Editor's Blog: CES and business

I've had a few people ask me why we'd sent a reporter to CES, given it is the Consumer Electronics Show.

My answer, if I was being flippant, would be: "Because we can."

Another publication this year said the 'E' is for enterprise. It is, to a degree, and this is more along the lines of why silicon.com is interested in such a show.

We wouldn't go along en masse, like our colleagues over on cnet.co.uk, say, but there was more than enough in Vegas this past week to keep our enterprise-angled minds stimulated.

For one thing our lives are increasingly blurred. What we use at work and at home - and even in cars or on foot - is starting to look pretty similar.

And the big enterprise tech vendors get this. Sure, many of them see the consumer market as a way to widen their sales base. That's clear. But take Bill Gates' keynote from Sunday. There's the 'server in every home' rhetoric - much like the classic 'PC on every desk and in every home' from Microsoft's earlier era - but more than that he wants the way he listens to music, surfs the web, keeps in touch with family/friends/colleagues and more to be seamless.

And let's face it, if it's not seamless for someone like him already then it's almost certainly not for the rest of us.

The other small point as well is how much we are using consumer tech in the workplace. Probably not so much large LCD screens but certainly devices such as webcams or iPods for carrying around data.

Yes, consumer tech is highly relevant - and that's why it's increasingly found on the pages of silicon.com.

One final point on this subject - see how CES has boomed while Comdex fell by the wayside. And many of the names from Comdex simply turn up in the same town at the different time of year.

On a related note, I'm pleased to announce you can very soon hear a few members of the silicon.com team going on - fairly incomprehensibly at times, I fear - on this very subject in the inaugural Weekly Round-Up podcast.

As regular readers will know, the Weekly Round-Up newsletter goes out every Friday afternoon. Has done for the past eight years or so, give or take Christmases and holidays. (And for the eager, it goes up online slightly earlier each week.)

Now we're adding an audio component which I hope you enjoy. It's also not intended to be too heavy. Have a listen here. Should be on iTunes shortly too. Feedback most welcome.