Huh?

CES never used to matter much in my world.  The show to attend was Comdex (and before that NCC). CES meant TVs and stereos, but Comdex, well Comdex was about computers. Up to 250,000 people in one place just because of computers.

What killed Comdex, I think, was a combination of 9/11, the Internet, and the end of the dot-com bubble. But then 9/11 came close to taking out a lot of institutions, even me.

It was the simultaneous loss of dot-com largess and the abrupt, but temporary, end to business travel after 9/11 that almost killed my career.  Pre-9/11 I was being paid to speak somewhere twice a month.  Post-9/11 I was speaking twice a year.  Comdex was hurt even more than I was, though, because it was built on voodoo economics.  Comdex owner Softbank retrenched, facing reality, the show closed, and suddenly it made perfect sense to display computers alongside the big screen TVs at CES in January, calling that change progress.

But now CES appears to be succumbing, too, to another era of reduced aspirations. Microsoft is pulling out. Half of the PC people who matter at CES live or work within 50 miles of each other anyway in the Bay Area, so why meet in Vegas?  Why indeed?

It’s hard to see, in fact, almost any big venue trade show that is growing and not in trouble. The only such business I can see that defies this trend is big name music touring, which brings us back to Taylor Swift and to Willie.  With so much that’s synthetic and artificial in our world, somehow the idea of seeing and hearing a real person onstage has gained new allure, a business model just waiting to be exploited through co-marketing.

Having once paid for my kids to see the Moscow Circus sponsored by Huggies, I can imagine a logical music/technology hybrid replacing the traditional techie trade show, a little like Burning Man and a lot  like Steve Wozniak’s old US Festivals where computers and music were displayed side-by-side.

Apple presents U2! (iPads around back).

Why not?

With 10 million IT professionals of one sort or another in America you could tie a tech seminar and a sales pitch to anything from Usher to cricket to Scottish Games, but with no more going to Vegas (and no Justin Bieber — too young). The trade show (and t-shirt sellers) would come to us, just like Willie Nelson does.

Just like Fish.

Write that weekend off your taxes.

Somebody call Live Nation.

What an irony if the “relatively simple and straightforward” treatment for Steve Jobs’ hormone imbalance revealed this week is for the lifelong vegetarian to eat meat. I have no way of knowing that’s his treatment, of course – the idea just sprang into my head.

But given the press and stock market reaction to details of Jobs’ health problems, I’d say he’ll make a cameo appearance at Macworld a few hours from now even if he has to send his good twin to do so.

I further predict that Apple will make a substantial product announcement or two. This won’t be the minimalist Macworld that people had feared. If Jobs won’t be doing the heavy lifting this time he’ll at least leave Phil Schiller with a product or two to announce.

And speaking of products to announce, readers have been wondering whatever happened to the disk drive I was working on with stainless foil media? It’s still coming along nicely, thanks, but startups without money tend to take longer to succeed OR fail than startups with money.

The recording media is more or less perfected, which was harder to achieve than any of us expected, and we should see prototype drives within the next couple months. They’ll be comparable in capacity to similar size conventional drives but less expensive to make, more shock-resistant, and require vastly less energy to run.

For an example of how much energy savings is possible with Metal Foil Drives, consider the duty cycle of a traditional glass platter drive inside a media player like an iPod. The way such media players work is they read data from the hard drive into buffer memory then play from that buffer. First the drive spins-up, which takes about five seconds. Then the data is read from the drive, which takes about a tenth of a second. Finally the drive is turned-off until the buffer memory is depleted and the cycle starts all over again. Each cycle, then, involves powering the drive for 5.1 seconds.

The Metal Foil Drive (MFD), however, has a LOT less mass to spin up than the heavy glass platter it replaces. Hard drives moved a few years ago from primarily aluminum to glass platters because glass can be polished smoother allowing lower flying height for the read-write heads and resulting higher arreal densities. But glass platters are also more expensive than aluminum and heavier. They are a LOT more expensive and heavier than metal foil. As a result, an MFD of comparable capacity spins-up in a tenth of a second and reads the data in another tenth of a second. Not only is 0.2 seconds a lot less time (and energy) than 5.1 seconds, but the lower mass of the MFD platter allows the use of a smaller, cheaper, and lower-power motor to do the work – yet another win.

But why even bother with hard drives with flash memory prices dropping so quickly? Because the more storage capacity we have available the more stuff we’ll want to store. I see MFD’s carrying HD movies around for years to come.  Maybe your Nano doesn’t need one, but video will keep us buying drive-based media players, too.

There will always be people who don’t want to carry all their movies around with them, of course, and to keep those folks happy Netflix seems determined to stream its B movies to as many consumer electronic devices as possible. This week we hear about Netflix streaming direct to certain LG HDTVs, which is cool. But a financial analysis of the product as it will be initially offered is cool only for LG – certainly not for LG customers.

The Netflix-capable LG TV’s, we’re told, will cost about $300 more than LG sets that can’t do such streaming. The difference between the two TV families is that the streamers have a System-On-Chip to run a minimal operating system and handle H.264 decoding, an Ethernet adapter chip to connect to your home network, and some buffer memory. That’s three extra chips costing at most $20 extra plus a little software, giving LG a gross profit margin of around 1500 percent for this particular improvement!

If consumers will actually pay $300 more for a TV with Netflix streaming built-in then I predict that EVERY HDTV manufacturer will install Netflix on every set by the end of this year. They won’t even care if people actually watch Netflix content as long as they just buy the more expensive sets.

The jury is still out, I’d say, on whether people will actually pay this price difference when, for $99, they can simply plug in a cheap media streaming box like the one from Roku and achieve the same result.  Still it’s worth a shot, the folks at LG must be thinking.

It’s what Steve Jobs would do.