Technology takes a back seat to politics, media, and commerce at CodeCon

Andy Rubin, founder and CEO of Playground Global, a hardware incubator located behind Fry's Electronics in Palo Alto, Calif., showed off a neat Android phone built by his new company, Essential. Also, Bryan Johnson gave a Spotlight talk in which he tried to convince those of us in the audience to let his company, Kernel, put a chip in our brains. But there were no other new product announcements or in-depth discussions of enabling technologies in the pipeline.