@ CES: Still Waiting For Wow

The CES floor opens officially today and I’m sure I’ll be dazzled by the very big, very thin TV screens. But so far, there’s just no wow here, no “oh my, gosh you have to see this.” Don’t get me wrong … lots of cool gizmos and neato services, some of interest to the gadget geek in me, some that could change the way we get media and entertainment. Still, the previews have been a lot like last night’s Bill Gates keynote — incremental and far short of dazzling.

A couple of things that have caught my eye so far:

— A social networking music technology called Jook from gaming peripheral company Razer Group that incorporates meshes wireless signals with music hardware like headsets, allowing users to broadcast music and other audio streams like podcasts to the people around them. Of course, those people have to have Jook, too. There’s a software element that allows people to contact each other via device-embedded profiles to find out more about what they’re broadcasting/listening to. Given that I can’t even find people to connect with on Zune in a room full of Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) employees, it seems unlikely that Jook will hit the kind of critical mass a social networking service needs but if it’s picked up by enough developers and manufacturers, who knows?

— Storage is getting smaller in size, larger in capacity, lower in cost and spiffier. What does that have to do with content? Everything. Music, video, audio storage, particularly the portable kind that makes it possible to carry as much as you want with you or the kind that’s hard to notice in a living room is increasing in importance. Western Digital is grappling now with one of the problems that comes along with media storage. Mio.net, a company it acquired last year, has a nifty service to store personal media online, use it from online and share it. The problem: it also comes with some controversial DRM blocking that prevents sharing. Product manager Scott Rader told me the company is working on resolving the issue. “We want our devices and our software to be agnostic.”

I’ll start walking the floor later today so maybe the wow is on its way.

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