For this year’s CES, press day kicks off on Monday the 6th. Press day is when companies hold press conferences to formally announce a number of new product offerings to be released throughout the remainder of the year.
If you’re unfamiliar with live blogs, it’s where you’ll be provided with live text and photo updates from various events. It’s not as nice as a live video feed, but it’s the next best thing! It’s something that many websites have been doing for years to cover certain events, such as Apple keynotes, even if live video feeds are available. It’s a fun and unique way of getting a direct understanding of what’s actually happening from the event itself.
Because GU’s coverage of CES 2014 is a one-person operation, I still plan on covering 5 different press conferences, all from notable companies. Below is the schedule. All times listed are Pacific. Add 3 hours for Eastern time zones. If you’re outside of North America, you’ll find a good time zone converter here.
Monday, January 6
- 8:00AM-8:45AM – LG Electronics (View live blog here)
- 10:00AM-11:00AM – Huawei (View live blog here)
- 2:00PM-2:45PM – Samsung (View live blog here)
- 5:00PM-5:45PM – Sony (Late transportation; didn’t live blog this event)
Wednesday, January 8
- 6:00PM-7:00PM – WWE (View live blog here)
The actual live blogs will begin 15 minutes prior to their scheduled start time. You’ll see the blog postings for each live event on the home page, and of course, they’ll be posted to our Twitter accounts.
If you’re curious as to what the technical setup will be, it’s a pretty standard one.
The live blogging service that I’ve chosen is called 24liveblog. Alternatives would’ve been CoveritLive and ScribbleLive. I selected 24liveblog because it’s 100% free, offers unlimited viewing, and still supports media uploads. I’ve used CoveritLive in the past with great success (their iOS app is great), but that was prior to them changing plans. Their previous free plan was great while their current one brings up concerns and confusion over their “click” implementation. 24liveblog was successfully tested on this website a few days ago, so things should be smooth sailing, providing my Internet connection will be as well.
I’ll be using my MacBook Air, tethered to my T-Mobile iPhone 5s, to provide you with the text updates. For photos, I’ll be taking them with my phone. Because 24liveblog doesn’t have an iOS app, photo uploading will have to be done with my web browser on my laptop. Since my iPhone will be tethered to it, I’ll use iFile’s web server to instantly pull up photos after they’re taken for a quick upload to you all. It might be a bit of a confusing setup, but everything should work well.
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