participants to hear from technology innovators, see cutting-edge technologies and the latest product launches, and engage with global brands and startups from around the world.“
In all seriousness if you want to check out the new gadgets, trends and progress you can now attend without “borrowing” somebodies pass who had to leave a day or two early. Wuuhuu! An infinite virtual exhibit hall will be replacing the 3 million square feet of actual exhibition space, but the more than 100,000 attendees will not be renting rooms in Vegas.
Or getting room service on the company tab, or watching pay-per-view from same said tab. Which is all not great for Vegas – but there will be better news next year – we hope seriously and sincerely.
As for this year let’s try to get the hang of this whole virtual thing! There are almost 2,000 exhibits for 2021 CES, to see the in detail, check out CES exhibitor list.
We can recommend, for those who will not register as an official attendee to view the action on CNET’s livestream. They’ll be broadcasting all day on Monday, Jan. 11 and you can follow along for press conferences, product reveals, a CES keynote presentation and expert commentary from the editors and hosts.
Our Premium Plus exhibitors will showcase their latest innovations at the all-digital #CES2021.
The battle is getting very public and will get louder and nastier
The full page newspaper ads taken out by Facebook, where they proclaim themselves the champion of small business and attack Apple directly are interesting and curious on many levels.
It will take a series of articles to attempt to untangle the confusions and endless, often intentionally fostered, misconceptions that will most certainly arise in this battle of titans.
At the heart of the matter is, however, the largest misconception humanly possible, the idea that these monstrously huge companies, and how they operate, are anything at all related to “normal”.
The fact that all of us have seen the role of the internet in general increase over the last 20+ years, and have therefore had to deal with, and in some cases, go through and cooperate with these behemoths, may be the status quo that has developed, particularly in the last decade, but it is without precedent on many levels.
The size, power and influence is beyond comprehension and this clouds every issue
Before even beginning to contrast one giant against another one must first confront the very existence of entities of this magnitude. It’s fair to say that never in history has such a tiny group of companies, and by extension, individual humans, controlled so much of the economy and so much of that impacts the society and our experiences.
This chart is not current. If it were the disparity would be far larger and even more astounding:
This information, for a human, is so out of whack that you would have to stare at this chart for days before it could even sink in. And, as it it only a chart of size, built on company market capitalization, the power and influence, which represents and ever larger disparity, is not represented.
The dominance overall is so extreme as to be humanly incomprehensible. And by all measures the disparity between the big tech firms and “everybody else” grows literally by the second.
If you are afraid of A.I., you’re too late, the world is already controlled by computers and software via these companies
Facebook is probably the best example to illustrate the problem of market power and dominance on a level that is so far beyond traditional methods of measurement that even government antitrust investigations are barely able to begin to access the potential violations.
“The questions below might seem odd, or even absurd. But what is really absurd is that they are, for the most part, never asked. “
The questions below might seem odd, or even absurd. But what is really absurd is that they are, for the most part, never asked. Since the iPhone and later Samsung / Android revolutionized information and photo sharing, it has been accepted as a simple reality that Facebook controls nearly all the “social networking” that is done with that data. Why?
What is Facebook? Most would say they are a “social media company” but that can mean anything you want it to mean. They claim they are in the business of “connecting people” yet they derive massive wealth and profit from advertising, and “monetizing” their network, the largest network of “social users”, by far.
And if they are interested in connecting people, then what do those people own of the network that they themselves comprise? That would be nothing.
What say do they have in how they are used to “monetize” the network that they literally “are”? None.
What trust do they have to surrender to the company, which includes Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and more (all controlled 100% by a guy named Zuckerberg)? 100%
“What ‘say’ do they have in how they are used to “monetize” the network that they literally ‘are’? None.”
— D.L.
Who authorized Facebook (or Google) to amass vast databanks of private personal information from a huge chunk of the world’s population, and use that data to amass fortunes of unheard of size using secret proprietary algorithms that they have zero requirement to disclose? Well, technically, users, inadvertently and without understanding, did. Otherwise: No-one.
Well, technically all of this was “allowed” via Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, passed in 1996, and states that an “interactive computer service” can’t be treated as the publisher or speaker of third-party content. This, effectively, protects websites and “platforms” such as Facebook, from lawsuits in the case that a “user” posts something illegal. There are exceptions, for example, for copyright violations, sex work-related material, and violations of federal criminal law.
This fact does not remove responsibility for building a system that gives massive financial benefit to Facebook, Google, etc and very little, in reality, by way of return or influence to the “user”.
It’s as if a man figured out a way to use mental-telepathy to rob banks and could never be caught or prosecuted due to the fact that no one had ever robbed a bank that way before. And then he claimed that he should be allowed to continue doing it forever, with impunity.
What would Facebook and Zuckerberg have if the billions of “users” stopped using its network? Nothing.
How little sense this makes just goes on and on. There could be 100s of pages of similar questions and answers and the end result would be a slightly better understanding of the absurdity of the very existence of such a “service” or company or whatever this is.
Why absurd? In a nutshell, Facebook controls private networks that exist “inside” a more public network called, for lack of a better term, “the internet”. And, because of what could be termed a mistake of history they represent a dominant, near monopoly, in the “space” which in this case is currently called “social networks”.
The dominance and the definition of monopoly can be argued endlessly (and likely will be in the coming antitrust cases) but, in the end, the numbers don’t lie. Only one person benefits, in direct payments of trillions of dollars, from a near monopoly in social networks. The billions of people, the very people who are the network, do not.
A bleak analysis, perhaps, but is there any light at the end of this tunnel?
The current increase in antitrust cases, both in the US and Europe, is a canary-in the-coal-mine moment and the wars over all the arising issues has begun and will go on for years.
The fact that Facebook is heavily advertising that they are the “good guy” while Amazon and Google do the same, is both ridiculous and sad, since “good guys” don’t have to buy ads to draw attention to that fact.
And the fact that these companies have already started, both in word and deed, to attack each other directly, is an indication of just how serious and all pervasive these mega-wars will be. This is just the beginning.
While none of the companies depicted on the chart above can be said to be without blame for the world of injustice and malfunction that is the internet, and by extension, our world, there is one company that stands apart from the others in so many ways and for so many reasons that they, amazingly, represent some hope within the madness.
And, not coincidently, they are the one that is already being attacked, in print and software, as the wars begin: Apple.
How Apple actually represents hope to clean up the tech universe that, arguably, they are most responsible for having created, is likely a hard sell with those that want to lump all these huge companies together. Because, after all, they are all huge.
However, nothing could be further from the truth. More on this and other burning questions in our next episode, so stay tuned.
Black Friday sales for 2020 have already started, with so many great deals popping up online, it can be hard to know where to turn to first. Luckily, Amazon in particular has put out huge savings on many electronics including Apple product headphones, its Echo products, Fire TV, cell phones and much for for the cyber event. Below we’ve collected the best deals ready to buy in the Electronics category.
Best Deals for Headphones this Black Friday Week on Amazon
Best Deals on Smartphones this Black Friday on Amazon.
Unfortunately it is not likely the new iPhone 12 will have any sales since the launch was pretty recent, however there are many other bargains on older models of smartphones that Amazon is providing this Black Friday. Check out below.
5G Network to be Available in Over 5,000 Cities through T-Mobile in 2019…
Recently, T-Mobile announced that they are set to launch their 5G network nationwide in over 5,000 cities next month on December 6th. This comes after a successful trial period in select cities where their millimeter wave 5G was deployed for testing. For their official launch, they plan to use a 600MHZ band spectrum, which will slightly affect its 5G internet speed, but with the benefit of being able to cover more space and penetrate buildings.
The widest increase in coverage to date by T-Mobile, the new, slightly slower version will increase the initial overall coverage to over 200 million subscribers. In optimal conditions the network is predicted to ultimately reach speeds of up to 10 times the current LTE network at 450 mbps.
China’s carriers, China Unicorn, China Telecom and China Mobile all recently announced accelerated plans to launch 5G services in 2019, ahead of initial projections of a 2020 time frame. Services are currently available in 50 cities across the Middle Kingdom, and 130,000 5G base stations are planned to be activated by the end of the year, according to a government press release.
Currently, however, there are only a couple of smartphones that can take advantage of 5G. Models made by Samsung (Galaxy Note 10 ) and OnePlus (7T Pro 5G) are currently available. Naturally, this entire transition will be a multi-year affair, with 2024 being a date for eventual transition to a majority of users.
Network Build-out and Consumer Adoption could hit Initial Peak in 2021
This gradual, yet sooner than expected, expansion of 5G coverage comes at an interesting time for iPhone users as Apple continues to develop their 5G iPhone technology for their future launch in September 2020, after recently acquiring Intel’s smartphone modem unit for their upcoming 5G push back in July.
Although much has been made of the race to 5G and the battle between the U.S. and China for leadership in the area, it will likely be the adoption by consumers, dependent on the investment by same in the associated costs, that will ultimately determine the speed of the transition. The improvements to all forms of online communication, particularly when coupled with the planned rollout of global satellite systems, such as SpaceX’s Starlink, have the potential to spur major changes in the coming decade.
As 5G internet coverage becomes more widespread through the various carrier roll-outs, it has the potential to revolutionize audio and visual technology by making high-quality sound and video more accessible to the general public. Once this 10x optimal speed and bandwidth become “standard”, all forms of online media will become more viable, hence the current steaming wars.
Interestingly, this nationwide 5G coverage could possibly be even greater if T-Mobile and Sprint are able to merge successfully, especially after considering that they obtained the Federal Communications Committee (FCC) approval for the merger in the midst of anti-trust concerns and a multi-state lawsuit against it.
