Great. Now real life can be just like a Flash-packed web page.

Why limit this to just cereal boxes? Imagine giant signs floating through the skies on the sides of airships and such...

That's not science. That's cheap technical chicanery. I wonder if there's any room in those prototype boxes for cereal?

Unless they can get the component and manufacturing costs down to where it won't cost any more than the cheap plastic toys they sometimes put in those boxes, this is a non-starter. Also, bear in mind that as soon as the box gets to the shopping cart, the lights go out. This will be deadly for the product loyalty of 4 year olds.

This smells like one of those startup companies that plans on making their fortune by selling stock in an IPO and then retire to some beach in Bermuda, leaving their stockholders with nothing but worthless paper.

@3, the inclusion of a thin polymer battery would allow the box to keep flashing for an hour or so.

...wait, what am I saying?!

Looks cool when it's one or two boxes. Sounds like a fucking nightmare when the whole store is lighting up like a casino.

What a wonderful waste of resources!! we should use this technology on everything in the grocery stores and watch the old ladies have seizures.

Oooh, maybe they could literally make bell and whistle sounds, too!

i imagine you can't recycle/compost these.

More e-waste for the landfills!! Brilliant!!

The annoying animated cereal box was one of my favorite touches in Minority Report. Kind of terrifying that it's becoming that much closer to reality.

Looks like you all beat me to it. Cardboard and tin cans are recyclable, flashing lights and embedded heating coils are not.

I was reading recently in the New Yorker about the Jevons effect, which postulates that attempts at conservation of resources (energy, in Jevons) increases resource usage, and doesn't decrease it as you would expect. As you save energy, you free it up for new previously-unthought-of uses. Looks like that works in other areas besides energy as well.

What would be really cool -- but not as exciting at CES -- would be someone figuring out how to use recycled cardboard more efficiently. Instead we get twinkling lights.

This reminds me of the moment in Asimov's "Foundation" series when the main character realizes the Empire is doomed: scientists finally perfect anti-gravity, and all people can think to do with it is make cool-looking elevators.

It's bad enough that we have a redundant cardboard box surounding the cereal already sealed in plastic of some sort. American packaging drives me nuts.
Yes, I know the manufacturers say it protects the cereal. And the stores like to line up the boxes all neatlike. Still, much of Europe sells cereal products in bags and doesn't double-package it.

@4 Okay, so the kid manages to get the box home, still flashing. The very next morning...

"Mo-o-o-om! My cereal is broken! I don't want it anymore! Bring it back! I want one that lights up like in the store!"

The kids will have broken hearts. The moms will hate it with a furious passion. The PR hacks will wonder what happened.

@14, clearly we just need to install induction coils in everybody's pantry shelves, kitchen cabinets, dining-room tables, and breakfast bars in order to keep those cereal boxes flashin'. I don't see a problem with this--we've saved so much power already with CFL bulbs, "smart" wall warts and power strips, etc. Your pantry will already know from the embedded RFID chips exactly what cereal you have in stock, and the optical-cantilever beam accelerometers in the bottom of each box will constantly weigh the remaining cereal and have your pantry text you once every five minutes when the level drops below 50%.

I for one welcome our new e-grocery overlords.

I wonder how this will change the maxim that "it's just as healthy to eat the box..."

@15 I know, right!?! And for the love of god can I just get a fucking spectrophotometer in my milk carton already? We can send a man to the moon but I still have to taste/smell my milk to see if it's gone bad like a damn neanderthal!