LATEST ADDITIONS

In general, air purifiers have always seemed a bit like, um, smoke and mirrors to me. After all, most of them just sit in the room; and, frankly, I can never tell if they’re actually doing anything at all other than taking up space. It only took about 30 seconds for the Airmega folks to give me visual confirmation of their claim that the company’s Airmega Smart Air Purifier models remove more than 99 percent of the particulate matter in the air in the room...

With the ever-loving number of products that are introduced at CES each year, it never takes long before you come across a gadget that causes your brain to stop functioning for a second under the heavy processing load of trying to figure out just why in the hell something like that would ever have reason to exist. Jooki, “an award-winning, figurine-controlled wifi speaker that develops children’s independence and imagination, away from screens” fell into that category when I read the initial press release. In fact, I had absolutely no intention of even taking a cursory look at something that seemed so stupid and had such a silly name. But Jooki was at an event featuring a number of startup companies with “smart” or “connected” products, and—out of the sheer goodness of my heart—I sat through what I thought would be a quick (but painfully dull) demo. It turns out that Jooki wasn’t quite what I thought it was.

The problem is that Jooki is hard to explain in a way that does it the justice it deserves. Seeing it in action, on the other hand...

The HDMI Forum is made up of 83 global member companies whose mission is to “support and develop future versions of HDMI spec, support the eco-system of interoperable HDMI-enabled devices, foster broader industry participation in the development of future versions of the HDMI specification,” and they announced the specifications of the upcoming version 2.1 today at CES.

Show Marks 50 Years of CES

CES, the show that has been the launch pad for new technology since 1967, opens tomorrow and runs through Sunday, January 8 but our coverage kicks off today, a day of press conferences. Watch for news from the HDMI Forum, LG, Panasonic, Samsung, Sony, and others.