 Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Krista Burns, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is a commission's weekly online event. We're a webinar, we're a webcast, we're an online show. What's this thing? No. When we cover anything, a variety of topics and activities, anything of interest to libraries. The show is free and open to anyone to watch. Both are live sessions that we do here every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. central time. And our recorded sessions, which are all posted onto our website, they're posted up to our YouTube account along with any presentations and links, everything is all there for you afterwards. So you can watch the live show with us on Wednesdays or go on our website and see the recordings of all of our shows. And we do a mixture of things here, presentations, mini training sessions, book review sessions. Like I said, anything library related, we can have it on the show. And we have Nebraska Library Commission staff that sometimes do presentations and we sometimes bring in guest speakers. And today we have a mixture of that. Once a month, we have Tech Talk with Michael Sowers. Michael is the Technology Innovation Librarian here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Good morning, Christa. And once a month he comes on and does something definitely techy related. We sometimes have techy shows other times in the month, but definitely every, the last month's every month will be something like that. And he pretty much always brings on someone to interview, talk, do a presentation and that's what he's got for us today. So I'm just going to hand over to you, Michael, to tell us what we have for this morning. All right. Thanks a lot, Christa. As she said, I'm Michael Sowers, the Technology Innovation Librarian here at the commission. And a little background to this one is back in the mid-90s after I got my library degree, I actually lived in Las Vegas for a couple of years and going there got to go to the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas, which is just an amazing experience. I actually got to hear Bill Gates give a keynote one year there. Don't get to go anymore, really would like to. But Brian Pitchman, my good friend from the Evolve project, went last year and gave us kind of a report back of what happened and I welcomed him back this year because he went to the 2015 Consumer Electronics Show. Good morning, Brian. Hey, good morning. Thanks for having me back. And so, Brian, what did you find and what do we want to know about? Yeah, so I'll kind of just do a brief overview of what the CES is first. So CES, Consumer Electronics Show, it's a hodgepodge of new products, product announcements, a lot of people are showing off their latest and greatest technology, even so, even where you can actually play with it too, which is really cool. You get a hands-on experience before everybody else, so you get gloating rights, I suppose, when you attend. It runs the first full week of January, so this year was actually it's Sunday, the 4th of Friday, the 9th, and exhibits open Tuesday, the 6th. So there's Sunday and Monday are usually like more press days, so there's a whole bunch of like the large companies like Sony, they'll do a huge release of what's coming out, or Intel will talk about their new microprocessors and their new PCs that they're coming out with. And then the exhibit itself, where all the booths are, that's for the remainder of the week, but throughout the latter part of the week, there's still a lot of events and press-related announcements. So CES is one of the largest events in the country. There's 3,600 exhibitors this year, and it brought in about 170,000 industry professionals for a 2.2 million square feet arena. And it's spanned across two different centers. There was a convention center in Vegas, and then also the Venetian in Vegas. And this image below is an example of one of the booths. They go from very simple, like here's your 9x9 space to an interactive exhibit. So this exhibit was showing when you walk up to it, the camera, and then it shows up phrases to you. It was kind of neat. So 2.2 million square feet, if you want to envision it, equals roughly 38 football fields. So extremely large and a lot of walking. So here's some of the examples of the grandeur of the booths. I actually am really impressed by the booth a lot more than some of the technology that I saw. So I was like, wow, so Intel's booths, hundreds of dollars, thousands of dollars, were spent on their ginormous booth with these little pods that change color throughout the day. Some booths actually had two stories. So if you had like a VIP pass, if you will, Oculus had some one-on-one press rooms where you can have a one-on-one convo with one of the engineers in Oculus and play with it. And then you had your simple, you know, style booths that we're all used to seeing. Belkin had a ginormous booth as well with all of their home automation stuff. And I'm going to go break down into some of the transit CS in a little bit. This is cool. Phillips had a history of all the remotes they've ever made along the wall. Like, as people were walking past, they're like, oh, I was looking for this remote. I should just try to yank it off the wall as a joke. So yeah, it was actually a really, really neat audience. So as you get as larger and more well-funded companies, if you will, they had larger and greater booths. So Audi had this, I just thought it looked really neat. They had a white floor. They made white panels. So when you're standing in the room, it looked like you were in an entirely white box. Panasonic's booth is from this point all the way down there. So huge. Some of these exhibits are expansively large. So what does it take to attend CES? So if you were to attend on Monday to Saturday, and I encourage you staying until Saturday because there's events every night for networking purposes. And I'll give you a little bit of that in a little bit. So cost-wise, a hotel is anywhere from $1.50 to $2.50 a night. The flight anywhere from $200 to $400 a night. And food, I actually only spend about $100 on food because I basically wait until the evening events because there's a lot of parties and VIP events that you can attend to. And by VIP, I mean you send an email to somebody in marketing, I assume, and then they send you back this phrase word you use. So there's no real, I don't know, smoke in the air to be a VIP member to go to any of these VIP events. It's like you find an email address. You say, hey, can I go? And it looks like everyone is approved. So just starve yourself until you get to one of those free little food parties and then you'll be fine. So transportation to and from your hotel and the conference center, it's a free shuttle. But from airport to your hotel, there's like this $14 round-trip shuttle pass you can buy, which is fairly cheap. The ticket to get in to CES is free if you register early. And in order to be part of CES, you have to be either an industry expert. So have some of an affiliation with the tech industry. Press, if you want to be a press member, you have to have like an actual newsletter or e-newsletter publication with history of doing it. But to be honest with you, if you wanted to attend as an industry expert or industry analyst, you can use your library business card if you were in the technology field. And even not, you can just ask and you should provide, hey, can I make a business card that says, you know, I'm going to go to CES for technology related things or I'm in the maker space, can I like improve my business card and kind of highlight that. And it's really simple. You scan your business card in, they look it over and I don't know, half a second. And if it looks like it's tech-orientated and you add value to attending, they'll let you go for free. So I encourage you to register early and then kind of decide like financially does the rest of the cost make sense to you. And if you didn't want to take the free shuttle to and from the hotels, it's like seven to 15 bucks a taxi ride. What to bring to CES? You want to bring a really good camera. So the photos I took was a Samsung NX300 camera and plenty of memory cards. A power brick for your phone, because your phone battery, because you're in a small space, if you will, with a whole bunch of other people connecting to their cell phone providers, there's a lot of interference. So your battery drains quicker. So what I would tell you to do, because my battery probably died halfway through the day, buy one of those power bricks with 20, 30 bucks now. So that way you'll have power all day long. Bring really good shoes. I made a mistake last year of just wearing dress shoes, thinking that would have been good enough and I destroyed those as well as my feet. So I'd highly encourage you to buy, I actually wore gym shoes with like those gel inserts this year. A tire, what do people wear? It ranges from like jeans and like band T-shirts, if you will, or like, oh, I love Sony heart type of T-shirt. People wearing full suits. So what I would encourage you to do, depending on what your goal at CES, dress business casual, I wore like real nice jeans, a dress shirt, and a sports jacket. When I was at CES, I had a very specific mission in mind. I'm going to look at that. So why do you want to attend CES? First and foremost, you get a chance to experience all the latest and greatest in terms of technology. You're going to see what's out in the market before it's out on the market. And that's really good knowledge to have because when you are talking to, for instance, your patrons, and they're like, hey, let's talk about tablets or I'm thinking of buying a new computer or anything along those lines, you can have an informed conversation about what you're aware of because we're supposed to know all these things, right? You also get a chance to meet founder's creators, leads in marketing, leads in development for all these different companies, which is really a unique perspective because it gives you a chance to talk to them about libraries. So why do I attend CES? Is I find companies that are doing something that's really awesome and really interactive or engaging and invite them to work with libraries. And so I'll point out some of the companies as we go through. But hey, I like your product. Have you considered beta testing in the library? And they're all like, oh, that's a great idea. We haven't thought about that yet. Let's do it. And there's no other environment that I can think of that allows the library to kind of control those conversations. And CES allows you to do that. You can also invite some of the companies there to share their expertise, whether it be starting a business or getting cross-source funded or anything like that in your library. So I've been having conversations with these exhibitors at CES specifically about how can you help me improve libraries. Versus though, hey, here's all the really cool technology. So yeah, there's a lot of really good reasons to attend. And so I take this bit of information looking as well. So I'm sure you guys are all familiar with the Pew Research Center. So they did this survey where they asked a variety of individuals how often have you used the library in the last 12 months and how important is your library to the community? It takes 3% today, I've used it in the last 12 months, but 91 says it's very important. So there's a 38% gap. Since I am approaching exhibitors, my potential of succeeding is extremely high. I have a 91% success rate of talking to someone that wants to help libraries based off the chart. So with that in mind, I know that I can speak to 1,900 exhibitors that have used the library in the last 12 months and almost 3,300 exhibitors feel libraries are important. So the cost to me to attend to reach that many groups of people is phenomenal from a price standpoint. So if you have that same attitude and you wanted to bring companies into your library space, you have 3,300 people you can talk to, if you will. So when I spoke to these companies, what kind of questions and what kind of trends should you ask if you attend? So I'll ask, hey, have you considered libraries? What is your marketing strategy to libraries? Do you value libraries? So do you think libraries are important? Yes, you do. Awesome. We're doing stuff about maker chases and I see you have a really great 3D printer. Would you be willing to let my library showcase it for a month or a week or a year? Which could tie into would you let my library better test your product? So surprisingly, the buy-in to do this type of stuff is extremely high. Companies are always willing to have an opportunity to showcase and then also have that good, hey, look, I help the library out feeling. So more about the conference. So there's two main venues, the Convention Center and the Venetian. The Convention Center is where most of the mainstream exhibits are, like the large branding companies like Samsung, LG is extremely crowded. Like you are elbow to elbow the entire time as you wade through the mass of people. And they have some of the most expensive and extremely elaborate displays. Those slides I showed you at the beginning were all from the convention center. All massive displays. The Venetian, which is my favorite portion, there's a section called Eureka Part. There's lots of hands-on demos and a lot of startup companies are there. So there's a lot of companies trying to get their feet off the ground and they're showing off their product, giving away to some other people to, hey, play with this, let me know what you think. Last year, Eureka Part was kind of like a secret. Not many people knew about it, and I loved it because it was like a smaller group of people went there. This year, they moved all the 3D printers into Eureka Part, which caused all the 3D printing enthusiasts to crowd up my usually almost empty startup space. So there was some major transency. I'm going to kind of break it through each one. So 3D printing, which was in the Venetian, a lot of 3D printing companies, and I would point out that if you see a printer for $3,200 or $2,700, there's probably something that makes a 3D printer just like that now for $1,000, for $500. So it's really interesting to see how expensive 3D printers initially were and how everyone bought it right away. Better improved models on their own, often from open source perspectives that print even better for a fraction of the cost. So this one company called 3DP Unlimited has a giant, I think it's 3 feet by 3 feet print bed so you can print out really large objects. I think the cost was $20,000, that was pretty expensive. There was one exhibit space that lets you scan yourself and print yourself on top of an action figure. Which was really neat, their line was extremely long, I wanted to do it but I didn't really want to wait in the long. Another company called CNE CNC has a really unique printer and I just thought it was really cool because instead of having the XY axis moving up, it's three poles and the print head which is back and forth between all three. I thought it was a really different way to print and that printer is about $1,000. The first ever I believe it's the first ever dot matrix 3D printer. So this printer prints very similar to how laser jet printer prints. So it shoots little pieces of ink out whereas in the 3D printer world it shoots plastic out. So the quality you get is far better than your traditional flat bed type of printing. So here this is an object, no sanding no solution, that's how it looks like fresh off the printer. And I thought that was phenomenally well detailed. There is a 3D printer that converts paper into 3D objects. So you can buy a ream of paper and print out a 3D using paper. Their machine was about 20 grand I believe as well. A 3D doodler. They had a pen came out last year that was relatively large but it was a good entryway into 3D designing. Now they refocus their design and I was able to play with it. In the little glass showcase that you see on the left there's a pen. I don't know if you can see my mouse but it's much smaller about the size of a highlighter and you can, there's a battery pack in there as well so you can 3D print just by drawing without having to plug in which I thought was really neat. So drones. I've never been a huge fan of drones. I don't know, they just never amazed me but a lot of people that I was able to fly them so that made it fun. So all sorts of different drones from different cost sizes. Here's a drone here. There's another drone with a little camera on the actual controller. They have cages built where you can fly your drones with other people's drones and that was pretty neat. Super strong and powerful drones that can lift heavy objects. It also says no photography. I messed up there. Micro drones. So they have mini little drones that you can fly around now that fit in the palm of your hand. I guess to chase your favorite pets around the house. You can have your own drones designed now in the color you want. So drones are huge. A lot of people like them. I have a friend that's an engineer that uses drones to survey buildings for structural deficiencies. So there's a lot of value using it. I just don't have one. So I just passed through it. Home automation. Home automation is starting to become extremely big. Everyone wants to be part of it. There was hundreds of companies that came out with their own home automation tools. The downside with home automation is that everyone's building their own type of interconnected devices. Sometimes they don't cross-colonate. So you'll buy brand A to open your garage door and tell you when someone opens your house door. But it doesn't talk with brand B which controls all your outlets. They use similar technologies like Z-Wave. However, no one has really made a hub or a device that lets all these things connect together. So what you're stuck with is multiple companies and multiple apps on your phone to control. Which is kind of disappointing. But there's new companies out there that are trying to basically build a whole suite of things. Anything that you can automate they're going to build which costs a ton. So exhibit-wise, Iris probably had the neatest booth setup where they built a house in their exhibit space. Literally a house with two floors that you can walk through and interact with various home-automated things like lights turning on automatically. Doors opening once you recognize it's your face. Web cameras. They even had a garage door opener in there to show you how it works. Now you can remotely control it. So the whole house was automated which was really, really cool. Made me wish I had a ton of money so I could do it myself. Here is Belkin. So they have a WiIMO. Most of it is just plug-and-play. Good to go. But you can control all these things from your phone now. Other companies so like Smart Home. I've never heard of before but they have a suite of products that interconnect and let you manage your house remotely. Bay at Home was another company that even had coffee pots crock pots where you can like turn them on remotely and program when you want things to turn on and what happens. Just lots of different companies that are now getting into that space. Even from home security people don't have to buy a thousand cameras anymore with all these sensors to protect their house. Companies like the Paddo make a small device. Canary was one of the first ones that I saw at CES last year. This one is even smaller. There is like a series of cameras on there that even detects your air quality and make sure that everyone in the home is safe and comfortable. They even have sprinklers now that are automated and they sync up with whether it's rained or not. If your subdivision says hey you can only water on Tuesdays and Thursdays the sprinkler you would tell the thought to the sprinkler and then if it rained on Monday you don't have to sprinkle on Tuesday and it would know that and not bother turning itself on. Droplet actually points and shoots where water needs to be which I thought was really, really cool. So in the scenario if you had a pot here and a pot here and you don't want the grass to get wet it would identify it and shoot the water at it. Samsung you can diagnose your washers and dryers now all from your phone. You can get a text alert when your laundry is ready. So you don't have to worry about it I suppose. But all these devices are now connecting to the Internet which is what people call the Internet of Things. So this home automation was extremely popular at CES. They even have robots that clean windows. And I wanted to find out what happens if there's a power outage because the robot just fall off the window because that would stop. But I wasn't allowed to test in a plug. I asked if I could and they said no. I'm assuming it just loses all suction and falls. But, neat idea. They even have robots that clean your grills so basically anything that you used to have to do and didn't want to do never when our parents were like when you get older you'll have to clean your own house you can tell them well not anymore I can have a robot do basically everything and it automate everything that sticks itself which makes me happy. They even have jars that detect what kind of food in the jar and then using an app it can tell you what you can make today without what you told us in each jar. There's like a weight sensor in there and it can figure out how much things you can make, what you need to buy and it even gives you the word if something's about to spoil. So perishable items. You would tell them I want to do buy it I'll tell you when it will become stale or unedible. So wearables. Wearables is also pretty huge at CES. Everyone's getting into the wearable business. A company called iHealth Fitbits and Jawbones. So there's a lot of it's called OEM Hardware. So a lot of companies now are doing like they'll take somebody else's design if you will and put all their own hardware and software into it but it does the exact same thing for fractions of the cost. You can have an entire line of health care or health work out equipment that can sense and program and learn from your habits to make sure that you are on the correct track for healthy work out attitudes. And props to these people for working out like every day because that's what they had to do for their exhibit. They even have headbands that you can wear. There's a company called Muse that you would it works like an EKG almost where you do brain exercises and it helps you strengthen your brain have better memory and things like that. And if that wasn't enough they even have stuff for babies now. So they have cribs that you can manage as your heart rate monitor your heart rate, your temperature. And if you didn't like that they have stickers that you can stick on your child that will send you messages if something's wrong with their temperature or if they're stirring in their sleep all water sleep is gone and all will have to be wearable. And if that wasn't crazy enough there's this thing called OQ and I saw it work. There's little tiny cameras underneath this cube. So you pick up the blue part and somehow can microscopically see your face detail and analyze it and figure out your true skin pigmentation and then give you recommendations how to improve your facial health. So it would recommend skin care products. It would recommend like hey you need to moisturize and then it even syncs up with the weather forecast for the day. So if it knew that your type of skin is susceptible to sunburn it would say hey it's going to be a sunny day to put on sunscreen and send you a text alert on your phone which I thought was wow that's really neat. If that wasn't enough they even have hats you can wear that can monitor head injuries. So if you're playing one of those contact sports you can keep better track of it and make sure that you're not injuring yourself. More with wearable watches. Everyone is in the watch business and programmable watches. I stood in line for ten minutes to win a Marchion watch tub it would sync with your phone and do really cool things and they were giving them away. So I'm like maybe I'll be lucky there. Either way I got a gamble somewhere and so the whole time no one in front of me was winning. So I was joking like hey this thing's rigged no one obviously wins this thing. So the people behind me also lost we were all joking about it and then like three people after us we were all well all won. They were at the wrong time. A little bluebump. Even Intel has their own watch now and wearable technology. This looked very similar to the Apple watches that were coming out. So everyone is getting into the business of smart watches. And here's another OEM company. So what else could you wear? If you were construction or working outside wear this vest that has digital displays on the wristband so you can see if someone like sent you a message or if you were looking for directions it would blink automatically at night. There's integrated speakers and headphones Bluetooth so you can take in after phone calls without having to use your hands. They have helmets that you can wear that will blink and let you know when you need to turn or if there's danger very similar to one of those new cars that have the collision detectors in it. And if that wasn't enough and you're like all right my whole family even my baby is wearing a wearable device but what about Fido? You can also give your dog you some wearables. So last year there was a few companies that had modern tools for your dogs. This year if you wanted to mount your GoPro to your dog you finally can. Thanks to the modern work technology. And what I thought was really neat and I got a poor photo so I had to go online there's this device that you can stand in and have a fully immersive virtual reality gaming experience. So you wear this harness you stand in this rubberized map and you can run in place and during your game you can run and shoot and have a 360 degree virtual reality experience. And the cost is only 500 bucks. I was like not bad. I can replace my living room furniture for that. I don't know how everyone would feel about that when they come over but I would have fun. And so you don't have to buy an Oculus Rift at this point for that fully immersive virtual reality experience. Let's say you're working out and you're like you have traditional buttons and enough for me. Now you can wear an Oculus Rift and bike and you virtually see you going up a hill when you accept the health ride or whatever to incline at this point. So you can virtually see all that happen. And you can have yoga maps that the lady on the left is doing like stretches and stuff and on the iPad or the giant screen on the bottom here was showing if she had the right posture and doing it correctly. So now that we have fully automated our lives let's get some more robots in here, right? So somebody made a robot that played beer pong with and so this was really neat. So before I click the video the robot missed and so it somehow recalculates itself and then shoots again. So it's picking up a ball on its own lining itself up and it shoots it perfectly. If it missed the first time it will recalibrate and shoot the second time. They had a company called Wemo a while we sorry they make all these different types of robots that aren't technically programmable yet but they're working on it. So for this one there's a ball that you can shake and move around and get the dinosaur to interact with you and play with you. I thought it was pretty cool. There's a robot from a company called Spinmasters that dances and moves and interacts and you build them and you can program if you do different things. Modular robotics, they actually won an award for one of I think it was the best toy award at CES and so they had these little cubes that you can link together and build robots from without having to do any soldering or programming or anything like that. If you were into more of the hands-on design and building of things there's a company called Actobotics that lets you buy kits and you can build huge robots out of it. Another company called Osobot is really new and they're one of the companies that I approached about working with libraries and they were floored by it. That's a great idea. We'd love to let's chat more. So what Osobot does is you can draw lines and the robot will trace and you can play games, learning games, interactive games and build them just by using different types of lines and patterns. Very neat idea. So from the mainstream perspective there was a lot of computers, TVs, audio and mobility like cases and amplifiers. So Intel came out with all these really small computers and I think the one in the back right is a gaming computer. So I'm not sure if you're familiar but remember the Alienware computers are really large, bulky looking things. This little tiny box has the exact same power if not better than those. And also I didn't get to see that CES but they have this little Intel it's like a Chromecast stick almost that has Windows on it. So you can plug it into a TV monitor and have a fully functional functioning Windows 8 computer. Lots of phone cases. Just like last year I think I had like 20 some odd phone cases. This year I actually was like no, no, that's okay as they're handing them out. They're even dealing away phone cases with integrated batteries this year which I thought was pretty cool. Lots of audio companies were there showing off their audio products. I don't notice audio differences. So to me like when they're like hey, our speakers are the best I don't know, to be honest with you they all sound the same. They don't appreciate that. Lots of TVs high quality 4K even 8K TVs were being shown and at that point I couldn't even tell the difference. Like I thought okay once you get the 4K it looks pretty real. 8K looks the same to me but they're also getting super thin. TVs are getting thinner and thinner like paper thin on us. Here's an example here. And one of the booths, Sony they had this 360 degree projector inside their booth. I'm going to play it for you guys. I thought that was the wildest thing. So 360 degree projector inside their booth showcasing their products. They even had a, they somehow filmed a concert and so it was like you're really there because you see the back of people's heads when you're looking forward and people's faces when you're looking behind you. So wouldn't that be neat to have in the library when you walk in and digitally see all the different sections and what's there. I just thought lots and lots of monitors and TVs. So what were some products that I thought instantly to be worked with in the library space. So I know a lot of libraries have display cases for their iPads or they mount them places for people to have like hard catalogs. They have a company called MacLots. They make their own cases and hardware cells where you can pop in your tablet securely and not have to worry about it. I'm not sure if you guys are familiar with document standards. There's a company that has their own document standards now looks like other things. It makes these rubberized shapes that you can play with your iPads to learn how to count, spell, do numbers, things like that. There's another company that I forgot to put a picture of called Edwin. It's this Bluetooth rubberized duck that you can put in the water and you can play with it through the app and back and forth and read Edwin's stories and shake Edwin because that's the best name and interact with him in a playful way which I thought was really neat. Touchscreen kiosks I remember seeing these things 4 years ago and they were like 6 grand. Now you can get a touchscreen table for like $1400 and do interactive designing, drawing uploading photos and sharing photos with other people. They're very cool. Another app company was there called Communicotool that will help you with learning with language disorders. You can use this app to learn different languages to learn how to speak better and more fluently and it's a free app and I was like wow that's really neat. And so now time for the crazy stuff. In Samsung's booth they had this or no Panasonic I'm sorry so they had this mirror that you can look at and as you look at it you can select different facial features you want to see on yourself. All in real time. So as this lady Laughsmile moved her head she was able to add facial hair change her hair color and it stuck with her as she moved and I thought that was really really cool. They had giant TV monitors on robotic arms and somebody was Skyping because there was a camera up there with the audience. I thought it was weird they had a lot of massage chair companies there and a lot of mattress companies but people were taking naps on new beds and giving massages on massage chairs. And if that wasn't enough if you just finished your massage and you're like you know what I want to make my teeth a little bit brighter there was an exhibit for that shit. They had a there's like this mouse that learns gestures and if you didn't like mice at all you can stare at a screen and using just your eyes interact with your computer. So in this exercise this guy is looking at his screen and he has to look at the red dots in order to cross them out and proceed through the this is a game but you can also use your computer without touching anything. NVIDIA showed off their autopilot cars that they've been designing and this car looks really neat and it has a on the glass it has the heads up display so you can see how fast you're going the directions about having to look anywhere else except forward. There was an award show so CES does innovation awards and then there's another group that does specific like children driven awards. So I already mentioned that Moss won an award for best tech tech toy and the Osbot won best robot the best robot. Osmo won for innovation and best app was Looney Kids Park and there's a maker maker subscription service. So Osmo you can use textile play with digital readout so you can it blends physical and digital together so there's all these different working exercises that you can do to strengthen your knowledge. Looney Kids Park I guess the best way to explain it was like farm bill but with science and physics involved so you can build your your park but you have to keep in mind like physics and math with it. It's a really neat app and one of my favorite things so a company called Creator Box and I think it was like 15 bucks a month we'll send you a kit and you would build it so it's like a subscription service for makers so you can build something new every month and just send it to you and all the pieces you need. So I think I went through things pretty fast so if there's questions you want to talk about CES in general in the floor. Alright, thanks Brian. I just want to remind everybody that we will happily take questions through the Q&A or if you have a microphone just say so and we'll happily listen to your dulcet tones when you ask your question. Brian, I've got a couple of questions for you. What was there any sort of e-book or e-reader presence at CES this year? That you saw. No, not really not that I didn't see. There wasn't anything new in terms of tablets or readers or anything like that that stood out for me. There was a display of people selling books which was pretty cool. E-books or physical books? Physical books. Really? Somebody, there one comment did come through from the audience earlier on when you were talking about the wearables and the sensors and all that. Because I had the same kind of about when the I think I can measure how much is in your jars and containers to figure out how much you need for a recipe. The comment was these things also make for a lazy society. Which I had a similar thought. Really you can't look in your jar and say oh yeah I need to buy more flour. Well I think the idea is if you're at the grocery store they even have fridges that talk to you too now. So if you're at the grocery store and you're like what do I want to eat tonight? You can text your fridge like what can I have for dinner. It'll look at everything you have in there and then give you back. Here's what we can make. Well here's what we can make if you buy this, this and that. The smart fridge. Eventually it will actually happen. Well it kind of led me to a thought around maybe more towards the sensors especially when you got to the baby things. Don't wear a Fitbit, don't get me wrong. Were any of these companies talking about or did you ask them about privacy and security issues with this data and how it's being transferred and what's being done with it? I think from personal knowledge and also what kind of my fear. They all say hey don't worry we keep the data and we own the data and we won't share it with anyone. But if I was a healthcare company that was a healthcare company with a ton of money wouldn't I just go buy Fitbit and now I know all those users if I insured them if I know they're healthy or not but there's really nothing stopping me if I buy the company so now the data has to be mine. But I think from what I understand there's some companies that actually or some healthcare companies that say hey if you share your data with us like Fitbit wise we'll actually give you more of a discount thing. So hey look it looks like you're being really active and really fit here's a discount versus being negatively rewarded for poor healthy habits. At least that's kind of what I've heard. I didn't ask anyone any of those types of questions. Okay well you know actually to be honest I think I would be personally surprised if they were actively talking about those issues at the sales booth but you know you never know that so some of these you may have already mentioned but I kind of like to do this and even if you didn't mention them maybe even better what would you say was like the completely wackiest, silliest I don't believe this exists thing you saw? The screen because I thought it was staged at first but they had like this pre-recorded thing put together let me find it the Panasonic booth where the one lady sitting down was able to put things on her face and in the real time as she moved like she actually had a beard and mustache. I did a double take her face. I was like wow there's somebody with a beard and mustache and then I looked at her and I'm like no she doesn't and I looked back at the mirror and I was like oh that's unique yeah I don't know and from a this case I don't know if there's any actual need something like that but I guess you're like what do I look like with blue hair you don't have to dye your hair anymore to find out you can just sit in front of your mirror and click on blue hair I'm almost thinking with this one extending it out to virtual trying on clothes if you get it a little bigger than just the face bigger screen that's sure yeah and then have that in like which also I don't know why I look like that's out what items surprised you the most and I'll leave your definition of surprise to you so last year last year I ran into these guys and like the technology wasn't there yet they didn't really have anything developed for it and they had like a card table size this year they had it all mounted with all their computers and like different things you can do and so the line wasn't bad for this I was able to try it and so last year I had a headache trying to like tell myself to do it this year whatever they did differently or maybe it's me like as I look the mouse moved and like that and it just was fluid but in terms and then in terms of like why is this here the mattresses was a little weird like they had all the brand ambassadors laying in bed selling they're showing off mattresses I guess and I was like that's not really peppy I guess the mattress moves at first I thought they were one of the mattresses that sounds like how you sleep and for sleeping correctly but one guy was like no this levitates and if you're snoring you tap this button and it fixes it I think my wife wants one of those okay you want me to give you the lips and let's let's say like just the single coolest thing you saw like I really want to take one of those home with me I do say that quadcopters is really my thing but I've always wanted one just to say I have the coolest thing that I have to have is that fully immersive game station like I just thought like when I was a kid I was like ah because it was in all the movies like you hop on this like virtual reality set and you're fully immersed and you can run around and duck shoot and cover and I'm like that'll be cool and then I kind of forgot about it until I went to CES and I was like childhood dream is finally possible can you talk a little bit more about that Chris and I kind of looked at each other and went $500 what does it connect to how does it actually work can you yeah so you'll need a game system that would work with an Oculus Rift oh okay okay I got it yeah so you wear the Oculus Rift for like 200 bucks so it's a $700 game system if you will it comes with shoes and the shoes can detect like which way you're facing and how you're running and the way this it's a rubber mat at the bottom that's concave so you can like run in place without having to like run you'll run and since it's concave you're actually right okay yeah the Oculus Rift makes sense you're not you're not hooking this to your Xbox your PlayStation you're working you're working with a head head mounted display okay that makes okay I get it now still 500 bucks not not bad really that's it comes with the harness the stand thing and shoes yeah wow I just got to see if pulling the trigger for $500 or something and then we use once or twice because I've always wanted it and it looks like we have a question for the audience yeah we have a comment leading into a question thing here says early adopters nonewithstanding it seems like a number of these products might be for businesses to offer a new service to customers and yet there's the home market and wearables certainly is aimed at the individual for the products aimed at individuals will the prices deter all but the most die hard early adopters kind of pricing on these more individual type things yeah kind of piggybacking the 3d printer I pointed out I think the way we're moving we're able to do stuff for cheaper now and at the same time like something else on the product that it's super expensive because they literally had to do it by hand essentially and they didn't have manufacturing in place and they didn't have a you know X Y and Z lined up it was a type of process as we move forward something else go hey you know what I can make that for better and cheaper and I think this competitive market that all of a sudden has exploded anything about a five years ago you didn't really hear too many people talking about startups or you didn't hear too many people talking about entrepreneurship but now like we don't hear it for a whole week no one mentioning it and you like to notice it so to answer the question I think yeah a lot of the wearables we see this omni package that's on the screen now I'm sure within another year someone else has been in development for cheaper and so my whole thing is from a cost perspective now like don't if it's hot don't buy it right away for instance Google Glass I know some people are fans of it I personally wasn't because $1,500 is really expensive but now there's companies that are doing wearables Sony actually displayed one of their wearable glasses with a screen on it I think it was for like a couple hundred bucks so there's companies now that make very similar to Google Glass but it's under a thousand and so you ask yourself you know do I want to be a die-hard fan or do I want to use it so then I'll just wait a little bit same with home automation because it's no one has perfected it yet there's a lot of glitches and a lot of issues so I say kind of just hold out yeah and that's kind of one of the standard rules is unless you are as the person at an early adopter and are willing to be someone who wants to test the product and realize it's going to have bugs never buy the first version of anything but that's like a standard rule for the average person just don't you can watch, see this stuff, see some, oh that's cool wait a couple of years and then it will actually be ready for prime time for the normal person performance and in price alright nothing else from the audience alright Brian thank you very much in fact one of those wearables I've got three pieces of news I want to talk about and a new wearable coming out it's going to be one of those so Brian thank you so much I'm jealous one of these years I will get back to CES just to geek out for a solid week so Brian you think you're getting back to your contact info there we had that up we will be getting Brian slides from him and Chris will be going through and finding links to as much of this as she can so we will make sure to get all of that into the show notes this afternoon or tomorrow usually we can do it within 24 hours so Brian thanks once again I'm going to take back control for just a few minutes here and share a couple of news items that I would like to show folks so give us just a sec here to do that and so so I've got three things that I want to share with you here and this first one the title is bad please ignore that title I will fix the title when I get back to my office after lunch but this first one is there is a new Facebook app for your phone and I literally discovered this about 20 minutes before the show called Facebook Light it is an official app from Facebook however it's not available in the United States through the Google Play Store but you can get it from this and I have installed it so I will back this one up as a good site to get it from but it gives you all the features of Facebook but it uses more of the web interface and it actually supports the messaging in the app so it's a little more bandwidth friendly and you don't have to install a separate Facebook app and a Facebook messaging app on your phone so if that is something that is an issue for you you might want to check out the Facebook Light app Windows 10 release and pricing has been announced this past week it is not an actual date has been specified but they are saying that Windows 10 will come out this fall more importantly is the pricing the way that the pricing will be set up is if you are a user of Windows 7 8 or 8.1 you will be able to upgrade to Windows 10 for free as long as you upgrade within the first year of its release after that you will have to pay for it now, some people have misinterpreted this to say you get a free upgrade for a year meaning like it's a subscription it is not you get a free upgrade as long as you upgrade within 365 days and there is no expectation of release date there is no expectation that there will be an annual fee or anything like that some people have misinterpreted this so the recommendation is going to be when Windows 10 comes out you have a year to get it for free as long as you are on Windows 7 or higher so yay everybody who has been waiting for Windows 10 Brian just said so forcing me to be an early adopter well actually you can upgrade to it now if you want to but it is still on the beta stage Krista was mentioning earlier if you are not willing to play with bugs do not but you know if you have a spare machine or you want to run in a virtual machine like I talked about a few months ago on tech talk you can do that it is pretty slick I was a fan of 810 is great I am loving it so far and at the same time Microsoft is going to put out their wearable called HoloLens this is going to be a head mounted display this was not at CES they just announced it last week in one of their meetings so Brian did not see this at CES this is a head mounted display so it does kind of go around your head and let me see if I can find a better picture here and it kind of looks like for lack of a better term those kind of old people sunglasses the sunglasses you put over your glasses the really big ones and the way it works unlike Google Glass where you are actually looking at something on a screen in front of your eye this is more augmented reality and that it overlays things on your environment that you are looking at and if you are a gamer and what a lot of people were talking about was there was an actual demo of Minecraft using this thing and you got to build in 3D in Minecraft using like he is building on his table and on his sofa there and if you look over the fireplace here you can actually look through that into another room now there has been no pricing on this yet I have listened to a lot of people who are actually at this Microsoft presentation and got to use it and almost every single one of them said I was ready to think this was over hyped and was going to suck and every single one of them went I was actually very impressed with this technology they actually kind of pulled it off now again don't know the pricing if it is a couple grand it is going to take a while to get people on if it is under a grand I might save my pennies this is looking pretty impressive with that one of the other examples they were giving here is your Netflix on the wall that you are just looking at here is getting directions and building 3D models in space just watch the video take a look at this it is called hollow lens it is pretty impressive Google last I wasn't going to spend the money this I might try to find the money those are the 3 newest items I have for us this week and I think with that we will call it an end to the tech test or tech test the tech talk and I will hand it back to Kristen so if anybody has any last minute questions nothing came in desperately there at the end we will wrap it up for this week's end cup of slide it has been and is being recorded as we said Brian will be sending us his slides so we will have them available for you in all the links for any of the companies and products and things that he mentioned will be included afterwards our recordings are up on our website here is the our archive sessions link is right here at the bottom and we go over there you will get our recording is on YouTube we post presentations up on the slides here or wherever they are and links to our delicious account everything will be linked there for you all in one place when this is all said and done so that will wrap it up for today's show I hope you enjoy this next week when we will be doing strategic planning depending on your point of view that's great or not so great strategic planning in general is a good thing here in Nebraska we have new as in last year new guidelines for public library accreditation strategic plan being done Richard Miller is our director of library development yeah library development here and he is going around the state doing some trainings on this and he is going to come on the show now and do a strategic planning in a nutshell for people so if you are interested in what to do for strategic plan at your library definitely join us for that next week and for any of our other upcoming shows we have over the next few months they are posted here also if you are a Facebook user it is also on Facebook we post when our recordings are available when new shows are coming here you can see I posted a reminder for this morning's show letting people know they can log in for it so if you are big on Facebook please do go ahead and like us there and you will be notified of when things are happening other than that I think you are good thank you Brian, thank you Michael and we will see you next time and come us live bye