Principal
Consultant, Collaboration / Multimedia / Video / AV
Dimension Data
Director of
Emerging Technology
Interactive
Multimedia & Collaborative Communications Alliance
eMail:
David.Danto@DimensionData.com Follow Industry
News: @NJDavidD
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The 2014 International CES
This
is the microsite I used for end of day notes from the 2014 International CES
(formerly known as the Consumer Electronics Show.) Those original notes are below. My complete 2014 CES review is now complete
and posted here. I’ve left the notes page here for historical accuracy.
Notes from the 2014 International CES
.) Most of the information below will be from
tweets I send earlier in the day. If my
comments are interesting or helpful to you feel free to follow me (twitter.com/NJDavidD) to get them in
real-time.
Even
before I left for Las Vegas, CES hot topics were clearly emerging in the buzz
hitting my email accounts:
·
Ultra
HD Television Displays (UHD-TV) was big news.
Not only the large, bright, 4K and in some cases curved displays, but in
the fight to get native 4K content to them.
Broadcasters and Cable MSOs will not win that race. 4K content will first be delivered by the
web. See the announcement
from Google’s You Tube pushing their VP9 codec (instead of H.264 / H.265.) There will also be a number of other
“Set-Top-Boxes” showing native 4K content delivery over the internet. As for the displays themselves they will be
bigger, brighter and with more “Smart-TV” features.
·
I’m
hearing that new video robotics company Revolve
will be reenacting the videoconference
scene from the 1990’s
movie Demolition Man with their new KUBI pan/tilt device for generic
tablets. That will be an interesting
thing to see.
·
My
email box and Twitter account is flooded with notes that Audi and other car
manufacturers will be showing “ground-breaking innovations” this year. For an industry who’s
biggest recent innovation has been as a bluetooth device for your smartphone
I’m frankly not expecting much. In order
to meet the level of importance of the hype the cars would have to fly and
simultaneously give pedicures. In
reality all I’m expecting is the beginning of the “early adopters” stage of
self-driving car features and vehicles
with more sustainable technology.
·
There
will be much discussion about the “internet
of everything” or “Internet of things,” with many exhibitors showing
systems and devices that are aware of their surroundings and able to analyze
them (with full access to all the information on the net) and act on that
information without user intervention.
Cisco CEO John Chambers will be giving a keynote presentation that
discusses this, and many exhibitors will be showing early stage products that
fit this category – like thermostats that gauge the weather and cars that drive
and/or park themselves.
Beyond
the major themes, as always, I’ll be looking for the news that doesn’t get a
lot of coverage. This includes promising
new products such as crystal-clear music speakers made from acrylic panes; some
brand-new interactive whiteboards that may finally be more intuitive to use,
and who knows what else. This of course
will be in addition to mountains of bluetooth speakers, newfangled headphones,
smartphone cases, and things that beep or light-up in the night.
Look
for the next update to this page Sunday night…
Pre-Show
Day One:
Sunday
is the first pre-show day for CES. My
first stop of the morning was a visit with the team from Plantronics. They showed me some exciting prototype
devices they expect to be launching a bit later this year, and they gave me a
demonstration of their “Wearable Concept 1” headset. This device has remarkable sensors that can
track a person’s head movements so that data can be ported into mapping and
virtual software. There is a formal
video of it in action here. But I
prefer my crude iPhone version here. One of the most interesting things it can
detect is if the person has fallen down and/or stopped moving. That immediately made me think of the possibilities
of the first “On-Star” for people instead of cars.
With
their headset development, music systems and gaming accessories expect a lot
more from Plantronics this year and going forward.
After
a quick bite for lunch ($22 for two hot dogs and a bottle of water – way to go
on those up-charges Mandalay Bay) I settled in to listen to CES’ analysts
describe the state of consumer technology.
First
CEA’s Shawn DuBravac gave those gathered his view of the key trends in
technology – they can all be found in the in his presentation here,
but at a high level he the key trends for him are:
·
Mass
Customization - how we can all get
“customized” products from mass-production systems
·
Multidimensional
Screen Expansion - not just bigger but
more choices in size, color, form factor and use cases
·
Age
of Autonomy - with devices and their internal sensors evolving to act
independently on the data they collect
·
Curation
& Context – the convergence of services and systems
One
interesting point that he made during a discussion about security was that our
rich technology life has virtually thrown us back in time to the level of
privacy that existed hundreds of years ago.
People lived in small towns and villages and everybody knew everything
about their neighbors. Now, with our
reliance on the net, and the clear accessibility of all our data we are
returning to a society where we will have no secrets from our neighbors (and
our governments.)
The
next speaker was CEA’s Steve Koenig who presented some very interesting numbers
about global consumption of technology.
Amongst the data points he highlighted were:
·
The
global market for technology sales is likely to shrink by 1% in 2014.
·
Half
of expected 2014 spending will be from “emerging markets,” up from 40% in 2010
·
Tablets
and smartphones alone account for 43% of global technology spending
Steve’s
entire presentation can be found here.
With
the analysis completed everyone gathered moved on to the CES Unveiled event –
the Opening press party and showcase.
I’ll spend more time over the course of the next few days sharing
pictures and descriptions of the items that were on display there – I want to
wait till I get the opportunity to see in everything in less of a madhouse
environment, but I will say I’m especially eager to hear the new clear plexi
speakers from http://www.clearviewaudio.com/
and trying out Invoxia’s new NVX-220 - even smaller
BYOD based IP Phone.
I’ll
have more to report at the end of Monday, when most of the major press
conferences are completed.
Remember,
you can get most of this information from me in real time if you follow me on
Twitter; twitter.com/@NJDavidD
Pre-Show
Day Two:
Monday
is the Patience Marathon, Line Standing Olympics and BS Filtering long day
otherwise known as CES press day. Many
major firms use this day to tell their story.
And the stories were flying this year.
Ultra
High Definition Television Displays (or UHD or 4K) is clearly one of the
products of this show. Whether it was Samsung’s
bendable display – with sides that can curve into the viewer, or Sharp’s Q+
system that is less expensive than a UHD model but better than any other HD
model – everybody was touting their new hardware. But it wasn’t just about hardware. Standard TV program delivery methods (cable
companies, broadcasters) can’t handle content in 4k and won’t be able to for a
long while. The first real 4K content to
the home will be coming from the internet.
This has created quite the stir amongst streaming content providers and
set-top-box manufacturers. Netflix’s CEO
Reed Hastings made a personal appearance at both LG’s and Sony’s press
conference to specifically announce that their original production House Of
Cards will be available to smart TVs and delivered in 4K.
Dish,
Roku and others also made similar announcements.
As
for controlling these new displays and their embedded apps, every single
manufacturer today said a version of: “Our devices have the best, simplest
smart controls on the market.” They
can’t all be correct, so your mileage may vary…
The
bizarre moment of the day (and likely of this entire CES) was when Transformers
Director Michael Bay imploded on stage at Samsung’s press conference when his
teleprompter stopped working. Now widely
circulated in social media, the entire clip along with a non-apology apology is
available
from CNET.
There
were hundreds of new, cool products on display at CES Preview events on this
day – way too many to cover in my notes (to get all of them in real time
remember to follow me on Twitter - @NJDavidD. Here
are some highlights:
·
Honeywell
introduced a new smart thermostat that you can talk to
If
you’re sitting on your sofa and you feel a bit warm, you just say “Hello
Thermostat” and it replies. You can tell
it to do anything using voice commands.
·
Samsung
showed a “bendable” large format display screen at their press conference today
that can actually curve toward you upon request, making it more immersive.
I’ll
be in Samsung’s booth tomorrow and will try to get a picture that shows this
better.
·
And
today’s winner for retro device of the show goes to “The Brick”
It
is a global ready cellular phone that also serves as a landline phone and
Bluetooth device. Everybody seems to want
one.
Now
that the press previews and conferences are out of the way the actual
exposition floor opens Tuesday. I’ll be
tweeting everything interesting that I see, and will also be attending Cisco
CEO John Chambers’ keynote in the afternoon.
Here’s
a webpage that shows my recent tweets: https://danto.info/CES_2014_tweets.htm
CES
Day One:
The
2014 International CES officially opened today, and what a day it was.
It
started with a Sony keynote where it was announced that they will have a
streaming game service for the PS4 this year (which actually caused game store
stocks to drop on the news.) Sony also
announced they will launch their own UHD to the home programming service, but
repeat CES attendees will remember they announced that last year as well and we
haven’t seen it yet. Sony also announced
that they have sold 4.2 Million PS4s since the launch – a staggeringly huge
number in a short period which should be concerning to the Microsoft X-Box
team.
There
was a lot of interest in prototype vehicles at the show’s first day. For one example, huge crowds gathered to see
Toyota’s prototype one person electric car
It
won’t be a finished product for years, if at all – but no one will remember if
it fails.
It
was definitely an opportunity to see a lot of new or improved products – like
Casio’s improved virtual presenter – at half the size and offered with a custom
content service.
Or
the much discussed contact-lens (or glasses based) heads-up display prototype from
Innovega:
But
the two big stories out of today were about curves.
First
of all, with curved HD screens and a new curved audio speaker, it is clear that
“Curved
is the new Flat” is this year’s Mantra.
The
other curve was from Cisco’s John Chambers at his keynote presentation - when he
didn’t speak about a lot of technology as in years past. Rather, he spoke about the curve all our
lives are about to take.
It
was interesting watching him speak and present. Rather than being a technology
pitchman he presented himself as an excited "smart future"
evangelist. He described for example how smart streetlights can prevent
crime and how smart garbage cans can save 30% of the costs of trash removal.
He
clearly seemed energized as a person with the proverbial light bulb over his
head, encouraging the audience to see the same vision he does.
He
also made the bold statement that all of this smart connectivity will begin to
converge in this year - 2014.
From
joking with comedienne Sarah Silverman (when she delivered lines like “I don’t
want to Michael Bay this thing” and “You’ve got balls Chambers”) to chatting
with the deputy mayor of Barcelona who explained how they are succeeding in
being a "Smart City", Mr. Chambers was very successful in getting the
audience to see his vision.
Tomorrow
I’ll go into some of the smaller booths and suites to continue to check out new
products. Hopefully you’re following me
on Twitter or reading the twitter
feed site I slapped together (https://danto.info/CES_2014_tweets.htm
) to keep up with all the product announcements. There’s lots more information there right
now.
CES
Continues:
With
CES well underway all that there is left to do is visit as many of the
exhibitors as one can to learn as much as possible. Unfortunately it’s a bit like the parable of the
three blind men and the elephant – no two people who attend will see
exactly the same things in the same way (other than everyone apparently
agreeing about the Michael
Bay big fail.)
At
a high level, what I’m seeing is the following:
·
Curved
is the new Flat – I mentioned that yesterday but I still like it. Remember how
tube TVs were considered gauche when the plasma (then LCD) flat displays came
out? That’s how I believe flat displays
will soon be seen when curved displays begin their trek up the adoption
curve. Despite what you may have read
elsewhere, the curved displays I spent time examining looked outstanding – even
from the most extreme angle – where the curve actually helps the image look
better. I predict this will be the
bandwagon that everybody jumps on next year.
·
As
for this year’s bandwagon, can you say Smart Watch? You can’t spit on the exhibit floor without
hitting some unknown company’s smart watch and/or wearable sensor device. Remember a little while after the iPod’s
release how hundreds of exhibitors had their own knock-off MP3 / media players
in all colors shapes and sizes? That’s
what the wearable device has turned-into at this year’s show. No real value in any of them was able to
escape the noise level that’s been created.
How good will you feel about your new Pebble, FitBit
or Galaxy when the kid down the street from you just bought something very much
like it at the 99 cents store? I think
the best advice here is to wait for the pendulum to swing back a little again
before anyone thinks seriously about purchasing any of these.
·
Worries
about “unplugging” have given way to worries about broadcasters and cable-TV
MSOs. A few years ago the concern was
masses of people would stop buying / watching big, room type TVs and instead
view their content on PCs and tablets.
At this year’s CES that sentiment has changed. No one is openly saying it, but that fear has
given way to the opinion that people will still buy their TVs but the content
on them will come from the web (using a set-top box or embedded smart
application.) Do you still think Amazon
Prime video or Netflix is a bad idea? No
one else does either. If I were a
broadcaster or MSO, this development and the continued legal successes of Aereo would
probably be making me very nervous just about now. Get ready for one of those Black Swans.
·
I
had a great chat with Jurgen Kurz –
CEO of Nero – about Consumerization and how his firm is reacting to it. They still make a fabulous suite of
multimedia tools and will continue to, but he doesn’t see this as his firm’s
best opportunity going forward. He and I
agreed that the lines between consumers, SMBs and Enterprise users are getting
blurrier all the time. His firm’s new,
flagship product, Nero
BackItUp is a combination software product and service, meant to enable
powerful back-ups of all kinds of digital files. What makes Nero unique in this space is that
users can perform these tasks any way they want from any device they want. Want to use unlimited cloud storage? That is
available. Want to do all your back-ups
to a local NAS or server? That’s supported too.
And if you want some combination (back up some files to NAS…others to
cloud…back up your NAS to the cloud…retrieve a PC or Mac file from your
smartphone…back up your tablet or phablet files and view them on each other or
on your PCs – all that is available in any combination. It is certainly a different direction for
Nero, but one with flexibility and low costs.
I believe that it will be embraced by individual end-users in such a
strong way that it will likely follow a path through SMBs and onto into other,
larger enterprises. Why pay tons more
for inflexible options? Another Black
swan?
Then,
of course, there are the devices. So far
(just today) I’ve seen a great new pico projector from Elmo, some unique and
interesting magnetic utility lights from Striker Tools, a new entry into the
Interactive Whiteboard Space (and a 4K one no less) from Westinghouse Digital,
and much, much more. I’m not going to
include these in my daily notes here. I
will have a “best of list” in my show wrap-up / A View From The Road for the
IMCCA (over the weekend.) However, the
only way to see everything that I think is worth mentioning is to follow me on Twitter or read the twitter feed site I
slapped together (https://danto.info/CES_2014_tweets.htm.)
This
will be the last update to my CES daily notes.
Look for the wrap-up shortly on the IMCCA
Home Page. Feel free to reach out if
you want to chat about any of my observations or anything else.
==========================================================
This article was written by David Danto and contains
solely his own, personal opinions. David has over three decades of experience
providing problem solving leadership and innovation in media and unified
communications technologies for various firms in the corporate, broadcasting
and academic worlds including AT&T, Bloomberg LP, FNN, Morgan Stanley, NYU,
Lehman Brothers and JP Morgan Chase. He now works with Dimension Data as their Principal
Consultant for the collaboration, multimedia, video and AV disciplines. He is
also the IMCCA’s Director of
Emerging Technology. David can be reached at David.Danto@Dimensiondata.com
or DDanto@imcca.org and his full bio and
other blogs and articles can be seen at Danto.info. Please reach-out to David if you would like
to discuss how he can help your organization solve problems or develop a future-proof
collaboration strategy.
All image and links provided above as
reference under prevailing fair use statutes.