Small Companies Pursue Big Break at Tech Conference

LAS VEGAS — The 2,700 technology companies selling their wares at the Consumer Electronics Show here come in all shapes and sizes. At one end of the spectrum are the likes of Microsoft, Samsung and Sony, with their gargantuan booths on the show floor, where they ply potential business partners and journalists with drinks, food and private meetings with executives.

At the other end is Scott Starrett.

Mr. Starrett, 39, is here with the three other employees of Cervantes Mobile, a company he started last year. It makes one product — called Jorno, a foldable keyboard for handheld devices — which does not, by the strictest definition of the word, exist.

The company is financed with capital from Mr. Starrett’s family and friends and his personal bank account. And though he seems a bit frazzled in his 10-foot-by-10-foot booth set against the northernmost wall of the Las Vegas Convention Center, he insists that he mainly feels optimistic.

His brand of cheerfulness is easy to find here. Dozens of dreamers, serial entrepreneurs, husband-and-wife teams, copycats and garage-based inventors occupy the tiniest booths in the farthest reaches of the convention hall. For them, the electronics show is an opportunity to meet with distributors and potential business partners and maybe to ride a wave of publicity generated by the show into the public eye.

Usually, it is also a costly undertaking, a calculated gamble that the thousands of dollars it costs to travel to Las Vegas and rent a booth will pay off in the form of signed deals or at least greater momentum. But in a show that sprawls over 1.6 million square feet across three exhibition halls, it is not easy to gain a foothold.

“You’re just placing bets, essentially,” said Mr. Starrett, who paid $4,800 for his booth and several thousand dollars for expenses for the trip here from Los Angeles.

It is a long shot that can pay off, said Jake Sigal, a 29-year-old entrepreneur who first attended the convention in 2008. He did not have a booth then. Instead, he talked companies that he wanted to work with into meeting with him at a Starbucks in the convention center. Most doubted he would succeed; some, he said, admired his pluck and offered him a job.

And he did persuade Pandora, the Internet music service, to allow him to build an Internet radio that plays stations from the service. He bought booth space the next year, and was able to reach a similar deal with NPR after one of its employees happened to walk by his booth.

“I guarantee that if I would have called NPR in the middle of July, they would have said no,” said Mr. Sigal, who is from Columbus, Ohio.

Livio Radio, Mr. Sigal’s company, has begun to manufacture car stereos as well. On Friday, the company announced a third partnership, with Grooveshark, another Internet music service.

The Consumer Electronics Association, the trade organization that organizes C.E.S., tries to encourage small businesses. It hosts competitions for companies with innovative products, offering free or discounted booth space to the winners. At the show itself, it hosts events to showcase small businesses and holds mentoring programs.

Aaron LeMieux, who is 36 and from Cleveland, won discounted space at this year’s show after giving a three-minute pitch for the nPower Peg, a sticklike object that harnesses kinetic energy, the type of energy created when an object is put in motion, like when a user walks around with it in a backpack. He believes that similar technology will eventually be used to power pacemakers and to capture the energy of ocean waves.

But for now, it is working with cellphones. The device creates enough energy in 15 minutes of walking to allow for a minute of talk time on a typical cellphone, Mr. Lemieux said.

He first came up with the idea when hiking the Appalachian Trail in 1996.

“I knew I had an excess of kinetic energy, yet I was stopping into town to buy batteries,” he said. “Fifteen hundred miles gave me a lot of time to think, and I figured out a way to convert kinetic energy into electric energy. It took 10 years.”

Mr. Starrett’s trip from concept to execution is shaping up to be considerably quicker. He first had the idea for a folding keyboard last year, and he decided he was far enough along to commit to coming to the convention in late spring.

Despite his best efforts, however, production could not quite keep pace with his enthusiasm. The Cervantes team arrived in Las Vegas with two model keyboards, rather than a working prototype. One was locked in the closed position; the other was fixed in the open position. Hinges, it turned out, are tricky.

Mr. Starrett acknowledged the awkwardness of peddling a foldable keyboard that cannot actually fold. But he said he took heart in knowing that every year some of the products drawing all the attention to the larger booths are not fully functional either, noting Microsoft’s false start on tablet computers last year, or the recent delays with Google TV.

“As an entrepreneur, it’s nice to know you can stumble,” he said. “I just don’t want to stumble too often.”