Taking on CES on a small budget you’ll need two things: guts and creativity. This year Per and Martin of People People were sent out to one of the largest electronics fair on the planet. The mission: Show the People People Speaker to the public and find the right partners to go into production, but also meet with potential new clients. This is how it all went down.

The People People Speaker still in Stockholm. Unaware of the adventures waiting ahead…

Wired show

In a way Per and Martin didn’t bring the speaker to the CES – it brought them. All the buzz online had in December made WIRED magazine pick it out as one of their 15 favorite products, and wanted to show it at their CES event at the hottest nightclub in Vegas – the Surrender. This was of course a great forum to be seen at, and we made some new friends among the people exhibiting their things next to the speaker:

Makerbot

Apart from hosting the best CES after parties – one at a MGM penthouse suite, another at a big pinball hall (quarters, pizza and beer included!), these guys make great 3D printers at an equally great price point. We can’t wait to get our hands on their new machine, the Replicator!

 

Ericsson

The R&D people at Ericsson have come up with something really interesting. Forget the cable, you send the data through yourself! At this point we were taking pictures and transfered them to a big screen, but the potential in this people centered technology is yet to bee seen.

Ericsson’s CEO Hans Vestberg demonstrating the technology at the CES

Lytro

This camera is really something new. Thanks to it’s special lens it takes a picture and lets you decide where to focus afterwards! I recommend playing around on their website to understand what I’m talking about.

Lytro cameras

The venue

Guerrilla exhibitions

The Wired event gave us loads of attention, business cards and a good time in general.  Now we had three days left of the CES, a great product but no booth. What to do? Well why don’t we go down to the central hall and put up a spontaneous little booth in the sun? Said and done, we figured a good place to be at were outside the main entrance. After walking around the immense show floor, elbowing their way through a 140.000 others, people step out in the sunlight and the light breeze and goes aaaaahhh… and then ooooh! Whats that?

The People People booth at the CES – right outside the main entrance

We had some really nice conversations with loads of people. We met with many soon-to-be customers, and some very promising distributors. After about four hours though, the location manager herself came down and made us leave in a very kind way. She said she was surprised security didn’t show up hours ago, but she seemed quite happy about the whole thing and gave us her business card.

We had also made some transparent stickers in time for the trip, which we gave away to fans of our speaker kit. We are very happy to see  the community that is starting to emerge around this thing, and after this we could see transparent stickers popping up in random places around town.

 

The last day at the fair we were hanging out with the speaker in the entrance to the Venetian show floor. Again a great spot to meet people, and before security showed up this time we had secured a meeting with one of the worlds largest suppliers of speaker drivers. This was my first meeting ever with a CEO that ended in hugs! Stay tuned for more info… (Again, in order to stay tuned to the development drop us a line to speaker[a]peoplepeople.se).

People People Speaker at the Venetian

After a long and productive day the speaker bought Martin a beer

These were just some of the spontaneous activities we did with our little speaker buddy during the CES week (it also went to the desert and to a fancy spa but that’s another story…). Two of our favorite reactions we got during this week was: “Wow, you guys are like Banksy!!!” from a fan on the street, and “HOLY SCHMOLEY!!!” from our favorite Stanford Professor Søren Ingomar Petersen. It’s clear that being called out to one of these places in the last second still offered a great return despite (or maybe thanks to) being short on both a booth and a budget.

We have been getting great feedback for our speaker and we are very happy to announce that we will be showcasing a prototype at the 2012 International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. We are part of Wired Magazines 15-favorite-products-show at the cool surrender club at Encore hotel (close to the convention center).

Here is Per packaging the speaker for the January 10-13 2012, Las Vegas trip.

Wired will host a cocktail party on Wednesday where you can meet Per and Martin in person. Please contact Martin if you want to set up a meeting. A great start to 2012!