| CES: No, no, no, Gizmodo |
| Written by Luck Kanthatham | |||
| Friday, 11 January 2008 | |||
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Yesterday at CES, the Gizmodo boys pulled out one of the meanest pranks I've seen in a long time: they went around shutting off TVs with their TV B-Gone . They did this at one of Motorola press conferences, then at the Seagate booth, and on and on and on, wreaking havoc everywhere they went. In the video they posted on their site, you could see a barrage of upset booth represtatives trying to figure what went wrong with their TV sets. Rafe Needleman of news.com wrote on his post about the incident that he would not be surprised ifthe Gizmodo crew would be banned from CES next year and that they would probably be sued by the people that they played their prank on. Though I think that some companies will probably sue them for this, I don't think banning them would be the right move. No good things are going to come out of banning anybody. Though I do NOT agree with what Gizmodo crew did, I was surprised that it took this long for somebody to pull out a prank like this. Anyone of the hundreds of thousands of showgoers could be carrying this little prank device and use it at any time. And it would be impossible to track down the source. At least the Gizmodo guys admitted to it. The solution for this is for the CES people to be smarter about it. Though it is impossible to check every attendee for a TV B-Gone device, they should find some other ways to prevent this type of thing from happen again (ie. cover the IR port on the TVs, etc.) I can already see the warning in my next year CES invitation about not bringing a TV B-Gone to the show. Everybody loses if CES bans the Gizmodo staff from showing up at the show again. Next, they'll start banning all the bloggers too. And then what? It's bad for CES and bad for bloggers like us. I'm sure the boys are sorry for what they did. The only people benefitting from this prank? The TV B-Gone people. After this kind of publicity, I'm sure they are selling the prank device like hot cakes. [Update] What do you know, the Giz staffer who did the stunt has been identified and officially banned from future CES. Read it here.
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Comments (2)
John Q. Public
said:
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CES product announcements were big news but, apparently, not as big as this news. Actually, it was kind of a sad news, at least to me.
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>>Though I do NOT agree with what Gizmodo crew did, I was surprised that it took this long for somebody to pull out a prank like this. Baloney! The reason it never happened before is because children were never allowed at the event...until Gizmodo got invited, that is. Am I the only one who finds it a bit hypocritical that the Goo Goo Ga Ga Gizmodo pre-school prankers had such fun with a device that the ripped to shreds in a review? http://gizmodo.com/archives/tvbgone-023694.php |
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