A Word of Caution on CES "Awards"

I was trolling the web today, as is my wont, and stumbled upon a product announcement on Gizmodo for a cool-looking Philips cordless phone. The writeup begins, "We know, cordless phones don't grace our pages very often, but the Philips DECT phone/answering machine won a Best of Innovations award for CES 2007."

That's weird, because CES is a full two months away. How did this phone win an award for a show that isn't happening until after Christmas? Here's how it works.

The CES Innovations Awards Honorees are generated by the members themselves. Basically, you fill out a form describing your product, attach some pictures, and of course, don't forget your check (up to $950, depending on if you're a member of CEA and whether you purchased booth space at the show). Next, an expert "three-member judging team" evaluates each entry and selects the honorees. (Those were announced today, and hey, I agree with Gizmodo that some of this stuff really looks cool, like that Philips cordless phone. Just look at it!) In case you missed it: The judges don't actually evaluate any physical products. They evaluate a form and a photograph.

Now I understand that it's not always possible to get your hands on products for "awards" like this, but I also question their validity to some extent. Here's why I'm on the skeptical side: These guys somehow earned a CES Innovations awards in 2005. The "Atom Chip" laptop allegedly featured several terabytes of "quantum RAM" and a 6.8GHz "quantum CPU." None of that stuff actually exists, and you didn't have to be a pro to figure out this is bogus. One would especially expect CES's panel of experts to know the difference between reality and utter B.S. (I'll also note that all mention of Atom Chip's big win has been carefully scrubbed from CES's website, but here's the company's exhibitor record from last year's show. As an aside, I actually went looking for booth 36604 myself, which appeared not to exist at all.) I mean, if a completely made-up product can win an award, you have to wonder...

This is all a long way of saying this: You're going to start seeing a lot of coverage for products being shown at CES over the next two months. It's the biggest trade show of its kind in America, and it's "make or break" time for hundreds of products. The manufacturers will do anything to get positive coverage of those products. Paying a few hundred bucks to try to win an award is chump change. So use your judgment when you read advance press about a product that no one has actually seen in real life. Early coverage is one thing (and I'm sure we'll have our share of it here). "Awards" are something else altogether.