CES Highlights

Happy New Year, and the first week of January means it is the Consumer Electronics Show (CES). Some people hate it, but I like the way that you get a look at what consumers are going to have on their shopping list...or not...without anyone curating what you see. So what are my takeaways this year?

Voice

Voice-activated stuff is everywhere. Amazon's Alexa (that I wrote about last week) is everywhere, in cars, in smartphones, in appliances. Microsoft's Cortana is in a different set of cars and appliances. Google is there, too. Most manufacturers of products are not going to be able to create their own voice user interface. One reason is simply the cost, but a more significant challenge is having enough data to train the interface in lots of languages, which requires a large installed base to get started.

Apple doesn't attend CES, but usually it is there in spirit as other companies try to emulate some of its success. But Siri, Apple's voice technology, didn't seem to be there, it was Amazon, Microsoft, and Google who seemed to be inside everything. Technology is going to be showing up in lots of places like cars, manufactured by non-technology companies. I'm not sure that voice is a race that will have just one winner, but Amazon seems to be in the lead right now.

Autonomous stuff

Anything that moves is going to become autonomous. The most visible area, of course, is the self-driving car, but drones are perhaps more advanced. After all, drones that you need to control remotely are really only more advanced versions of radio-controlled airplanes, fun as toys and for hobbyists but not that useful in the real world. I will do a separate post on autonomous vehicles since there was a lot on show. One of the keynotes was by Steve Mollenkopf, the CEO of Qualcomm. Of course he talked a lot about 5G and mobile, but with the acquisition of NXP (with Freescale inside), they will be far and away the biggest semiconductor supplier in automotive.

A couple of weeks ago, I heard an interesting podcast from a16z  about Zipline. This is a company that delivers drugs using drones in Rwanda. If you think about it, this is an almost perfect confluence of conditions. Drugs are light. Drugs are expensive. Roads are poor in countries like Rwanda. It is actually the opposite of the burrito delivery by drone that gets press coverage since burritos are cheap and heavy and so not actually a good target for drone delivery. Like the internet-enabled toaster, it exists more in the imagination than reality. But Zipline delivers drugs all over Rwanda using drones. Interestingly, it would be illegal for them to do that in the US since the regulatory environment is too restrictive.

 Virtual Reality

One interesting thing about CES was the way that different sections of the floor were carved up. One was "Gaming and Virtual Reality" and a second area was "Augmented Reality". I thought that was an interesting split. I remain a bit unconvinced about virtual reality being the next big thing. I've worn the goggles and tried various demos, but they all seem like a solution looking for a problem. The promise is for a completely immersive experience, but outside of a video game, I'm not sure that's what people want. If you are watching a baseball game with your friends, you want to be able to see and talk to them too, not just be completely immersed in the game with your VR goggles. But lots of smarter people than me "get" VR and I don't.

The other aspect of VR is the all-round cameras that are needed to provide the content for that immersive experience. One of the strangest sights at CES were the people walking slowly with the cameras on top of their heads.

TV

CES is always a big show for the next generation of TVs, or what the manufacturers hope will be the next generation. There were lots of 4K TVs and lots of 8K TVs. You have to see an 8K TV up close to see what it's all about, basically you can't see pixels no matter how close you look.

As the screens get bigger physically, there are two trends. One is that the TVs are getting thinnner, since most of the screen is simply OLED flat panel and all the electronics fits in a small bit at the bottom. The other trend is for curved screens. They may or may not become popular. CES is notorious for having lots of products that turn out not to catch on, like all those 3D TVs a couple of years ago.

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