Ad+Geek

Don’t laugh at this one…there’s a big market for baby tablets. If you don’t believe me, you haven’t flown cross-country on a plane with an 18-month-old like I did last week.

The passengers in the seats next to us would have pooled their money and bought us an iPad if such a transaction were possible on Delta flights.

And from what I’ve seen, tablets for small children make sense. My daughter loves her parents’ smart phones, and we’d rather have her interacting with a touchscreen than passively watching cartoons on TV. We’ll be getting a tablet for her soon, now that she’s old enough to know not to throw it on the floor.

Anyway, CNET has the details on the Vinci: “Introduced at CES and launching in the first half of 2011, the Vinci has a BPA-free silicone handle that fits little hands, a 7-inch screen, a micro SD card slot and USB connectivity, built-in speaker and microphone, as well as a 3-megapixel camera. In order to protect wee ones from radiation, there’s no Wi-Fi.”

The problem with this, of course, is that there’s a big iPhone/iPad developer community that is building games and apps for small children. Android and Win7 devices will have similar offerings soon, assuming those platforms take off. But if the Vinci has a proprietary platform (the article doesn’t specify), a steady stream of new apps to play with isn’t as likely. 

(Photo by CNET)

At the Entertainment Matters keynote panel today, Michael Kassan (MediaLink) spoke with several ad-industry heavyweights to see what they’re doing at a tech show like CES. The panelists were:

• Sir Martin Sorrell (WPP)
• Mich Matthews (Microsoft)
• Michael Roth (IPG)
• Joseph Tripodi (Coca-Cola)
• David Kenny (Akamai)

Turned out to be an interesting discussion about how agencies can keep pace in the digital age, and Peter Suciu’s got a good writeup over on Twice.com.

This will be a great discussion…four very smart tech analysts

Had a good chat with BitTorrent last night. They announced 100 million users on Monday, and have partnered with Information Technology Research Institute to craft standards around content playback, which BT could use to set up a BitTorrent certification program for device makers. Think BitTorrent-certified Blu-ray players and tablets and such.

More reporting on the standards program [PCMag]

More reporting on BitTorrent’s usage stats [Mashable]

The Tivizen dongle lets you pick up broadcast TV signals on your iPad.

Something pretty for all you Wacom nerds: The Wacom Cintiq 21UX. It’s a 21-inch touchscreen offering all kinds of functionality for Creative Suite pros. It detects 2040 levels of pressure from the pen, has 16 express keys, and uses 2 sliders with 4 settings each. It’s $2,000, and the 12-inch version is $1,000. The guy I talked to said these have been out “for a while”…but in the tech world, that could mean they launched last year or last week.

Imagine a 2TB SD card. Shoot all the HD video you can, shoot photos in RAW + JPEG, do whatever you want, because capacity is almost limitless. SanDisk chickened out by putting the 2TB SD card on their above timeline without a target date, but I’m going to guess 2013. Shot in the dark.

Sidenote: I cornered some Seagate reps at SXSW 4 years ago and asked them when we’d have 1TB pocket drives (1.8-inch). They did some napkin math and said 2014. I bet we’ll beat that, regardless of whether or not companies are still putting spinning disks in things like iPods.

The CES show floor is flooded with tablets, from both huge companies and tons of tiny companies I’ve never heard of. Most of them are very small departures from the iPad, with the exception of RIM‘s, Samsung‘s, and Asus‘s.

I’m betting 90% of them come from the same three factories in China. And that we’ll be able to score some screaming deals on tablets come September.

Yahoo’s version of the connected TV is designed to serve up complementary content to whatever your watching–basically, these are widgets that react to on-screen content. So when Grace Park is onscreen, you’ll get facts about her life and career (above). When a Microsoft commercial is playing, you can check out deals on new laptop (below).

Seems like it will be a good space for brands to play in once it reaches critical mass, especially if we’re finding ways to co-develop good content instead of using it for interuptive ads. (Yahoo showed examples of each…the ads can be quite invasive).

The Yahoo rep told me they have 5,000 developers already working with the platform, and partnerships with Toshiba, D-Link, Sony, Samsung, LG, Haier, and Vizio.