I think CBS made a smart move by buying CNET. Yes, if you look at earnings, the price seems too high, at about 18 times earnings. But as CBS Chief Executive Leslie Moonves said, “…there are very few opportunities to acquire a profitable, growing, well-managed internet company like CNET.”

A lot of money gets shelled out for acquisitions that are highly speculative. With CNET, CBS is getting an established brand with one of the longest successful track records on the web. Sure, every company talks about the synergy factor when they make an acquisition, but in the pairing of CBS and CNET there may actually be some.

Where could the synergy come from? Well, CNET’s TV.com has the potential to be a killer property. However, CNET has never really been able to get much going with TV.com, and it has kind of languished as a lightweight TV version of IMDB. But with CBS driving it, TV.com could become a major online television portal.

Then there’s NEWS.COM. CNET has done a good job of making this a major tech news site… CBS could bolster that effort, or perhaps even broaden its franchise. CBS needs help in the news dept., and maybe the cross-pollination between the companies will help CBS learn more about how to do web news right.

With Grand Theft Auto IV raking in a breath-taking $500 million in its first week, there is no doubt that video games are a major pillar of the entertainment industry. CBS doesn’t have much to offer on that front, but CNET can offer up Gamespot.com, one of the top gaming sites.

In addition, CNET has several other properties that have a lot of potential and may be able to benefit from CBS synergy. For example, there’s BNET.com, the business network, the CHOW.com food site, the way underachieving MP3.com, the MySimon shopping engine, and the UrbanBaby.com site for the lucrative “urban parent” market… I can almost feel the tie-ins with the Early Show coming.

And then there is the wealth of internet experience that CNET brings to the table. Many of my old cohorts from the glory days of Ziff-Davis are over at CNET, and they have done a great job on both the editorial and advertising sides of CNET. CBS gets a whole boatload of internet insiders and expertise. I sure hope they value those people and that incoming CBS honcho Quincy Smith don’t make the mistake of thinking he knows more about the web than they do.

CNET has been sort of floundering around without a real leader ever since Shelby Bonnie was pushed out over the stock option backdating mess. For a long time Halsey Minor and Shelby Bonnie were CNET, and without either of them there to drive the company things just weren’t the same. If Quincy Smith can fill the leadership vacuum, he may be able to re-energize CNET and put them back on a track to higher growth and industry leadership.

There’s also a bit of poetic justice in CBS buying CNET. I was one of the very first people to work for CNET. I met CNET’s founders, Halsey Minor and Shelby Bonnie, back in the early 1990’s, and their idea was to create a 24-hour TV network devoted to computers and technology. When I joined CNET the company consisted of Halsey, Shelby and their admin. I guess that would make me employee number 4, except back then there were no actual employees.

Some of the early CNET business meetings were held in the dining room of my old place in the Berkeley hills. When CNET did finally get real office space the place most meetings were held was in an old railroad car that was bolted onto the front of the warehouse space which we dreamed would someday house a TV studio. That old railroad car office was really cool, and the TV studio got built.

I was part of CNET’s pilot TV shows, along with my pals Adam Curry and John Dvorak, who are still collaborating on things like the cool No Agenda podcast. I think the first pilots we shot cost well over a million dollars. We had really great Hollywood-class sets, designed by a brilliant award-winning art director, Fred Sotherland, and we had top-rate TV talent like Adam Curry, Kate Kelly, Richard Hart, Gina Smith, and some unknown named Ryan Seacrest, who hosted a CNET show called The New Edge, which gave Ryan his start as a TV Host. He’s definitely not an unknown anymore, huh?

I was proud to be on CNET’s first show, CNET Central, and helped CNET raise money, rework the company strategy, and maybe most importantly over the long run, got them tapped into hiring people from my old company, Ziff-Davis. ZD wound up being the source of much of CNET’s top talent, both before and after CNET’s purchase of ZD Net.

Although CNET wound up shifting from TV to the web, their TV shows were probably the best tech TV ever done. Halsey Minor made a great hire and brought in Kevin Wendle, an amazing Hollywood wunderkind who created iconic TV shows such as Fresh Prince of Bel Air, and was President of Quincy Jones Entertainment. Kevin was an amazing talent and I felt privileged to be able to have worked with him and learn what real TV production was all about.

CNET got their shows distributed on USA Network and SciFi Channel, but the economics of TV are brutal. CNET had to pay to get the shows carried, and then give up part of their ad revenue as well. By the time you deducted the cost of producing the shows and other overhead, it was almost a wash. Around the same time, Bill Ziff decided to sell Ziff-Davis. That’s when I bailed from ZD.

When we were trying to figure out what to do instead of TV, we came up with the not very original, but very successful idea of just doing what Ziff was doing, but do it on the web instead of in print. This was the early 90’s and Web 1.0 was barely going. I used to explain the idea by saying that we could print just print one copy of the magazine on our server, and everybody would come over to our place to read it. Goodbye printing, shipping, mailing, newsstand, subscriptions… in other words, a lot of the basic expenses of print publishing.

After Ziff sold ZD, it got sold a few more times, and the instability made it easy to hire a bunch of my cronies from Ziff to come and work at CNET. The first ZD transplants were great people like Chris Barr, Lon Otremba, Paul Klein, Ellen Atkinson, and a host of others. Ultimately, the post-Ziff ZD got in over its head financially, and was drowning in debt. The company was forced to sell its online business, ZD Net, and more than just ironically, it wound up getting sold to CNET. That’s when a whole new batch of great talent came over to CNET, including my old buddy, Dan Farber. What a wild ride that was.

So, CNET, I hope your new marriage to CBS turns out to be a good one, and that you get showered with new resources and possibilities. And, hey, CBS… you just bought one of the Tiffany web sites… I hope you show them the respect they deserve and figure out how to learn from them… when it comes to the web, they are the experts, not you.

Imitation is the most sincere form of flattery, huh? Well, the hiPhone is the kind of flattery Apple can do without. The hiPhone is an abysmal knock-off of the iPhone that bears more than a striking resemblance to the original… even the box looks like the iPhone box.

I first found out about the hiPhone when I noticed a posting on Craigslist for “unlocked special iPhones” at a price that was suspiciously low. I definitely got a heavy whiff of scam. I wrote and asked for more info and was sent a pic that at first glance looked like an iPhone… but then I noticed a couple subtle differences.

A bigger tip-off was that the email also said the iPhone had been given several improvements including dual sim card capabilities, video recording, and a built-in FM radio. OK, now maybe someone could hack and unlocking of an iPhone but no-one could hack new features like that.

After a bit of googling, I soon realized that this Craigslist scammer was not selling iPhones at all, he was selling the “hiPhone,” a crappy Chinese knock-off, and trying to pass them off to unsuspecting suckers as real iPhones. I quickly flagged his posting, and flagged it again after it quickly reappeared.

Turns out a bunch of people were burned buying these pieces of junk on both Craigslist and eBay. The current crop of eBay postings I looked at now fess up and let you know this isn’t a real iPhone, but they also try and lay on the BS, saying they are actually better than an iPhone due to the aforementioned features such as dual sims, video, and FM radio.

I tracked down a couple people who had fallen into the hiPhone trap and asked them what they thought about it. Here’s what I found out. Basically, the hiPhone has a plastic screen that scratches easily, the iPhone’s is glass. The screen is smaller, no-where near as clear as the iPhone’s, and the touch screen function works poorly. The user interface looks like the iPhone on the surface, but is horrible once you try and do anything, which is made even harder because the hiPhone is full of bugs. Worst of all, the sound is so bad that you can barely hear calls.

20th century scam: hawking fake Rolexes in Times Square. 21st century scam: selling fake iPhones on Craigslist. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Sprint just reported a staggering $29 billion loss this past quarter. Ouch! Now, even Sprint couldn’t actually lose that much money that quickly – the titanic loss comes from a write-down of its disastrous Nextel unit.

Sprint acquired Nextel for roughly $35 billion back in December 2004, so the $29.7 billion write-off means that Nextel lost 85% of its value in just 3 years. Some analysts are predicting that Sprint will wind up writing off the remaining $5 billion, making the Nextel deal a total wipeout.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, the company is also hemorrhaging customers with over a million post-paid subscribers hanging up on Sprint in the last 6 months. But wait, there’s more… or actually, less: Sprint predicts that they will loose an additional 1.2 million post-paid subscribers during the next three months. Buh-bye!

What villain is to blame for the massive customer exodus? Yup, Nextel. Sprint’s network was based on the prevalent CDMA platform but Nextel was based on the moribund iDEN network. The million customers Sprint lost, and the million-plus that are racing to the exit, are iDEN users who realized that AT&T and Verizon also had “push to talk” features that used to be the sole domain of iDEN. And Nextel’s trailing edge selection of lousy handsets didn’t help either.

Sprint claims that it may be down, but insists that it is far from out. The knight in shining armor that Sprint hopes will rescue it is Xohm, Sprint’s WiMAX initiative. Even though Sprint’s much ballyhooed deal with Clearwire to combine forces on WiMAX fell apart last fall, there are rumors that some sort of deal between the two companies will be resurrected.

Clearwire or no Clearwire, Sprint still claims to be well ahead of the competition in WiMAX, and promises to ship its CDMA/WiMAX phones later this year. Can the mighty Xohm save Sprint from the ravages of Nextel? Or will Sprint be too weak to make it on it’s own, and wind up becoming lunch for an acquisitive telco? Hello, Sprint? This is your future calling… are you there?

Wow! Microsoft just offered $44 billion to gobble up Yahoo! Such a deal! Especially with Yahoo’s stock price trading at about half of what it was a couple years ago. And compared to the $8 billion Microsoft has reportedly spent on developing Vista, it looks like a bargain!

Microsoft has been wanting to snack on Yahoo for a while, and the rumors about this deal have been circulating for longer than Hillary has been running for President. But hey, Microsoft has to spend all that money they’ve been stockpiling on something!

This move is definitely driven by the fact that Microsoft and Yahoo are both loosing their battle against Google. Microsoft has poured billions into its own online efforts, and wound up trailing both Google and Yahoo. Yahoo hasn’t been able to keep up, either.

Yahoo was once king of the Internet, but managed to botch most of the opportunities it had to maintain its lead. For example they paid billions for Mark Cuban’s Broadcast.com years ago when they could have been a leader in online video. But after paying a fortune for Broadcast.com, Yahoo did nothing with it - except maybe screw it up - and let YouTube win that game. Which Google snapped up while Yahoo and Microsoft looked on from the sidelines.

Scoble makes a good point about how Yahoo’s web engineers could help Microsoft do a better job of moving their Office apps to the web, and stave off Google’s online appplication push. Microsoft can’t move too quickly on that front because they don’t want to impact their existing Office sales. But if Google starts making a bigger dent in Office, then it will force Microsoft to try and do a better job of taking Office online.

It looks like this deal has the potential for major corporate culture clash. But they say that nothing unites like a common enemy, so maybe the folks at Yahoo and Microsoft will get along anyway. And it would definitely give Microsoft a bigger presence on both the Internet and in Silicon Valley (assuming they don’t make the stupid mistake of trying to relocate Yahoo’s operations to Redmond).

The deal is far from done, and regulators are already expressing “interest” in the acquisition. If the deal goes through, it could give Microsoft the extra calories it needs to try and beef itself up for its continuing battle with Google. Or, it could lead to massive case of indigestion.

OK, usually blog posts let you peer backwards into time, arranging the posts in reverse chronological order. But rules are made to be broken, right? So, I’m going to reverse the reverse direction of the blog flow.

Got that? Yeah, I know, it sounds like some sort of bad plumbing problem. 

What I mean is that I am going to alter the time stamps of my various CES postings so those will run in chronological order, thus disrupting the natural order of things. At least temporarily… or should that be temporally? Anyway, as a result of this time-shifting, the time stamps on the CES posts will not be accurate. But at least the flow of the postings will be easier to sense.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy my little tour of CES 2008.

It’s off to Lost Wages, Nevada for CES 2008! This is probably my 20th CES, although I’ve kind of lost track. I’ll have more to report once the schmoozing stops long enough to write!

Got into Vegas on Sunday to help set up a booth for Threshold, a start-up I’m working with that has some cool wireless technology making its debut at CES.  

Even though there was a concrete floor, you could feel it shake and wobble whenever a forklift laid another palette of something down.

Took me a while to convince myself it wasn’t an earthquake. Once the booth was up and running, it was off to dinner with the Threshold guys to talk about strategy and fine wine… Threshold has a couple Sonoma county wineries as investors, so wine is always on the menu. Being the rebellious sort, I had a beer.

After dinner I decided to head over to the Podtech Bloghaus at the Bellagio, where my good buddy Robert Scoble was singing his swan song.

Things are always further apart than they seem in Vegas… maybe it’s the desert air, or maybe it’s the massive scale of everything. Walking by Caesar’s Palace seemed to take forever, but I got a few cool shots of the artificial fancy stonework and sculptures.

Talk about gaudy…

 Walking down the Las Vegas strip is an energy conservationist’s nightmare…

… not to mention a grand exhibition of electric bad taste.

Turns out it was 2 miles from where I had dinner to the Bellagio, and then another half mile to wander through the Bellagio to locate the Bloghaus suite. There was a special Bloghaus guard at the elevator, but this time I was actually on the invite list. When I stepped off the elevator I was looking down what appeared to be an endless hallway, and could hear the faint strains of partying wafting down the hall.

When I got to the door I found Robert greeting the guests in typical enthusiastic Scoble fashion, camera in hand.

Pretty soon my old friend Andrew Eisner from Retrevo came by, and we got together with Robert and Rocky (his cameraman/producer) and talked about doing a couple episodes of Retrevo Gang for the Scoble Show.

The Bloghaus was pretty hoppin’… the main room had beanbag chairs, a big sofa, a wide-screen TV, and a full bar.

Another room was set up with a big conference table populated by bloggers who were theoretically uploading stories 24×7… but, hey I peeked at some screens… don’t worry I won’t tell

I wandered down a little hallway in the suite, and found another room set up to do video shoots for the last episodes of the Scoble Show, and some other Podtech stuff. Over in the corner was a really cute gal basking in the glow of a computer monitor… mood lighting for geeks!

Hi! I’m Fred! Turns out the geek goddess was Chloe, who has a very funny satirical blog. After showing me her website, Chloe hammed it up with some pals on the Scoble Show set.

It was late, and I knew this was just the start of several long days, so I bid my farewells, and headed back to my hotel. It was now about 2am, and when I got back down to the lobby of the Bellagio, I got another reminder of how everything in Vegas is done on a grand scale… they were taking down the xmas tree… with a crane.

On Monday morning the show officially opened. Threshold’s booth was ready. People came charging in. The game was afoot. This was something like my 20th CES, so I knew what to expect: 140,000 people tromping down miles of aisles, almost 3,000 exhibitors trying to schmooze a stampede of potential opportunity.

Down on the show floor, my pal Scoble was scrambling around with Rocky trying to set a new record for the number of interviews done in a single CES show.

After the show, I headed over to the Wynn to crash the Showstoppers event. At the Wynn they were busy trying to cram as many lights into a single building as humanly possible.

Once I got into Showstoppers I met the glamorous Sarah Meyers, infamous party-crasher and blogger. Sarah was being interviewed by my buddy Tom Foremski.

After the interview, Sarah give a big grin to another one of my friends, PR maven Renee Blodgett. And Renee is a well-known blogger, too, just like Tom. But I gotta say, the three of them sure do have VERY different blogs!

 Tom turned the camera on me. He was zooming around shooting everyone… there he goes again!

Then I ran into the effervescent Robin Raskin, who I just loved working with at PC Magazine and Family Computing. Robin is a fabulous writer and editor who has carved out a great niche in becoming a thought-leader in the area of kinds, family, and technology.

Robin introduced me to Dan Tynan, an award-winning writer for PC World, Family Circle, US Airways Magazine, and others. He seemed like a really nice guy.

There was a bunch of crazy stuff being demoed at Showstoppers, like the sci-fi-esque bicycle…

… and the F*ck Voicemail girls…

Back when I was a punk kid computer journalist, the whole field of computer journalists only had a few dozen people. One of them was Larry Magid, who has extended his writing with a gig doing computer news for CBS TV. I’ve known Larry forever. Larry is one of the guys that KPIX (the Bay Area CBS affiliate) grabs a soundbyte from every time there is tech news. Larry had a CBS news video booth set up at Showstoppers where he was competing in the great CES interview race (he doesn’t have a chance against Scoble!).

After Showstoppers I got a ride over to the Bloghaus to from Andrew Eisner of Retrevo, formerly of PC World, ZD Labs, and MacUser. I gave Andrew his start in this crazy biz when I hired him to run the product testing labs way back when I was Editor of MacUser.

Andrew and I were going to do an episode of Scoble Show about the latest crop of gadgets being introduced at CES. Before we left the Wynn, Andrew had to stop in their lavish Men’s room to wash off the last residual bits of Showstoppers.

As we were walking into the Bellagio, we ran into some more people headed to the Bloghaus, and one of them (a woman, I’m sure of that!) asked me to take a picture of Chihuly’s giant glass flower installation splayed across the ceiling of the Bellagio lobby. So, here it is… whoever you are.

If you want to see the Scoble Show episode that we taped that night, click on the pic below…

OK, I stumbled under the shower and braced myself for another day of relentless schmoozing.

Next to the Threshold booth, Norton/Symantec had a noisy and glitzy game show going on that they called “Cyber Smackdown.” It was hosted by Miss America, Lauren Nelson, and Nathan Lazarus, one of the kids from Fox’s TV show “Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?”

I had been schmoozing a lot of geeks already, so I figured I’d try schmoozing Miss America while she was taking a break from her Norton duties…

After the show I headed over to a party at the Atomic Testing Museum where I ran into the blogosphere’s glamour girl, Sarah Meyers.

Just like last night at Showstoppers, she was hanging out with Tom Foremski. I think Tom must have been hoping for a really in-depth interview…

As if the Atomic Testing Museum wasn’t creepy enough, the Chola from Ask a Chola posed for this weirdo group shot…

After that it was back to the Bellagio for another round of free drinks at the Bloghaus. The blogging room had a bunch of people who at least looked like they were blogging…

I saw Chloe down at the end of the table looking very interested in whatever was on that guy’s laptop… a blog in progress, theoretically…

That night the Bloghaus had been invaded by a gaggle of girl gamers who call themselves the Frag Dolls.

They were there to prove that no guy at CES could beat them at playing video games. Chris Tolles of Topix was there to help prove them right.

Then I got the chance to be on another episode of Scoble show interviewing Rhoulette, the red-headed Frag Doll.

If you want to see the video of Robert, Rhoulette, and me, click the pic below…

I had a blast with Robert and Rhoulette (her real name is Morgan Romine, and she’s not just a great gamer, but also a brainiac who’s getting her Ph.D. in Anthropology at UCSD… so much for video games rotting your brain).

Next, I headed out into the lounge area of the Bloghaus, and, surprise, surprise, there was Sarah Meyers again! Did she change between the Atomic Testing Museum and here?

Sarah was talking up Dan Farber of CNET, while Renee Blodgett looked on…

Flashback Dept.: Way back when I was editor of MacUser, Dan was one of the top editors at MacWorld. I was always trying to hire him, and I remember getting a whole load of crap from my boss once for inviting someone from “the competition” to a MacUser party at MacWorld Expo. Sheesh! What are parties for, ferchissake?!

I looked back over at the gaming area to see if Eric was still engaged in his futile video game battle with one of the Frag Dolls…

But no, he had taken his deafeat with moderate grace, and was headed over to the bar to (game)console himself. No-one else was brave enough to challenge them, so the Frag Dolls wound up just playing with each other. But hey, it was fun to watch!

BTW, I took all these pictures at CES with a diminutive pocket camera, the Nikon Coolpix P5100. Great little camera, and it was a lot easier to lug around all day and night than my comparatively hefty digital SLR, which was sitting at home resting in its camera bag. But that didn’t stop a lot of people from lugging theirs around… here’s Renee trying to get that special shot…

After clicking off a bunch of shots, Renee checked out the latest pix from her geek photo safari…

BTW, that big green thing in the right of the frame above is Scoble.

 Renee was pretty happy with one of the shots, and showed it to Jeff Sandquist from Microsoft. Hey, no booing! Jeff is one of the good guys at Microsoft… he runs Channels , 9, 10 , Mix Online and TechNet Edge.

Next up with a digital SLR was Valerie Cunningham of PodTech… got this cool shot of the camera swinging in front of Valerie…

Then Valerie and Renee starting shooting in tandem…

Now it was Valerie’s turn to check her pictures…

Yikes… I remember when you had to wait for them to come back from the lab before you could see them… I’m getting old!

I headed over to the bar for another drink and ran into Marjorie Kase, the head of Blogger Reps, who was a fellow pocket camera carrier. She had a cute pink model that pretty much matched the flush of her cheeks…

And, hey, down at the end of the bar… that’s Samantha Murphy with a big smile!

She didn’t bring her guitar, so we didn’t get to hear her latest songs. But, she did bring her pocket camera…

Samantha is buddies with Scoble…

It looked like Robert was not buying Samantha’s excuse for not bringing her guitar…

But, a round of those those fruity drinks that Robert was pushing on everyone, and it was all smiles again…

Samantha’s sidekick, Brian DeWitt, had CES badges hanging all over him… he must have been having an identity crisis…

Sarah Myers was still there, this time she was talking up Michael Pilla from Indieflix.

I headed back over to the bar, and grabbed a drink with Valerie Cunningham and Tom Foremski.

Valerie was doing a great job as the Bloghaus party girl… here she is flanked by Chris Tolles and Phil Wolff…

By then it was getting pretty late, and we closed out the party with the giggling PodTech girls…

Warning! CES overload! By Wednesday I was starting to feel a bit worn down.

Also, I neglected to charge the battery on my camera, so I didn’t get to take many photos. Although I love the Coolpix P5100, it’s the first camera I ever had that didn’t take AA batteries. That used to be a prerequisite for me to consider a camera, since AA’s are ubiquitous. But lately, the plague of proprietary batteries is in full swing, and a lot of gear requires its own idiosyncratic battery that costs a fortune if you get it from the manufacturer. Luckily, cheap alternative clone batteries are being pumped out of China faster than kid’s toys, and there is a plentiful supply available on eBay for a small fraction of the cost of the OEM branded batteries.

Anyway, the only pic I got before my battery died was a shot of Peter Semmelhack, CEO of Bug Labs, giving me a sly look after winning the CNET “Best of CES” award for their cool hackable hardware platform.

After the show, I headed back over to the Bloghaus, where I co-hosted the last two Scoble Shows that Robert did for Podtech.

The first one featured Robert’s first girlfriend, Vanessa Fiske, who is a marketing manager at Plantronics. Robert didn’t know she was going to show up, and he hadn’t seen her for over 20 years! To see the episode click on the pic below.

After Robert got to reminisce about his high-school days, we taped the last episode of the Scoble Show, which was part 2 of the Retrevo Gang with Andrew Eisner. Click below to watch it.

After we finsihed the taping, Robert and Rocky packed it in, enjoyed the last few hours of the Bloghaus, and got ready for their new gig starting up Fast Company TV.