CNN Hologram: “Cheesy Tech” That Added No Value

While I’m a huge fan of taking technology risks, trying stuff out and moving forward on cutting edge innovation, sometimes it’s so obvious that something adds no value, is done just for eye candy effect, and is laughingly cheesy that it has to be called out (and I’ll wager Saturday Night Live will be bring us a skit on this just like they did with this one about the giant touch screen maps, another eye candy technology that’s actually pretty useful for “what if’s” and other analysis on the fly).

CNN’s bringing in Jessica Yellin via hologram is last night’s best “cheesy tech” example and is the antithesis of applying technology in a useful manner. When a TV screen cutaway is perfectly acceptable — and when some hologram thingy is so new and useless that it makes whatever is coming out of the person’s mouth irrelevant — that’s a no value addition.

Here’s a brief snippet with Ms. Yellin describing the (clearly expensive) 35 HiDef cameras that had to be used to deliver her holographic presence: