This week's event was in the the sumptuous surroundings of the Town Hall Hotel, Bethnal Green. We were greeted with a glass of wine, which was refilled regularly throughout the evening, and treated to a seemingly endless supply of gourmet tasty tit bits from the hotel restaurant.
Top of the range treatment doesn't come cheap, and this week's sponsor was a top of the range company: Western Digital.
As we settled in at the back of the room, it became clear that I was the only male guest : there was a few guys who were clearly from the company (businessmen casual wear - they kind of stuff you'd see down the golf club), the first time that this had happened to me at a GGD.
Western Digital had set up a few pieces of their new kit, and we were guided through them by one of their staff. She had quite a strong French accent, and didn't seem to hold the crowds attention as quite a few of them seemed to be chatting throughout.
Anyway, from what I could gather their new items included:
- An external hard drive that came with software for easy sharing over the internet : so you can look at files on it wherever you are in the world .
- A solution for creating a home ethernet network from your electricity cables ("Livewire").
- A Home Theatre PC system, similar to Apple TV / Google TV / Boxee / etc.
The speaker spent most of her time pushing the TV system (WDTV), which seemed to do the usual streaming your content to the TV kind of thing. Interestingly, this seemed like a new idea to the audience. Or at least it took a long time for someone to ask about similar products. The WD spokes person slapped down Apple TV by saying WDTV was less expensive and supported more formats. She didn't really mention Google TV, and didn't mention Boxee at all (I guess it's only because I read the usual American based Geek blogs that I know about it)?
When someone asked about compatibility with the BBCs iPlayer "We're working on it, Europe is a fragmented market" was the best that WD had to offer. I wonder if anyone at WD has even heard of Youview?
I must admit that I've fancied a PC / TV combo for a couple of years, but the fact is that I'm not a very obedient consumer. I'm very unlikely to replace my fully functioning 15 year old television with the latest set with all newest bells and whistles. I doubt any of the home theatre systems will work with a TV with one scart socket and no HDMI, although I haven't checked so I could be wrong.
I also remember wanting to turn my houses electricity cables into a high speed ethernet network, but that was about 8 years ago and these days I'm perfectly content with my wi-fi. Sure, this wouldn't be any good to stream HD video around a big house, but that's not what I've got.
I think I am likely to get on of there large, external, NAS hard drives. I got Deepa one of the hard discs for her Mac last year, and since then I've lusted after it. I think it would be handy to have all my media files accessible from my desktop or my macbook or a new device that I happen to buy.
At the end of the night my gender finally counted against me, and I was singled out to draw the raffle. Western Digital were generously giving away an external drive, a 'passport' portable drives and a Livewire system. I carefully shuffled the paper in the bowl and picked numbers 3, then 4, and then 11. Luckily 3 & 4 weren't sitting next to each other and although someone did shout out 'fix' I managed to avoid a beating.
Hopefully I won't have to wait another 9 months for a Geek Girl dinner, as they're interesting nights out.
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