CES 2008: You don't need a big booth to get attention

There are actually two CES shows happening in Las Vegas this week. The one at the Las Vegas Convention Center is filled with booths the size of a typical NYC apartment (or bigger). It's loud. It's got every type of tech on view. It would take a day just to go through one section, never mind the whole thing. In short, it's overwhelming.

The show at the Sands is different -- in fact, it's a bit old-fashioned. The booths are smaller (with one or two exceptions) and the vendors are smaller as well. In fact, when you stop by, you are much more likely to be talking to the guy who started the company, or to his chief IT staffer, than to the typical PR flack. (With all due respect to PR flacks, of course.)

A few years ago, when the Comdex business tech show used to take over Vegas, I would prowl the periphery of the hall in order to find the smaller, up-and-coming companies who were hungry for success in the market, and who were sure that their ideas had the potential for being the Next Big Thing. Most of them didn't make it even though some of their products weren't half bad. But it was always interesting to talk to them. At CES, you'll find them at the Sands, the smaller venue for CES vendors.

For example, it was at the Sands that I found the VieVu, a small digital video camera that is designed to be hands-off -- you clip it to your shirt, push down the lens protector, and it records 640 x 480 video for up to about four hours. And there was WildCharge, a metallic pad that, according to the company, allows you to charge your mobile device by just laying it down on the pad (assuming the device has the appropriate add-on).

Other vendors were even more on the periphery, avoiding show floors altogether and showing up in small press gatherings or in the halls of the convention center. Everex, for example, used one of these events to launch what looks to be one of the latest in a group of ultramobile Linux-based notebooks: the 2-pound, $399 Everex Cloudbook (from a design by Via Technologies), which uses the gOS Linux distro and sports a slightly less simplistic interface than the Asus EEE. I tried it out and was rather impressed -- except for the fact that the keyboard is missing the right shift key, which is going to bother anyone trying to touch type.

But the winner of the "get 'em where you can find 'em" vendor contest is Zoho, the online office suite, whose representatives were seen wandering the halls holding signs with the company name and chatting affably to anyone who cared to stop. And from what I could tell, quite a few did.

For more CES coverage, check out Computerworld's News from CES 2008.