Porn pushes high tech forward

ONE OF THE paradoxes of writing about technology is that the group that pioneers the highest tech, and the ones that push it into your home are the ones that you can't write about. Think about this, who made VCRs popular? How about the catalyst for DVD uptake? Video over the net? Pioneers in secure internet payments? They all have one thing in common, porn.

Without porn, who would push broadband, or advanced satellite video? The things you know and love all come from places CNet won't cover to save their lives. During CES, there are a bunch of ‘adult' conventions in town, the first of which I attended was the XBiz awards, a ceremony attached to the Internext convention.

It looked like any other awards ceremony, but with a DJ spinning real music, and go-go dancers.

If you were expecting sex drenched debauchery, well, it wasn't there. There were a bunch of content aggregators, affiliate tracking companies, and of course, GFY.

Believe it or not, the technical sophistication level was pretty damn high.

Among the crowd was a company called Electric Shout ( here), a seller of scrolling LED nametags. In a dark room full of go-go dancers, these things were almost enough to make one look away from the porn stars. Almost. These devices clamp to your shirt with magnets, no holes or pins, and only cost about $50 each. You can replace the batteries, and program them on the fly with a remote, or through a computer. Slick little things. The web site that hosted the XBiz awards is here, a news site for tech in the adult industry. Don't worry, the main page is mostly worksafe, and rather tame. The show itself started two hours late, and I had to leave before it began in earnest, so I can't bring you the highlights. They also would not accept my press credentials for the show itself, so no real business coverage of the adult industry this time. There is always next year though.

If you are a webmaster interested in cutting edge e-commerce, security, or related technologies, you might want to skip CES entirely and go to Internext. Aside from being much less stodgy, it is a much safer place to crack the occasional off-colour joke, and you won't get the tech second hand, six months late. µ