CES 2015

Ultra-D is a development of Stream TV Networks, in conjunction with partnering companies, to offer glasses free 3D. Their press event was a less elaborate affair than those above (though the awful photograph shown here is largely my fault!).

TCL is one of the Chinese HDTV makers vying for attention at CES. While still little known in this country, the company claims to have produced 30 million HDTVs this year, the bulk of them going, so far, to markets other than the U.S. (most, of course, were sold in China). The company has 75,000 employees, with 23 R&D facilities, 21 manufacturing bases, and markets in 80 countries. It’s also building a new panel factory (it also sells panels to other manufacturers, some of them outside of China, for use in their sets). That factory will be 70% devoted to making TFT LCD panels and, interestingly, 30% to OLED.

Sony announced that all of its 2015 Sony smart TVs will run the Android TV platform and it has partnered with Netflix to improve 4K streaming.

Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it. Or so goes the old saying. BloomSky, “the world's first crowd connected module”, won’t change the weather. BloomSky says its aggregated crowd-sourced community weather data will “disrupt the way people see, think and interact with the weather.” A spherical device about the size of a softball, BloomSky is a...

Ultra-D is a development of Stream TV Networks, in conjunction with partnering companies, to offer glasses free 3D. Their press event was a less elaborate affair than the usual CES press event (though the awful photograph shown here is largely my fault!).

With more and more music and video being stored by consumers on external hard-disks, those disks have themselves become valuable commodities. You’d think someone who took time to rip an entire CD and/or DVD collection, or downloaded a boatload of high-res albums from HDtracks, would make the additional step to secure their data by backing it up. But in many situations that isn’t the case.