 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. Yes, we are a webinar. You can call us that. We won't be offended. We do this show live every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. Central Time. But if you're unable to join us on Wednesdays, that's not a problem. We have all the recordings on our website, so you can go back and watch them all there. We do a mixture of things here on the show, book reviews, mini training sessions, interviews, demos. Basically, if it's library related, we want to have it on the show and share it with everyone. We have commission staff, Nebraska Library Commission staff, to do presentations, and we have guest speakers. And this morning is one of our regular mixtures of that, I guess we'll call it. Once a month, usually the last Wednesday of the month, we do tech talk with Michael Sowers, who is the Technology Innovation Librarian here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Good morning. He's here next to me. And he tells you the tech news things that have happened since last month, and brings in our guests and speakers, which he has today. And I will just hand over to you, Michael, to share what we're going to have on the show this morning. Thanks, Krista. Yeah, if we were in print, this would be called the column, I guess. But I'm not sure what you call it with the show. We'll have to think about it and maybe come up with a new word. So good morning. It's Krista Seton, Michael Sowers, the Technology Innovation Librarian here at Nebraska Library Commission. And today we have with us Brian Pitchman of the Evolve Project. Brian, you on the line? Yes, I am. Great. Welcome back. You were back on, I think, back in like 2012. It's been quite a while. It's been a while. Yes. So Brian recently attended CES, the Consumer Electronics Show, which I am regularly jealous of. I got to attend back in the late 90s when I was actually living in Las Vegas. It is quite an event. But Brian, as I understand, also kind of went not only to see what the new gadgets were, but kind of went with a bit of an intention in promoting libraries. Would that be a correct description? Yeah. That's very correct. All right. So Brian, you've got your presentation up there. We can see that once you just go ahead and tell us about your experience at CES this year. Yeah, sure. So to begin, for those that aren't sure what CES is, it stands for the Consumer Electronics Show. They say it's not open to the public, meaning like not anyone can just walk in and attend. There's like a whole registration process. You have to approve your affiliation, whether if you're a presser within the technology industry. But I'm working to change that up just a little bit and we'll get to that later. And then they typically do it the first full week of January. So this year it was the 7th through the 10th. But if you were a press, you would be able to get there on Sunday the 5th and kind of do some like pre-conference events. And what they do at CES, it's split between conferences and keynotes and just exhibit after exhibit after exhibit. Most of these exhibits are announcing new products or something new that you can play with hands-on experience. So it's a really good way to meet like owners of companies. I met the CEO of the former CEO of LeapFrog. I met Randy Zuckerberg, the sister of Mark Zuckerberg who created Facebook. And so all these people are super friendly and really easy to approach, which I was very surprised about. Because I figured they'd be too high up there and don't really want to interact with people. They want to do their thing and get out. So I was very surprised that was not the case. And then during all these keynotes there's also more product releases, special announcements. And so with that being said, there's about, there's over 3,200 different exhibitors and 150,000 industry professionals attend the show every year. And that includes international people. And within this space it's about 2 million square feet. So if you're trying to wrap your head around what does 2 million square feet look like, it's about 35 football fields. So if you can imagine that, that's huge. And with different size exhibits and different size booths, all talking about technology or some new cool innovative product. So I wore a Fitbit just for giggles to see how far I walked. So Tuesday was a travel day for me. And then Wednesday I was mostly in conference halls. So between conference halls I walked just over 5 miles. But on Thursday is when I attended most of the exhibits. And I walked over 12.5 miles within that arena, which to me that was a lot. I felt dead afterwards. And then Friday I kind of wrapped up and visited a few more people. So if you can kind of, if you want to see what a scale perspective, here's a Samsung exhibit, which is from here from this corner all the way down to that corner. And so what's in the inside of that exhibit is all their products like their TVs, their cameras, their phones, that they just have lying around. You pick up, you can play with it. They have Samsung reps there with a lot of paid models essentially selling the gear. So Samsung, for instance, is either looking for more distributors or people to sell their products to or talking to press to promote their products. So what's it take to attend? For me, overall cost was just under $1,000. And that included the hotel and the flight. To get in, it's technically free if you register early. And there's all these, I was lucky enough that I met the right people while I was there. So I heard about like the free shuttles between the hotels and the conference halls. So I didn't have to pay for a taxi. Then I heard about a round trip shuttle from the airport that was like $14, so seven each way. So there's lots of really cool ways to save money while you're there. And then in terms of food, depending on which events you go to, there's a ton of events at night. Spotify hosted a party with free food and free drinks. And all these other companies are always hosting evening parties. So you've got your dinner plans. And if you go for a conference or a keynote in the morning, they usually have some type of breakfast thing. So what did I bring? I brought a real nice camera to take pictures. If you're curious, you can see the photos of the Samsung NX300 with a low light lens. And a power brick for your phone, because my phone died like halfway through the middle of the day because the reception isn't the greatest. I'm also taking pictures and tweeting. So bring one of those like power USB power bricks. They're really small and light. Bring good shoes. I made the mistake of not bringing good shoes. I wore dress shoes so I can look kind of classy. And they were destroyed by the end of it from all the walking. So bring like gym shoes. And then people would wear one of their ranges from people in jeans and t-shirts all the way up to like full suits and ties. And so if you wanted to attend, I would encourage you to wear like jeans and like a sports coat or something. Look clean and presentable at the very least as you're talking to people. So here's a couple more photos to show you the size and the grandeur of CES. So people spend a ton of money on their booths. For instance, TCL, this little diamond prison that you see on the right, it just houses three TVs inside promoting their 4K TV and the 3D TV. Audio companies, they hire DJs and they DJ and play music the entire time they're there. So as you go through their booth, you can hear their music on their speakers. Here's Panasonic's booth. Again, really nice. It looks like they're supposed to be there like their storefronts. And I wanted to ask what they did with all this material and they were all done. Like did they check it or they store it somewhere because it looks very expensive. So SES, there's two main venues. There's a convention center, which most people hang out at, which shows all the exhibits, most of the exhibits I should say. And every mainstream company like Samsung, LG, obviously does not attend CES anymore. I don't know the story behind that. And then Whirlpool and other companies like that are in the main convention center. This is also where all the conferences and workshops are hosted. Between the convention center and the munition, the convention center was super crowded because there was a lot of those fanboys or fangirls. Everyone that loves LG, for instance, was basically stayed at the LG booth the entire time. Like I literally was there the next day and I saw the same people running around like the gear and just staring. Why? I'm not sure. I've never had that fanboy feel. And then these in the convention center are much more expensive and very elaborate displays. The munition on the other side is focused more around startup companies or companies that are trying to find funding or companies that are trying to find distribution channels. So the munition for me, and I think for you guys too, if you were going through 10 CES, hang out at the munition because those people are a really easy approach. They have, you know, booth size which you're familiar with and like at ALA, those normal booth sizes, essentially is what they use. And you just walk up and down and you chat. And I think success is when it's talking to, because I was bringing libraries up to these different groups, so that the munition was much easier because people were willing to sit down and chat. We're going to get into that in a little bit too. But between, and then the munition also lets you do a lot more hands-on, so you can sit down and program with something and play with it whereas when you're in the convention center, it's so crowded there's lines if you wanted to demo anything. So why would a library go? That's a great question. So I'm going to backpedal here and show a stab from Lee Rain from Pew Research. What I want you guys to pay attention to is the difference between people that used the library in the last 12 months and the people that say libraries are important to the community. So it's a 38% difference. So I applied that figure to the exhibitors. So basically I knew that almost 1,700 exhibitors were in the library in the last 12 months and almost 3,000 exhibitors know that libraries are important. With that being said, I went up to each exhibitor that I thought had a cool product or I wanted to work with them and bring their technology into libraries. I would ask one of these basic questions do you consider libraries in your marketing plan or have you considered selling to libraries? Do you value libraries? And these simple questions, it was really interesting watching people react because that was the question they've ever been asked before. How did you see a product in libraries? I went up to one company who makes tablets for kids and I said, hey, have you guys considered selling your stuff to libraries? And they were like, well, no, because libraries are for books. And I had to take a step back and go, hey, you know what? They're changing, though. They're doing more innovative things. They're building makerspaces and pulling in lots of digital petting zoos and things like that. And so they were like, well, yeah, our product is really cool. It's locked down. We can work out library pricing. So these people were really approachable with that idea that libraries don't have the funds to purchase a big, large equipment. So there has to be some type of price negotiation. They were already gunpow about it. And the second thing I thought was really cool was that some companies wanted to use libraries as a beta test ground. I was in a session called Kids at Play where they were talking about how startup companies struggle with doing their beta testing and how they have to pay all this money to do beta testing. So I asked, I said, have you guys considered using libraries to beta test your product? You give the product to the librarian, the librarian who is an expert at cataloging, metadata, and things like that, and then show the patrons how the product works, collect the data, and then give it back to you. The library wins because they get a product and no one else gets to play with. And you get a win because you don't have to pay for a beta testing company. And Hasbro was on the panel. They were really surprised that they'd thought about that session or thought about that relationship. And then a couple other companies were like, yeah, you know what, we should look into doing that. So side-stepping, how does this apply to you right now? There's probably half a dozen companies within driving distance of you guys that are building some new cool product. Ask them if you can beta test their product in your library where you don't have to pay for it, but you collect the data for them. So I also brought a poster around. I said, I love libraries. And as I was talking to people, I wanted them to take photos of the poster. I actually became so engrossed with talking to different people, I totally forgot I had a poster. I thought it was out of light. So on the left here is the CEO co-founder of SIFTOCubes, Little Interactive Cubes. And on the right, Aya is her name, and she is the CEO co-founder of Little Bits, Little Interactive Circuit Boards. Sphero is another company I approached and we chatted. I've actually worked with them a lot of times in the past. So it's really nice to actually meet the owner of the company and he took a photo with the poster. A couple new companies. Second Avenue. He was in the Arica Park exhibit. So again, really simple. They're trying to get up to speed. They create learning environments, literally a virtual environment for learning. So you can go onto a website and build physics environments like how does a ball roll down a hill. And you can build things really easy and not really don't even know how to use programming to do it. And so they sell specifically to schools because they do the grades, et cetera. So I talked about him, hey, have you guys considered doing this as an online resource, online database? So the younger kids can have a place to play and build environments in to learn from. And he was like, ah, that's actually a really cool idea. Modular Robotics is another one. They're in a few libraries, but when I asked them, hey, have you guys considered selling to libraries? They haven't really thought about that as their main market source. And so what Modular Robotics does is they build things called cublets, which are little cubes that have different sensors or different motors that either move, vibrate, light up, et cetera. And you can just connect them and you basically build simple robots with no programming or wires. They also build something called a MOS, which is these guys. They're smaller cubes, no coding or wires again, but there's more configuration opportunities between all the different cubes so you can build a car. For instance, out of these little cubes, I got a small car. But these would be great for STEM learning, robotics learning, et cetera, that a lot of libraries are doing. Another really cool company is called Pinocchio. And so they build wireless web-enabled projects. So they have this really itty-bitty circuit board, essentially, that is wirelessly connected to a network. And you can actually have it plugged into, they were saying like lamps and lights and things like that and have things turn on, turn off. And it's really simple programming. So kind of that home automation idea, but there's a whole bunch of other, it's for prototyping. If you wanted to create something new, but you weren't sure where to start, this gives you that opportunity. There's another company called Tai Chi, which makes like almost an artificial intelligence robot on your phone, so it's an app, and you can stick it into a car and these cars can communicate with other cars and you can communicate with them. They recognize human faces and human reactions. So that was really, really cool. I think libraries can play around with that. This might be a little different. This was called Beams, and what they make was a little infrared, DJ mixing more almost. And by moving your hands between the infrared lights, you can make different sounds. So a lot of some libraries are making that music play space or let's make music in your library. This was a really inexpensive product to do that, and it was a lot of fun. So I approached them about libraries. Have you guys considered libraries? Because libraries are doing music stuff, and they were like, that's actually a great idea. And then 3D printing companies, I even approached a few 3D printing companies. Some were very unsuccessful, and some were very successful. Like this one was extremely successful. They have a 3D printer for $800, that I would say the quality is very comparable, if not better, to the MakerBot. So $800 versus $2,800, it's a pretty good deal. And what they have done was, I approached them about libraries, and we explained what libraries are doing, and how libraries are making 3D printers. And they're like, well, that's the case. We should probably do less than $800 for libraries. And I was like, say what? And so that was a really cool conversation. So just by approaching these people, we were able to make Robo Printer considerably less. I approached another 3D printing company, who basically didn't want to work with libraries. So there was unsuccesses as well. I wouldn't say everything was successful. As a side note, Robo is also building something called makable.com, where you can showcase and share your 3D print designs. So with all that being said, the first reason why I went to CES was to promote libraries to different companies and show what libraries are doing. In an online survey, a really brief one, asking librarians, what great things have you done in your library? And I used that when I talked to these different companies, saying, hey, this library in this area has been doing this. And they're like, oh, wow, that's really cool. So these companies, if we go back to that original chart, showing up 3,000 exhibitors, understand that libraries are important, but only 1,700 actually have been in a library, I was able to bridge that gap and get everyone on board about what great things libraries are doing, and get them wanting to help libraries do beta testing libraries, deliver products for free to libraries all by talking. So that was hugely successful. The second thing I wanted to do was discover what trends were out there. So here's main trends. Home automation or life automation, as I'm going to call it, wearable technologies, technologies that you can wear, and the current tech, like 3D printers, 4K, TVs, 3D TVs, stuff that's already been out, but is still very promoted and considered new. Then a couple other cool little products. So, home automation. LG did a keynote, and I left the, this is LG's photo, I left the link at the bottom if you're curious. You can basically text your fridge, text your dishwasher, saying, hey, I'm going to be late, or hey, fridge, I want to make this tonight. Do I have all the ingredients I need? Or, hey, fridge, looking at the ingredients I have in my fridge, what can I make tonight? Give me an alert when the eggs are low, or I need to order new milk. Hey, clean my house. You can send the text to that and they'll actually clean your house for you. So this home automation thing is by controlling your home from controlling your house while you're away from home. Quickly. Whirlpool also has an interactive cooktop that they were showing off, where it's a surface, and just by putting your hands on the surface, you start interacting. You can put a pan down and it says, hey, this is a pan, I'm going to keep this sift spot up. You can social media, tweet out what you're cooking. You can pull recipes from Pinterest, or Twitter, Facebook, all through a touching interface. Make sure that the stove is turning on for baking a cake as it's almost done with the sauce or the frosting. The other side of the coin is home security, such as Canary, which is in the top left, Drop Can, which is in the bottom left, or Doorbot, which is on the right. So essentially, these are all, they all have embedded cameras that can detect who's there, who's not there. The Doorbot, for instance, is really cool. If you have small children who are too alert because they didn't see them come in, or if your children are home at three and it knows you don't get home until five, but someone's at the door at four, it'll send you an alert. So it learns all these things about us and collects this data and then relays that data to us. Nest, in the top right, is a temperature control unit. It learns when you're home, when you're not home, at what temperatures you like. I was in a presentation with Drop Can, and apparently it's now the biggest there's more data uploaded to Drop Can than YouTube, which I thought was pretty surprising. Vest Tech is another one for home automation. You can have your coffee pot turn on when you wake up every day at six or seven or wherever it may be in your thermostat and automatically adjust accordingly. So basically, we're getting all these devices within our home environment that's learning what we do and collecting that data and managing it for us. That's why I always call it life automation because basically now you don't really need to turn on anything. We'll get to a point where your shower will warm up and start to hot water and the lights in the bathroom turns on when it learns that you wake up every day at six thirty-five. So we're moving to that point where everything seems to be integrating. And then in terms of wearable technologies, I've seen everything from a technology called Voice DOI CE which is in the top left where you can give your dog it's almost like a sick bit, it can measure heart rate, calories burned, those types of things. On the right is the fifth at force. It measures your activity and how many steps that you walk. And then they're even making activity monitors for children at the bottom they're called IBITS, I-B-I-T-Z. And so what they do is you can actually give your child reward points based off of which activity they've done in the day. So for instance, they have this integrated with Minecraft which apparently is really big, I didn't know that. And after a certain amount of time they can actually buy things from Minecraft based off the activity they've done. Here's the Fitbit exhibit where they actually had people running treadmills and showing off the Fitbit but I felt a little creepy taking a photo of them. So I skipped that part. They had a technology that you can wear over your eyes like Google Glass and interact very similar to Google Glass. And they have things all the way down to where your feet are that can detect if you're walking correctly, if your posture's right, those types of things. And they even had stuff for babies. They had like a little binky thing that can detect how your baby's sleeping their heart rate, etc. And then you can even lifelock your life. We've all heard of Autograph or probably or Mito which is now called Narrative. Lifelocker is another one that you can wear and takes pictures of everything you do as you do it. So again, we're clicking all this data about everything around us and everything we do either to automate things or to share our lives with others. Edulock was another cool gaming app that you have to answer math problems in order to unlock the tablet and then after you work read or to give you like a paragraph to read after you read it, you can unlock your tablet and go on the internet for X amount of time. People are building playstakes that are digital. So this is a place a playstake called Neos and basically you can play like, there's a firefighting game so if you hit the firefighter which is the little orange icon on the right there these things light up when they're red and you're on fire and you've got to basically turn it off. Here's a robotics group that's very similar to Lego but a lot cheaper. So they are called VaxdexIQ So if you go to vexdexIQ.com you can kind of see what they do and they build very similar to what Lego line storms are where you can program it and send data and have it pick a ball and move a ball to point A to point B you can also build it to remote control so it actually has an extra feature for a lot less. And then from a programming perspective I saw a lot of companies talking about how they're able to build really easy to use programs and you can either for their products, if you wanted to change a product a little bit differently in future needs they built interfaces that you can do it which if you take a step back you might want to consider doing more programming within your library as well because it seems like a lot of companies want people to program their own devices to make it unique and make it specific to their own. So Popscotch is a really cool one that lets kids build iPad apps using an obligatory program so you drag commands over so like there's a sound picture so if it hears a sound what do you want it to do and you drag these series of events over another really cool technology I saw was the iTracker where you can't control your phone just by looking at it so basically whatever you're staring at is where the mouse appears I had a terrible headache trying to use it because I think I was trying too hard but some people were opening up programs and Google searching just by shifting their eyes all over the place there was a demo that they were showing was Fruit Ninja so by looking where you want to slice the fruit you can slice the fruit and then a whole bunch of companies were talking about their self-driving cars Audi had their self-driving car there Google had their self-driving car there but if you think about it there's really nothing special about the self-driving car it's just a whole bunch of sensors that are interacting differently and relaying that information to you so we basically could have built a self-driving car years ago because we've had all these sensors cameras, depth perception temperature, heat, etc and then the overly popular TVs so they had curved TVs if you ever wanted to have a curved TV I don't see the need for one but that was a huge hit this was really cool it was LG's display it was all 3D and it was ginormous and basically they give everyone 3D glasses and you can see everything pop up at you it was really cool so if you were standing on the far left whatever was popping out on the far left would be dead in your face but if you moved to the far right it would actually be off to your left like you wouldn't be directly in front of you like most 3D TVs are everything is perceived the same no matter where you're at depending on where you're standing and then more TVs and 3D printers were there this was prime lab 3D printer one of the most accurate and high definition quality wise 3D printers on the market and then a couple more 3D TVs and then some more cool technology if this was this is blasting air in the air and projecting screens facing it and you can actually interact without having an actual screen so by moving his hand in front of where the air was he was able to interact and also play Fruit Ninja and then a lot of people were doing the whole iLock for authentication you know people can't remember passwords anymore so we have too many passwords for too many things because we have a thousand devices now that are storing our lives so we need a better password system so iLock you basically look at it and it unlocks and then it works and then other companies were showing off displays which is a tablet that you plug in and it projects it in a large format screen TV very simple ideas if you wanted to if you ever went to a hotel like one of those fancy ones where they had a little touchscreen key out about what's going on you can actually do that relatively cheaply now just by getting an Android tablet pointing it to a website and then getting this device and then Versal was another cool company that without doing any special coding you can build an interactive course so libraries that are doing those how to do this or how to build how to play piano from how to cook you can actually build an interactive course allow your patients to log in more cool technology Muse which is a brain sensing brain sensing headband so very similar to what a heart rate monitor does what Muse can do is it detects or what is that EKG your brainwights and so it gives you exercises to do to help you relax and concentrate throughout the day you actually want to wear this it looks fashionable so perceivably okay all this really cool stuff and then what else was that CES tons of giveaways from hundred dollar headphones to phone cases I have so many phone cases now I don't even I don't even want a phone anymore there's lots of companies with audio equipment such as you know the headphone speakers etc and then even tons more phone case companies don't know why there's so many and there's also quite a surprisingly a large amount of OEM manufacturers which for instance on the right here that looks very similar to Microsoft Surface but it's not they called it like their tablet their Windows tablet so it's literally does everything that Microsoft Surface does has all the exact same features of Microsoft Surface doesn't have the word surface on it it's just blank and it's like $200 versus whatever surface it's costing with the keyboard oops so and then I attended a few different events one event was really fun called kids at play where it was presentation after presentation or panelists talking about technology for kids obviously I do a lot of that as it is I thought it would be smart of me to attend it so this is the CEO former CEO of LeapFrog talking about how to build teams together around your product and some takeaways from that a lot of people again and again so there's really nothing new or shocking at CES nothing wow factoring like oh my god should we now this is the greatest thing since I spread but most of the stuff they they were showing at CES is actually just a different range from the sensors and how those sensors communicate another really startling fact that a lot of people mentioned was merging digital and physical together probably last year or two years ago a lot of people were trending in direction of converting physical products into pure digital products but now they're kind of complimenting each other as seen from the Neo's little playground interactive playground where Furby actually has an app that talks to your Furby so you're blending both physical and digital together so not separating completely you're blending people were talking about how the play experience has changed there used to be a lot of very gender-specific or age-specific games and that's kind of going away a lot of the companies that were showing off their tech was like it's for all ages from a little kid to a college kid for all ages gender doesn't matter gender neutral colors the CEO of LeapFrog gave a quote that was really interesting where he said none of us is as smart as all of us meaning we have to group together and come up with new ideas and concepts one person can't have all the ideas and one person can't come up with the ideas without getting together another guy mentioned augmented reality doesn't need to be in a virtual environment so this guy he built a headset that can read for you so if you're visually impaired you can put this headset on and look at words and it will actually read those words to you so he had a really cool video I was trying to find it but I couldn't I was actually a kid that has never been able to read before reading a Harry Potter book as they're interviewing him, his mom his mom was trying to talk to her son so when he looked up he answered the question but now he lost his place right, like if you're reading so when he looked down he goes thanks mom you made me lose my space that's an experience that he would never be able to have losing his space while reading so other than that was really cool and then they all laughed because I was the librarian in the group and I respected that joke I respected that that event and the other thing that was mentioned was that we're no longer in a maker movement people were always talking about how we're in a maker movement etc but it's more of a revolution now because basically everyone's revolting and wanting to build their own product people want to make what they need so if I want an automatic toaster people are just doing it on their own now and then somebody also was talking about children and how their security is going to change in terms of their identity and when Randy Zuckerberg mentioned that children have a digital identity before they were born now and I was kind of surprised but if you think about it when you're pregnant and you take photos of the sonograms or whatever they're called you post those on Facebook so basically they have that digital identity now before they're even born she was taking the standpoint of to embrace it but take control over it which I thought was a really good point and then the other event it was an invite only but I was lucky enough to be invited it was the fashion wear the technology fashion show so all these wearable technologies there was tons of different designs and different people wearing different gear everything from performance monitors to headphones the picture here if you look on the bottom left of her was a color changing dress and so a few other takeaways there's clothes now that can vibrate for direction so if you're in a city and you're trying to navigate around you don't want to be looking at your phone there's an app that can sync with your jacket you're wearing and it will vibrate the left shoulder when it's time to turn left or vibrate the right shoulder when it's time to turn right there's clothes that light up based on mood or sound so if it hears noises it changes colors or if you're happy or you're sad it will change colors ton of performance monitors so for next year this being my first year I went I definitely want to kind of restructure and do it differently take a lot more photos again I mentioned at the very beginning that I kind of got sidetracked and it was just too mind-blowing everything going on when I went down I was just like ooh it's an ass as I hit each booth definitely want to try to arrive earlier and attend the press events because there's a lot of really cool opportunities involved there and there's also a ton of evening events and parties that I plan for the day of and looking back at that they post stuff online and just if you're planning on going make sure you review all those and really do put a schedule together and do a lot more networking and only events or even the Venetian I would not have even been able to go to if I didn't just randomly chat with people so I talked to one guy that's been there for 20 years or has been attending for 20 years and he's like oh hey check out the Venetian and this is perfect for you so those are very important you have to be very social when you're at CES otherwise it's not going to work out and as a side note I'm also trying so at the very beginning I mentioned that I'm trying to change so I was there I was constantly asking constantly tweeting about libraries and CES or libraries and technology and actually one guy approached me who I didn't know who he was but he must have recognized me on Twitter and he goes are you the library guy and I was like yes yes so and he's like hey I saw your tweets let's chat about how we can get more involved with libraries and CES so I thought it was really really cool and I'm hoping that we can start building an ecosystem within CES where librarians as a whole can go up to these different companies and instead of just me it would be better if there was 20, 30, 100 of us talking to all these companies and giving libraries a presence in technology because we're using it we're embracing it we should be more closely partnered so that's my wrap any questions I know I threw a lot of stuff at you guys Thanks Brian that was wonderful just to respond to a few of the comments that are coming in as usual we are working to bookmark all of these things and we'll put them in the show nuts and we'll get links from Brian and Chris has been frantically typing and finding URLs as we go along here I have a couple of specific questions but Christy you did get one comment about the fridge some of the fridge that can tell you things some of us know it will be able to just recommend ordering Chinese because that's what they really want that's a good question I honestly don't know but they say that you probably could I don't see why not if it doesn't have the ingredients for you you can probably say would you like to order out or would you like to order from that could be an option absolutely and then we did one question like you said you were riling up a whole bunch of different things and they wanted to know the name of the company with the infrared music maker yes that is called BEAMS BEA if you go to the BEAMS I can type it in thebeams.com sounds like we got at least one musician in the audience so okay let me ask you a two part question to kind of keep it really general here what was the coolest thing you found while you were there and what was the weirdest thing you found while you were there the coolest it might actually be the both so I thought the eye tracker was the coolest because I can control my phone by looking at my eyes or using my eyes but at the same time it was also really weird because I had a terrible headache trying to make my eyes look at the left icon it took a whole effort to do it but I thought it was really cool what else was I thought was cool I don't know I thought all of those were really cool to be honest I was like a little kid I wanted to touch everything I wanted to see everything no the other cool thing which I can never afford was the displayer that little interactive screen I thought that was really cool as well for the weirdest yeah I'm not sure on that one okay yeah just sometimes there are these weird little gizmos floating around out there okay that's cool I took a video of it with a face on it and you could talk to it and it follows you around that was really weird I thought it was actually controlling it but no it's artificial intelligence no no that was weird it's too smart wasn't there a movie where somebody's luggage got lost and the luggage was saying have you seen so and so I'm his luggage there was a movie that did that I'll think of it eventually we had some other audience questions the name of the the company that makes the 3D printer that was less than $800 um yeah I actually did not talk to them but so robo is $800 but they'll give a discount that's robo 3D the other one let me go back on my slides so I actually didn't chat with them I just took a picture here we go any company that's going to say hey we should give a discount to libraries should be worth talking to that was the robo they actually donated one to some high school group that was doing robotics competition they just gave it to them that was awesome no one asked us for a 3D printer so here you can just have it wow cool okay and then um the navigation jacket they want to know does it work while you're driving as well as walking let me see I have the pamphlet on it let me look at it I would assume it would work the same way theoretically yeah but it might you might not like even if you need to make a right while you're cruising like 25 miles an hour you might not you know vibrate quick enough yeah if you could maybe adjust the lead time you know because if you're walking you don't need as much lead time to know you're going to turn the jacket is called the navigate jacket from we colon e s cool and I have all these videos I took an entire video I don't know if I was allowed to I just did it um I took an entire video the fashion show with each uh each model wearing the gear and if they talked about it so I'll make sure that Michael post as well the uh the video looks okay and we do have one um what technology did you think was the most relevant or promising for use in libraries particularly for programming um pop scotch yep yep for in terms of programming as development code or programming as in like a event I'm assuming events but I'll actually for an event yeah for events like programming in like programs in the library all the robotics stuff I thought was really cool which includes the the moss at a modular robotics uh the the vex IQ the little like Lego robotics kits and then even basically sitting people down and having them build robots essentially makes a really cool programming you do the whole STEM learning um and curio I'll always love curio they do uh tablets so you can actually do group games and stuff and play together and synchronize for gaming um so so let me ask you this kind of in the larger scheme of representing libraries to to the companies at one point you kind of said sometimes it was a little more successful talking to them sometimes it was a little less successful I don't want you to necessarily name any names but but was there any situation where you just got not a really great reaction from a company or about a product and they just what would have been one of those unsuccessful situations so while I was talking to 3D while I was talking to 3D companies so most of them were like yeah you know we do have some of our printers and libraries um and then I got to one who was like I don't see why libraries would want to use a stereo what do you call it a stereo graphic printer which is the fancy name for a 3D printer um I said well they're doing you know libraries want to do beta environments they want to let people build prototypes whereas other libraries want kids to be able to build 3D modeling out 3D objects model them and print them and others just want to be able to kind of show it off and then he's like well ours is to show ours is quality and so that's cool so that means if a if a guy wants to build a startup company he has to build his prototype object first and he does it at the library and he's able to get funded he's able to get successfully funded either through a campaign or through a venture capitalist he's going to look back to that library that gave him that 3D printer to build that really nice 3D object and guys I was just like nah I don't think so I was like alright man never mind well you tried you gave it you gave the effort so let's um some that I didn't think that could even work in libraries like track me down um I want to mention the names of kids that are watching right but uh this one company makes like a desk organizer and it's a really cool idea I just don't think it would work for a library space but uh you can basically plug everything in and it communicates huh interesting yeah um other questions from the audience at this point no just people saying this is so cool and I definitely want to go yeah it's I remember going to these and yeah I will completely second the wear good shoes uh um yeah I did not expect that my shoes were ruined I had to buy new shoes and everything like the trends yeah nothing is small in Vegas that's for darn sure um I noticed you did your own personal step counting and and then you you mentioned a lot of the wearables and um kind of tracking ourselves and and uh just uh then for the February tech talk is I'm going to have Gary Wolf from a website called the quantified self uh on and talking about kind of just that category of things going on and wearable computing and tracking your steps and your heart rate and when you got up and how well you slept and when you showed up in the morning and when you left in the afternoon and things like that so that that's definitely a pretty big category going on right now uh it was at least I mean I always want to say like 10 15 wearable like performance monitors everything from things that you can wear like as a shirt that monitors your heart rate to wristbands um and even shoes so yeah wearable health and fitness thing is is skyrocketing I'm still a little creeped out by it I don't know if I want people to know how much I walked uh but oh some people think it's cool well I'm I'm a Fitbit wearer and I gotta tell you I've been uh trying to up my step count and I've had a couple of friends in in kind of the Fitbit ecosystem in encouraging me and we're trying to see who gets the most steps out of a week and I gotta tell you at least for me it's it's working a little bit so uh yeah pull that side my feet are reminding me I have to walk more and then this makes me sad and then when I was at Vegas it was like congratulations you finally beat your record I was like ouch yeah cool um so let's just back off completely here then we'll kind of wrap up uh for the hour and if anybody else this thing has more questions you know we still got some time feel free to send those in or we can turn on your microphone if you have a mic just just tell Krista to do that for you um just take a minute or two tell us a little more about the Evolve project what you're doing with that and kind of what its goals are and uh how people might be able to get involved with that if they're interested so what I'm doing with the Evolve project I've been classifying it as an open collaborative platform um where I'm actually going out on my own and finding all these companies and working side by side with them uh to basically change the way people see libraries so I recently kind of redesigned how I wanted to work and organize things so I have all these different partnerships as I'm calling them with all these different companies um that have predefined uh library rates that are that might even be cheaper than the educational discounts um and at the same time offer demos so some companies either I have a demo and I can ship out uh PG printer for instance is sending me 10 3D printers for me to share with other librarians and so by doing that I'm able to kind of push stuff out so I'm almost like a uh technology and library promoter I'm doing both on both sides um which has been pretty successful so far um but yeah the idea is to change the way people see libraries by introducing innovative and interactive technologies uh and then I've been recently working on specifically focusing on robotics and programming so I actually just partnered up with a group called bird brain technologies that lets you build your own robot robot through like a really small kit and you can make it like dance and do lights and I can send you guys links to that too and is there a website we should go to if we're interested in finding out what's going up uh evolveproject.org I try to do like a weekly blog post um but I'm still catching up from CES I have a stack of business cards still people to follow up with but uh evolveproject.org great uh uh any other questions from the audience at this point no and we have any questions you can type them in um we are getting close to the end of our hour here so about 10 minutes or so considering when we started if you have any questions comments or anything um I just want to say um Brian you were mentioning wanting to get more um librarians involved in going and what not and I know um I don't know if you hooked up with um Jason Griffey while you were there he's the head of I mean you know Jason but people don't know he's the head of library IT at University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and I've seen his I've tried to look and see how long he's been going as far I could see him as far back as as far back 2010 or so yeah he's been going every year um for a while now um got with him or not yeah no I did not um we chatted briefly he gave me a few pointers and stuff um but uh yeah so he does he covers it with the American Library Association so he also did a live webinar I think last week about it but um so what I'm trying to do with with libraries and CES they actually get librarians to attend and also present um about what they're doing in spaces regarding interactive technology um so if I'm lucky or successful I should probably say lucky um I might be able to get like a whole panel together of people and that could be the basic tickets in for different librarians and get some of those vendors who think that their work their products are not useful to libraries to realize they are but getting them getting up there as actual presentations yeah just like getting librarians now into South by Southwest that we're we're warmed our way into that too we're everywhere yeah which is awesome that's exciting oh someone does want to know if you can go to the slide with your contact info they want to because I think you had something about if you they weren't if you were interested about attending again or in the future and then a question of how can I find out what I can borrow from the Evolve project I assume that would just be contact you or just contact me and I'll either coordinate with the specific company or see if we can work something out and send something to you Evolveproject.org correct and it's also going to be in the show links I've already put it in there in our links as well people want to be able to quickly jump to it afterwards as well and you're also talking about you're both talking about wearable technology and so I just wanted to let you got you know Brian and everyone online know that we I just added to the Encompass Live schedule while we were sitting here on February 19th we'll have a session on Google Glass Hastings some people may know in Nebraska they've seen the news stories Hastings Public Library here in Nebraska has Google Glass and Jake Rundle from the library is going to be on with us on February 19th to talk about what they're doing with it and how they're using it and how they got a hold of it and that so you're into that kind of thing that might be some cool show to watch we got some neat stuff coming up things are happening alright well Brian thank you very much that was really wonderful and I love getting different perspectives on CES and people looking at different things because it's one of those things you could send a hundred people and everybody would come back with I saw different stuff those things are just so huge everything like I kind of skipped the car section because like on Friday I was like barely able to stand I was exhausted so I looked at what else I wanted to see and kind of just pinpointed it but yeah I think if we bring an army of librarians we'd be able to cover a lot more grounds yeah a battle plan I'd love to go back we'll see what happens so alright Brian thank you very much we're going to go ahead and take control back here and actually I've got to be honest I don't really have any news I tried I mean really when it comes to January the news is everything that comes out of CES and so we pretty much just kind of had that covered and there weren't any more significant security preaches in the last couple weeks so there's that yeah exactly so you know I got my car replaced because of Target and whatnot so I believe I mentioned that last month so there you go so that's it for Tech Talk and like I said we'll have the description hopefully very soon for Gary Wolf and the quantified self next February 26th according to that that's the last Wednesday in the month that's the last Wednesday in the month and then I will mention on February 28th is Big Talk from Small Libraries 2014 so don't forget to register for that also and as we said we have the links will be for this episode and the links will be there and then Brian can you send us your slides we can post them as well I will share them on yeah it's like 300 megabytes I'll share a tweet slide share of your own or something we can just link to that we're not picky whichever works okay sounds good alright great so that will be available afterwards so thank you everyone for attending thank you Brian and I hope you'll join us next week as you see here's our list of shows we have coming up the Google Glass one that I mentioned February 19th Michael's Tech Talk February 26th but next week our topic is music here in Lincoln City Libraries has a poly music library and their music librarian is going to be with us next week to talk about what they've got there available and she just recently attended the International Association of Music Libraries which I think was somewhere like Vienna or I can't anyway it was something really cool so Carol and I will be with us next week so please do sign up and join us for that and if you are a Facebook user we are on Facebook so you can go to the Encompass Live on Facebook page and like us there you'll see notices of when our shows are starting when recordings are available reminders of what next week's show will be we do post like here's one for today join us right now people can pop in on the fly as we had a whole bunch of people this morning which is great so do like us on Facebook if you are a big Facebook user and follow us there other than that that will all be anything else all good for this morning all right then thank you very much and we'll see you in the future on Encompass Live bye have a good one bye bye