DanicaNot long after E3 had to ban booth babes, CES is sexing it up with GoDaddy Girls.

Geek conferences love the models. The E3 (Electronics Entertainment Expo) became so infamous for scantily clad women hawking the latest video games the event had to curtail the practice. The ban was in effect for the last E3 and it helped tone down the hold that the event was having over the industry.

The CES 2008 (Consumer Electronics Show) in Las Vegas takes place Jan. 7 -10. It’s where the consumer electronics manufacturers and service providers get together and share their latest gadgets with the press.

GoDaddy is the largest domain registrar in the world and will have a booth at the Las Vegas Convention Center Central Plaza. The girls, including IndyCar driver Danica Patrick and WWE wrestler Candice Michelle, will be on hand to help GoDaddy give away a free domain name to each visitor.

GoDaddy Girl Candice Michelle

Hopefully, this isn’t a sign that CES is heading in the direction of E3. The booth babe ban at E3 was one of several measures taken to help stop the event from being the focal point for the industry. Could happening with CES?

I’m all in favor of booth babes, whether they’re GoDaddy girls or sexy models dressed up like Lara Croft to entice users to look at the stunning graphics in the latest version of Tomb Raider.

But what concerned the industry in the lesson learned by E3 was an escalating number of unmet release dates promised by the manufacturers who hired the eye candy.

Last year’s CES featured a number of next-generation gadgets that probably had no hope of being mass-produced by Q4 as promised by the manufacturers.

Let’s hope we can keep our booth babes and keep the event in check. CES should be driven by the electronics industry, not the other way around.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 3rd, 2008 at 12:10 pm and is filed under Culture. 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.