Kara Swisher

Recent Posts by Kara Swisher

BoomTown Headed to Vegas for the Umpteenth Time–And I Am Not Even Tiger Woods!

BoomTown will be Southwesting to Las Vegas today for the annual Consumer Electronics Show, being held there over the next several days.

CES has certainly lost some of its immediacy over the last several years, as big players like Google (GOOG) and Apple (AAPL) suck up all the oxygen outside its noisy, analog crowd-filled pushfest. This year’s spoilers are the Nexus One launch yesterday and upcoming iSlate arrival in a few weeks.

But CES is still the place to see a lot of different kinds of tech treats in one spot–from big-screen televisions to mobile devices to tricked-out stereo systems to whatever those odd booths in the back are peddling–and try to discern the tea leaves for innovation.

And, of course, to go to a lot of parties with passels of geeks! Yes, it is that kind of fun. Ladies, hide your gadgets!

This year, Walt Mossberg–with whom I do an annual video walk across the massive Convention Center floor, where he is treated like the tech equivalent of Brangelina (see last year’s video below)–and I are trying to up the ante a bit by throwing a substantive interview event with top tech execs, which All Things Digital will be live-streaming on Friday.

We are at capacity at our venue in the Venetian Hotel, but you can see Walt, MediaMemo’s Peter Kafka and me grilling digital leaders, starting at 3:30 pm PT and ending at 5:30 pm (the video will also be available later for watching anytime).

Onstage: Jon Rubinstein, chairman and CEO of Palm (PALM), talking to me; Reed Hastings, CEO, president and chairman of Netflix (NFLX), to be queried by Peter; and Android guru and Google VP of Engineering Andy Rubin, who will be interviewed by Walt.

ATD will also provide extensive coverage of all the doings at CES over the next several days, so there will lots to peruse, from keynotes to product launches to the annual blogger snub by Microsoft (MSFT) CEO Steve Ballmer, who seems to prefer doing pre-speech interviews with television crews from Omaha.

And we’re not bitter about not being invited to the special off-the-record session either, at which Ballmer will talk about whatever he plans to gab on about onstage tomorrow at the opening keynote at CES.

Rumors swirl about what he’ll talk about. Will he show off a slate PC called the Courier with Hewlett-Packard (HPQ)? (My guess: No!) Or will he touch more on the future of cloud computing, portable devices and importance of Microsoft software plus services. (My guess: Yes!)

So, not hearing what Ballmer will say to a passel of reporters, which I couldn’t tell you about anyway since the event is off the record–well, you can imagine how devastated I am!

But there is plenty more I will be able to get into and write about, as well as deliver videos on.

Remember: What happens in Vegas, stays right here.

Until then, here is my annual video interview of Walt, as well as Mossberg Solution columnist Katherine Boehret, on the CES floor last year:

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There’s a lot of attention and PR around Marissa, but their product lineup just kind of blows.

— Om Malik on Bloomberg TV, talking about Yahoo, the September issue of Vogue Magazine, and our overdependence on Google