As usual, lot of strange stuff graced the floor of International CES, the consumer electronics trade show that took place in Las Vegas this week. There was a Roomba-like robot that cleans your grill — perfect for that post-labor future in which we’re all too lazy to spend 30 seconds running a brush across the barbecue. In another booth was a robot that roams around a tennis court picking up balls: Ballboys, you’ve just been disrupted.
Despite all the robots, CES was not all bad for humans. In the hall devoted to fitness gadgets were several men and women who’d been employed to walk, run, jump, pedal, lift weights or otherwise work out for extended periods of time, and to smile while doing it. It looked exhausting, but hey, at least it’s a job that no machine can do.
Strangest of all was something spotted by my friend (and podcast co-host) Jay Yarow, the executive editor of Business Insider. At one booth Jay met an entrepreneur who had created an animatronic tail for people to wear. Yes, a tail — long and furry, the appendage straps around your waist and gently sways up and down as you walk.
You may wonder, “Why would anyone want a tail?” To which I’ll counter, “Why would anyone not want a tail?” I’ll note that lots of people asked Bill Gates why anyone would want a P.C., too, and look who’s laughing now.
The oddities at CES show why journalists often complain that the show is a pointless ritual that produces few interesting stories about tech. But it’s also worth noting that to people with real jobs the show takes on a greater importance. A lot of business gets done at CES, often away from the show floor, in the labyrinthine warrens of meeting rooms across the Las Vegas Strip.
The point about business was underscored one morning as I was walking through the Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas hotel, where I spotted a door emblazoned with the Twitter logo guarded by a couple of folks wearing blue shirts. I ran into a Twitter public relations representative who offered to take me behind the door, where I found something breathtaking.
In the space of two huge hotel ballrooms, Twitter had created a theme-park-like miniature city, a members-only Twitter town that was realistic enough to be used as a film set. The Potemkin village had shops, restaurants, a sports bar, a theater and an outdoor park with fake grass. It was also quite peaceful; away from the crowds of the show floor, here was a nice park bench overlooking Pleasantville. I spotted Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s chief executive, in the corner of the town, looking at his phone.
Each “building” in Twitter Town was really a meeting room, the spokesman explained, in which Twitter’s advertising sales teams could show off the service’s potential as a marketing tool to brand advertisers and ad agencies. The whole setup was fantastically detailed: In the sports bar, for example, the TVs would be tuned to show off the brands that Twitter’s salespeople were meeting with.
Twitter wouldn’t tell me how much it spent setting up the town. But the company did say it got a lot done in Twitter Town. Sales people held more than 300 meetings in the span of four days there, the spokesman said. With its fake Paris and fake New York, much of the Las Vegas Strip is a gaudy simulacrum of the rest of the world, and Twitter’s city, like much of CES, was another deeper layer of fakery nested within the larger town. But if real business gets done there — if what happens in Vegas matters in the real world beyond — maybe CES isn’t so useless after all.