By Jim Barry, CEA’s Digital Answer Man

Greetings from Detroit. This is the 28^th city on this year’s Digital Answer Man Media Tour, the second stop after Minneapolis earlier in the week.  I’ve been able to squeeze two TV appearances and two radio segments in between the raindrops today, despite the city’s raucous celebrating of the Red Wings’ Stanley Cup championship. Other than that, it’s a pretty typical tour week with early morning radio and TV live spots interspersed with taped segments to be aired later and wide-ranging interviews with newspaper tech and business reporters.

I’m highlighting electronic products for “Dad’s and Grads” this month, and I can relate  personally since I just purchased a new wireless phone and iTouch for my own two graduates  — Moira Rose from High School and Fiona from Middle School. Lately the tour has become a “cool gadget” tour combined with a “DTV transition” tour as interest builds towards the February ’09 analog broadcast TV cutoff. In that light I’ve been showing converter boxes and the $40 government coupons provided to ease the transition.

In radio call-in segments I get peppered with questions about the DTV transition. It’s the top topic (on one station in Cincinnati a few weeks back the host had to ask, “Are there any questions not about Digital television conversion”.) Along with various others about digital and HDTV, plasma and LCD, I suppose questions about PDAs, mobile phones – especially the iPhone – and phone related topics are next and well see another spike in this line of questioning with the 3G iPhone due.

We’ve been talking a lot about hot gift categories lately, including GPS, Digital Picture frames, digital cameras and camcorders and digital music players, and I’ve brought along a complement of products to demo on TV and discuss with radio hosts and print journalists.  These days I’m carrying a Cobra, Tom Tom and Deluo GPS, Panasonic HD camcorder, Digital Foci and Kodak digital picture frames,

Accessories also play a big role in the tour and of course as gift items. IPod accessories especially portable speakers like the Ladybug from Vestalife, and Video iWear from Vuzix have been real favorites..  I’ve also been showing a Sony digital Walkman and Samsung among other MP3 players to illustrate the alternatives for folks who are looking for something other than an iPod.

Home tomorrow, then next week off to Texas – Houston, San Antonio and Dallas/Ft. Worth to finish up the “Dads & Grads” tour.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, June 12th, 2008 at 10:32 am and is filed under CE Accessories, DTV, Digital Answer Man, Digital Images, In Vehicle CE, Wireless Communications. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.