by Kim D'Amico

White Horse staff gears up to attend the world’s largest consumer electronics trade show.

That little flutter in my chest that’s been building up over the past week or so since New Year’s? It’s not the post-holiday stress of returning to the routine, no, it’s the physical manifestation of pre-CES excitement. I’ve been looking forward to this year’s CES pretty much since last year’s CES, but this time I’m going with a little perspective under my belt.

This is the second year in a row I’ve been fortunate enough to attend CES. Last year I had literally no idea what I was in for. Lady Gaga introducing Facebook enabled video projection eyeglasses? Sign me up. 50 Cent promoting his own brand of sleek wireless headphones? I’m in.

 But once I got over the celebrity-hyped gadgetry and general hullaballoo (waiting over an hour in a packed crowd for Gaga to introduce useless goofy glasses and not perform cured me of trade show ADD), I quickly realized that the real value of CES is that it introduces the world to what can be game-changing technology that ultimately influences our everyday lives. I’m not just talking about Swarovski encrusted headphones (although they’re rad and I’m sure they’d look great on me with matching lip gloss), I’m talking about the kinds of things that become so commonplace in our lives that we’ll eventually take them for granted – smartphones, tablets, e-readers, internet-connected-everything.

What does this all mean to White Horse and our clients? With the emerging modes of consuming media and ways of interacting with technology, it means new marketing channels to reach consumers and new platforms on which to develop. We’re always on the lookout – not just for the next big thing – but for the ideas that drive sea change.

So stay tuned. Bandwidth can be a precious and rare commodity at CES what with so many smartphone and tablet possessing nerds gathered in the same place at the same time, but I hope to post a couple of brief updates while I’m there. It may be about a product we’ve already seen a lot of advance press on like the ultrabook, it may be on the exciting advances in the mobile-television mash up trend, or it may be the new must-have robot butler. But I swear you will NOT see me waiting in line to see Justin Bieber.