The 2007 International CES held last week in Las Vegas, Nevada, is the world’s largest technology trade show. It’s a fantasy land for techies with 1.8 million net square feet of exhibit space and over 140,000 attendees from across the globe experiencing the latest consumer technology products from 2,700 exhibitors. It’s so big that a person walking the full 65 miles of carpet laid on the show floor would burn 6,500 calories.

CES buzzed with more than 20,000 product launches and major partnership announcements, spanning across industries and connecting consumers with more features, services and control of the content incorporated into electronic devices. A new convergence of consumer electronic devices emerged on the show floor, combining existing product categories with new digital content and services to create unique, multifunctional products.

There were some excellent keynote speakers who put on well rehearsed performances that were more like Broadway productions than the boring PowerPoint presentations commonly slept through at most trade shows. In a couple of those keynotes, the speakers actually remembered that there is a developing world outside the United States with emerging markets that might be interested in their new technologies.

As with almost anything in this world, the positives of CES were too often brought down by the negatives. The service industry in Las Vegas is out to fleece the CES attendees of every penny in their pockets. For example, at the Venetian Hotel where we stayed, the hundreds of dollars paid for a room covered exactly that — the room. Neither the hotel’s fitness center, a water boiler nor local telephone calls were included in the reservation fee. Even that which was created by God, cost extra. The view out the room’s window was of a gray concrete wall. Guests had to pay more to get a room with any other view.

In Las Vegas, prices for necessities such as food, transportation and connectivity were scary and everyone wanted gratuities. The taxi lines were long — although not as bad as those at GITEX in Dubai. There was a free shuttle service to go between the various show venues but that required standing in line as well. Too many of the hostesses working the CES stands were just pretty faces with nothing of interest between their ears. Often, they didn’t know anything about the products and frequently the only information they could offer was a company’s URL.

All of the negatives mentioned above are nearly standard for any major trade show, but there was one really ugly aspect of CES. On the last two days of the Computer Electronics Show, the 2007 AVN Adult Entertainment Expo (AEE) opened at the Sands Expo Center, one of the CES venues. AEE is the largest event for the adult industry worldwide. The organizers of CES and AEE are not associated with each other in any way. However, the AEE organizers are aware that the majority of visitors to CES are men, and there are hundreds of thousands of attendees and exhibitors in town for CES. AEE wants to leverage off those numbers and the result is a very negative experience for women at CES.

Many men attend both shows and it is not unusual to see attendees walking through CES browsing material picked up at AEE. Tasteless advertisements are all over town. Professionals from AEE do not hesitate to fully expose their physical attributes, anywhere, at anytime. Even in the CES press room, male journalists could be seen viewing some of the explicit materials they had collected from AEE. In most other business settings that would have been grounds for dismissal.

It must be acknowledged that the adult entertainment industry has been a major driver of many technological innovations which are now used by mainstream consumers. Video over the Internet and viewing moving images on mobile phones are just two of the technologies that owe their rise to the demand for new distribution channels for adult content.

That said, whether to view adult materials or not, is supposed to be a matter of choice and last week in Las Vegas I was given no choice, except to leave CES early. And so I did.