Five final thoughts about Las Vegas

Heavens to Betsy, I’ve been out of Vegas (and CES 2010) for nearly a week and I never got around to covering all the various bits of weekend excitement. So here’s some quick thoughts around a few key themes before I have to get all New Zealand on everybody.

RADIO: This year, being at CES was rather good for my media profile. While I was still in town, I did a phone interview with the ABC overnight program. That was pretty enjoyable, though being the ABC I had to avoid specific product mentions. Later in the week, I also talked CES on 6PR in Perth, where host Simon Beaumont described me as a “high-energy supergeek”. He doesn’t know the half of it.

WARM GLOW: I’ve got to admit it, I enjoyed the summary of my work for the week on ITJourno (which is a subs-only site, hence my need to repeat it here):

CES is perfectly timed for tech editors because they can come back to work and just feed a whole swathe of wire content into their CMS’ systems. However, that certainly hasn’t been the case at APCmag which over the past week has been turned into the vehicle for Angus Kidman’s prolific, and quite amazing, output from CES.

As of this morning, Kidman had penned more than 20 pieces from CES. Click here to see all of Kidman’s coverage, which has been all the more remarkable because they’re not blog-standard press release rewrites of product launches. You won’t see a better example of a journalist demonstrating their ability to dig out unique and quirky angles, amongst a background of mostly formulaic coverage. APC has been running wire stories as well for all the big announcements, but it’s been Kidman’s stream of pieces that has made APC a unique destination to visit during CES. As you would expect from Kidman’s coverage, he’s managed to slip in stories about Lady Gaga, sex robots and once again bagging Monster cables for being ludicrously expensive. It’s worth noting that Kidman continues to edit and write for Lifehacker. Epitome is in awe.

SINGING: The Piano Bar at New York New York is awesome (thanks to the Sony Australia team for taking us there). Especially impressive was that one of the guys playing actually knew ‘Khe Sanh’, having been asked by far too many Aussies over the years to perform it. We still had to throw a couple of twenties at him to get ‘Down Under’ on the set list, but it was worth it.

CITYCENTER: I went to check out the newest addition to Vegas' skyline, CityCenter, currently manifested in the form of Crystals shopping centre and the Aria hotel. The former has some great architecture, but offers literally nowhere I would ever want to shop -- luxury brands don't do it for me. Similarly, Aria looks nice, but in my head the only hotels that make sense in Vegas are theme hotels. So I can say that I've seen it, but barring getting hosted there for a conference or perhaps eventually seeing the Elvis Cirque show, I can safely say I'll never go back.

TRIBUTES: I wanted to see a show on the Sunday night, but the choices were pretty limited. I eventually made good on a long-standing promise to myself to see ‘Legends in Concert’, the tribute show which ran for years at the Imperial Palace and last year moved to Harrah’s. In the current lineup, the acts are Jerry Lee Lewis, Tina Turner, Bette Midler (which is cheeky when she’s actually appearing just over the road), Michael Jackson and Elvis Presley. Jacko’s track selection was a bit weird, I have to say, offering up both ‘Jam’ and ‘Black Or White’ but nothing from Bad. I’ll write more about this some other time perhaps.