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If you live anywhere from the mid to north east part of the country this weekend should have been interesting for you. It all started Friday evening when a light snow started to fall and by late that night we had about a foot of snow on the ground and it didn’t stop snowing until sometime Saturday! It was pretty crazy, seeing people try to dig their cars out and failing horribly. Luckily I didn’t really have to go anywhere all weekend and I had enough food to last me so I didn’t have to leave my apartment. My friends came over Friday night and were stuck here till Sunday!

On Sunday we decided to finally get the cars out. That was an adventure since no one at either of the 2 houses here had a shovel. So we were using buckets, trash cans, and even hockey sticks to get all of the cars out. It was actually a lot of fun and gave me a workout! All of our neighbors helped and we got everyone out safely. Here are some pictures I took during the 2 days…

Wow it’s already a month into 2010! January was a really crazy month for me as I was in Las Vegas for CES. I tried to fill everyone in on my trip, but I still have 3-4 posts to publish, so stay tuned for those. Out of the 9 posts from January my favorite would have to be My 2009 Year In Review. It is always good to look back and see what you were doing and having a blog enables you to look back. That is why I love blogging, from time to time I will go back and read my old posts to remember fun times, get new ideas, and just to look at old photos. That’s just another reason to start blogging if you haven’t already.

Popular Posts
So what was everyone checking out this month? Let’s take a look…

1. My 2009 Year In Review
2. The CES 2010 Swag
3. Tracking Events on Twitter
4. In Vegas for a Week
5. The 2010 Night Before CES Party

Awesome that the PodCamp articles are getting some traffic!

Traffic Sources

1. John Chow
2. Facebook
3. Twitter
4. Jon Waraas
5. Mahalo

Nice to see some new traffic sources up there!

Top Commentators

The Top commentators for January were Caterers Sydney, Voyage Montreal, Bathroom Wall Floor Tiles, Colin Dean & Michael Kwan.

Stats

RSS Readers 959 (+96)
Twitter Followers 6042 (-59)
Facebook Friends 1471 (+94)

I’m sort of disappointed that my twitter numbers went down.

On to February
As I said I still have a few CES and Vegas posts to publish and I want to blog about a ton of other things so let’s see if I can get February’s post number in the double digits!

I use many online services and I’m sure you do too. If you don’t think you do you probably at least have a Facebook account. So you put tons of photos on there, write long notes, get tagged in photos etc. What if for some reason Facebook crashed and you lost all of those images and other important things on Facebook? This is very unlikely to happen, but it is always good to have a backup of everything. This is where Backupify comes in. It’s a service that backs up many cloud services and for a limited time (till Jan 31st) the service is free.

The Services
So do you use a service that Backupify supports? They have all the big online services covered, Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, Gmail, Google Docs, Flickr, and Wordpress. Other services include Delicious, Zoho, Photobucket, Basecamp, Blogger and Hotmail. They also have support for YouTube, Xmarks, Rss Feeds, and Tumblr coming very soon.

How It Works
Getting Backupify setup is pretty simple. All you do is create an account and go to the settings tab. There it will list all of the services. Then you go ahead and click on what service you want to back up, enter your credentials and hit create. You can also select how often Backupify backs up your data. You can select weekly or daily backups and you can have them e-mail you a digest of what gets backed up.

So when Backupify starts backing up your files you can go in and see what all has been backed up. Just click on the Archives tab at the top then select your service. Depending on the service the files will be backed up differently. They make a nice PDF for Twitter updates. Other things are stored in .xml files or things like photos are simply backed up.

Sign up Fast
As I said Backupify is currently free, after January 31st the service will go back to a paid pricing structure. If you signup during this free period your account will remain free and unlimited. Even if they do not support your service you should sign up. They are planning on adding many services in the future and you can’t beat it since it’s free!

I myself have been going to CES for 5 years now. For ThinkComputers it is really the highlight of the entire year, we really don’t attend any other trade shows. We get to see the latest technology, new products and catch up with old friends, not to mention getting to spend a week in Vegas. Something really stood out to me this year during CES…it was very small! Also this year CEA (the company that runs CES) tried to kick out many exhibitors who opted to use hotel rooms instead of paying for a booth.

Where was everything?
If you were on the show floor at all you definitely had to notice it was smaller. There were completely open spots on the show floor! The North Hall of the Las Vegas Convention Center, which normally is car audio, was almost completely empty! Apparently what was left of car audio was moved to the Palms, which not only is off the strip you can’t even take the monorail to get there. The Sands Expo at the Venetian, which usually held a lot of niche products and vendors, was not even used; take a look at our Sands Expo article from last year. Many large companies who normally have decent size booths either opted for a very small booth or had meeting rooms instead.

Another thing that bothered me were the press rooms, rooms specifically for press members that have free WiFi, computers, printers, etc. In past years the press room was a nice comfortable place to work, they even had free drinks and snacks. This year the only free drink in the press room was water and there were no snacks at all. Press lunches used to be a big buffet, now you get a lunch ticket and a boxed lunch. The computers in the press room were running Windows XP Professional. You’re telling me you can’t get a large company to sponsor the press room? A sign of the times I guess?

Another thing that many companies have done in recent years is use a hotel suite to show off products. From what I’ve heard on average a booth at CES costs around $75,000 – $100,000 depending on the size and that is just for the space. Then you have to pay for construction of the booth etc, bringing costs up even more. I couldn’t imagine what large companies that have massive booth’s pay for them, I would guess some pay upwards of $500,000 in total cost if not more! Because of the hefty cost many companies display their products in a hotel. Let’s just say on average a hotel suite costs $1,000 a night during CES, include food and some other expenses, you are still under $10,000 for all of CES. You can see why many companies are doing this.

CEA Kicks Out Companies
The CEA who runs CES does offer a hotel suite package. The official CES hotels are The Venetian and Palazzo. Each had specific CES floors that allowed companies to display products, and get their name listed on the official CES Venetian / Palazzo suite guide. From what I was told this cost was $8,000 on top of the cost of the suite itself. And there is a catch, you are not allowed to sleep in the suite, it is just for display purposes only. So companies have to pay $8,000, plus the cost of the suite, plus the cost for another room for their employees.

Many companies had no need to be listed on the CES guide and did not feel like paying the $8,000 to CEA, which is very understandable. So they just went ahead and booked a suite themselves making sure ahead of time that they were allowed to display products. Well apparently this year CEA was cracking the whip on companies that did this. All hotel staff was told if they saw products being displayed in rooms that were not official CES rooms to report it. I was in one such room being given a product demo when the hotel manager and security guards asked anyone not registered to the room to leave the room. Not only was this very unprofessional it was embarrassing for the company in the suite.

I also met with a company later in the week that was kicked out of the Palazzo. They told me that they called ahead of time and made sure they were allowed to display products and have meetings. When the hotel found out they were displaying products and having meetings during the week they were asked to remove to products, but for some reason were allowed to have a party that night. Maybe because the party was being catered by the hotel? The next morning the company was asked to leave the hotel and still pay for the 4 days they had the room booked, when they only stayed 2. Funny they did this AFTER the party that was catered by the hotel.

I personally know of 2 companies that were asked to leave their suites at the Venetian / Palazzo, but I heard of up to 30 companies being ousted from the hotels. Because CEA has a deal with the Venetian and Palazzo I guess they can do this, but it is very unprofessional and many companies have done this in the past without any issues. It makes me think that the CEA put pressure on the Venetian / Palazzo to kick out companies that did not pay their fee.

DailyTech and Hardware Secrets both have articles on their experiences getting kicked out of hotel suites while meeting with companies

So is CES Going Away?
I really hope that CES is not going away, but this year the show was noticeably smaller and there was all of the drama within the Palazzo and Venetian. This could just be a sign of the times, but I hope that the 2011 CES is much larger and more exciting. I think next year you are going to see many companies using other hotels for meetings rather than the Venetian and Palazzo.

I originally posted this at ThinkComputers, but I figured I would post it here as well.

Another really cool event I was able to attend during CES this year was Lenovo’s Blogger Nights. This was a 3 day event hosted at AquaKnox at the Venetian. The entire event was hosted by Lenovo, but each night was co-hosted by someone else. Wednesday night was co-hosted by social media club, Thursday Night was co-hosted by Social Media Jungle and Friday night was co-hosted by GDGT. Because CES was so crazy we were only able to make it on the last night, which was Friday.

I had never been to AquaKnox before and it is a really cool place. There were tons of free food and an open bar as well. Lenovo’s idea for the blogger nights was getting everyone together in a relaxed atmosphere where reps are not trying to shove products in your face. Lenovo did have products setup and a demo room, but you were not required to demo any of the products.

One thing that was missing from this event was free WiFi. I had brought my laptop to actually do some work at the event and I was unable to get on the internet. If you are brining tech media and bloggers together you should have some free WiFi! All in all it was a good event though! Here are some photos from the event.