Foster City's Slingbox Tantalizes Techies at Trade Show

Fort Mason’s century old Festival Pavilion was the perfect setting for Engadget’s inaugural Expand show in San Francisco last month. The old building with its steel bones showed off 21st century drones, electric cars, and the latest in electronic gadgets that literally made participants say ”wow!” out loud.

Some of the products are already on the market, while plenty of entrepreneurs wandered the show floor making new contacts and getting advice about crowd sourcing.

Foster City Company

Amongst the companies displaying products was Foster City’s Sling Media. The Slingbox allows you to seamlessly move media between your home TV or DVR and your smartphone or tablet. So, whether you’re watching a show from your TV or DVR while commuting or sending photos from your smartphone to your Slingbox so that you can view them on TV, everything is controlled from an app.

Monica Nakamine, Marketing Communications Specialist for Sling, sees Engadget Expand as a valuable opportunity to reach a sophisticated audience, “We want to build awareness to people who’ve heard of us but are not really sure what we do,” she said. “New models launched in October and we want to make sure that people know about all of our latest features.”

The Slingbox is available at Best Buy, Amazon, Fry’s and the company website.

Sling Media currently has several job openings, from engineering to management. The company is also accepting applications for internships.

Engadget Expand

Engadget is an online magazine focused on happenings in the world of technology, gadgets and consumer electronics. Engadget Expand featured speakers, cool tech stuff and a competition, Insert Coin, for $20,000 in startup funds for new ideas.

Several companies displaying their products were focused on reducing energy consumption—Nest of Palo Alto, and Insert Coin challengers Radiator Labs and Observos.

Another amazing product was Ziphius, an aquatic drone controlled by smartphone or tablet. This invention won the Insert Coin competition, snagging the $20,000 prize, plus another $5,000 for being the fan favorite. Ziphius’ inventors came all the way from Portugal to show their product. Other long-distance commuters included Scubo 3D from Spain and an entry from Manitoba.

ZSpace of Sunnyvale bowled-over attendees with its revolutionary 3-D product that allows you to pick-up and manipulate objects, via a stylus, on a computer screen. Whether a patient’s own heart, a product design, a mutated gene or architectural plans, the uses for this product are astounding. To make it even cooler, it has a “camera” that you can fly through the objects, seeing them from the inside.

Engadget Expand’s sponsors all had extensive displays of their latest products, including Lenovo , Outlook and Toyota .

Editor’s Note: Engadget and Patch are both owned by AOL.