| Good morning. CES gets underway in Las Vegas this morning. It’s the world's leading celebration of tech gadgetry, with 50 football fields of convention space, showcasing a blinding array of mammoth televisions, a cacophony of sound systems, an endless assortment of smart lights/refrigerators/cars/toothbrushes, in-air and underwater drones, robots that will "nurture your capacity to love," and much more. Some 30,000 different products on display this year will respond if you say "Alexa” or "Hey, Google." Meanwhile, Apple , which doesn't subject Siri to the CES riffraff, is nevertheless lurking outside the convention center with a building–sized billboard that declares: "What happens on your iPhone, stays on your iPhone." (That's a data joke. Get it?) If all this sounds a bit stupefying, well, it is…which is one reason I'm taking a break from the brouhaha this year. But what I find interesting is how this ultimate showcase for consumer technology has increasingly become a destination for business technology. This morning’s opening keynote will be given by IBM CEO Ginni Rometty, who will be talking about "what's next" for data and computing. She also will unveil the new IBM Q System One , billed as "the first fully integrated quantum computing system for commercial use.” Because it has to operate at a temperature "1,000 times colder than outer space," in Rometty's words, it's not really ready for the average smart home. But it does open the door to experimentation at cutting-edge research facilities. On stage with Rometty this morning will be Vijay Swarup, who heads R&D at ExxonMobil and is using the IBM Quantum computer for global oil discovery projects. I got a briefing on the system at the IBM Research Center in Yorktown, NY, last month, and was impressed with the possibilities that it promises to bring to the world of computing. Fortune helped get gadget week off to a strong start last night with its annual Brainstorm Tech dinner at the Bellagio's Picasso restaurant. The event featured a fireside chat with AMD CEO Lisa Su, who is feeling buoyant about hardware maybe being “sexy again.” You can read more about the chat here. Other news below. And by the way, also this morning, IBM and the Consumer Technology Association, which hosts CES, will announce their "21st Century Apprenticeship Coalition," designed to help close the technology skills gap by expanding apprenticeship programs. It's a worthy effort; details here. |
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