David J.
Danto
Collaboration Industry Consultant and Analyst
Covering AV / IoT /
Mobility / Multimedia / Video / Unified Communications
eMail: David@Danto.com 
Follow Industry News: @NJDavidD
(Read David’s Bio) (See
David’s CV) (Read David’s Other Blogs & Articles)
A View From The Road Volume 12, Number 1
CES 2018 – A Transition To Concepts
I’m using a new format for my CES report this year, with overall themes
and concepts sitting above my original technical notes. Read
the top for the high level items, the daily notes below for the technologies and
products of interest.
Greetings from Las Vegas where the
2018 CES just concluded. We won’t know
the attendance number for a bit (I’ll update it here when we do) but it’s sure
to be over the 180K+ announced last year.
This year’s conference was both great and terrible. An essential view into the next 18+ months of
technology and a physical, mental and financial strain on all those who
attend. The bad logistics this year were
particularly bad:
· Security
was obviously ramped up following the recent tragic strip shooting, but by the
second day of the show the “rent-a-cops” weren’t even bothering to look in bags
anymore. That didn’t stop them from
creating brand new choke-points that everybody had to pass through.
· There was
an approximate two hour power outage thrusting the Central Hall into
darkness. While no one can expect a
power-failure, it was handled poorly by the event staff, as the aforementioned
rent-a-cops now had something to do other than pretend to look at bags, and had
no training for such an event. People
were told to leave, but not everyone did.
People were told to wait outside when the other halls were actually open. There was also no emergency lighting in the
main hall area (there was in the adjacent corridor.) Worst of all, the LiveSafe app that CES
advised everyone to download provided little to no instructions on what was
open, where to go, what caused the issue, etc.
All that app did for the whole show is tell us that roads were crowded
and slippery. Duh.
· The roads
were slippery because Las Vegas experienced one of its rare torrential
rainstorms, making an already difficult and painfully slow to navigate city
(during the CES mobs) even worse. The
rain closed a number of outdoor exhibits that weren’t waterproofed, and it is also
blamed for the power outage.
The good logistics this year are
also worthy of attention:
· The show
was the best organized in years. The
international pavilions moved from the Westgate to the Sands, Smart Cities in
the Westgate, categories of companies closer together
than ever before. Kudos to the planning
in this case.
· The CES
companion App worked better than ever before.
One could easily find exhibitors, load maps, mark favorites to be
visited. The only complaint there is
every time you closed it it restarted from scratch
instead of taking you back to where you were.
This was nearly perfect.
A number of articles (like
this one) have already complained about how hard it is to navigate the
show, how much time is wasted going between venues and how Las Vegas isn’t “Smart
City” enough for CES. These comments are
misguided. The problem isn’t the venue –
as few cities can handle the crush of people as well as Las Vegas. The problem is that the event itself has
grown unfocused. People used to bring “products”
to CES for people to see and experience.
Now they bring concepts. You can’t
touch and feel a concept, you can’t take pictures of it. Exhibitors that have nothing but concepts
(Smart Cities, AI, IoT) purchase huge booths and
bring people into town to talk about concepts, which makes the event
essentially an arms race for who can spend the most money on the biggest
booth. I don’t need a basketball court
sized display to show me a car that you’re firm isn’t making yet and may never
make, because it’s the image you want covered.
If CES were divided into two shows, one with things, and another one
with ideas it might make the logistics more manageable, and it would certainly
waste a lot less of everyone’s time. I
doubt that the people that come here to purchase light-up speakers and mobile
phone cases really care about electric cars and smart cities. There’s an opportunity here to have this
event make more sense for all.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The clear winner of the event this
year is Google.
Realizing the vacuum left by a
number of big firms that made a big deal about not exhibiting at CES anymore,
Google stepped in and owned CES 2018. As
Dan Freeman of VDO360 said in the video linked far below, “you can’t swing a
dead cat without hitting something Google.”
Helpers around the floor, concept booth, prize giveaways, billboards all
over town and plastered on the monorail, etc.
If you were looking for Amazon’s Alexa at the show you’d have to ask “Hey,
Google, where’s Alexa?” If you found and
asked an Amazon Echo why it was so totally outclassed this year, it would naturally
say it didn’t understand the question – but that’s another point entirely. Google showed that a strong presence at CES shouldn’t
continue to be overlooked by firms like Apple, Microsoft and others that
stopped exhibiting.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The reason I cover CES is because
too much of the standard news coverage fawns over the wrong things. Take this item for example:
This isn’t just too new to
purchase. There are absolutely no plans
to manufacture or distribute this display (according to the people I spoke
with.) I’d much rather hear about items
I can actually buy soon then concept demos only meant to attract a crowd.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
If you’re not following me on
Twitter (and you really, really should be following me on Twitter) then you
didn’t see the attack of the zombie brands at CES2018:
If they could build a Blackberry
with a Polaroid camera in it then they’d really have something.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
On the last day of CES I had a
nice chat with Jason McGraw who runs the expositions for AVIXA. Click the picture to take a look.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
My Daily Notes From
CES 2018:
January 11th, 2018 – CES Day 3
I used the time today to stop by some of the
outdoor exhibits and chat with colleagues and clients attending the
conference.
The above picture sums up one of the biggest
stories of CES 2018 – a small Amazon “Treasure Truck” in the shadows of the
massive Google presence. The Verge team voted Google “most in
show” for pulling-out all the stops.
Also outside was the Simpli
Safe team – a pioneer in simpler home safety / alarm / monitoring systems. They win the Einstein award for redesigning
their entire system with no plan to upgrade existing customers – who they
expect will keep paying them for monthly service using outdated gear.
While they were a pioneer in the space there are
now a handful of players competing with similar systems. Way to give-up your advantage by pushing
formerly happy customers to competitors.
I also caught up with the CEO of VDO360 Dan Freeman
(who was attending the show) to get his impressions of what he was seeing. You
can watch our chat here.
I ended the day looking at the precision, light-up drone display from
Intel over the Bellagio fountains.
I have a couple more appointments tomorrow, then
I’ll be writing the show wrap-up blog and finishing up the AVNationTV
webcast / wrap-up. Just like last year
it is meant to give viewers a sense of what it was like attending. (The link will be here once it’s ready.)
As an idea to ponder as the expo nears its close
and (and we all have thoughts of the tremendous opportunities of #AI)
the excellent team at Screenjunkies asks what if the
HAL-9000 was Alexa?
January 10th, 2018 – CES Day 2
No matter what stories come out of CES this year
they’ll pale in comparison to the story of the great CES Central Hall Blackout.
Click to see a video where the
CES Power Failure is explained.
At about 11:20 am all the power to the Central hall
went out and stayed out for about two hours.
People were asked to leave the hall and were kept out for the duration,
with many crowding the sidewalks waiting to get back in. Misinformation was spread that all the halls
were affected, and it was later corrected to indicate people could go back in
to the south and north halls. Here is a good BBC
story on what happened – good because of its author’s obvious good taste in
choosing twitter sources to quote.
Before the blackout I spent time with the team from
LG, who have taken-over as the de-facto leader in consumer and enterprise displays
in the US. Did you read about their
roll-up flat TV in other CES coverage?
Forget-it, it’s not real. It’s a
demo of a concept that had inexperienced and or hype-friendly reporters
drooling. What is real is the
“wallpaper” OLED that they showed last year.
It is shipping in multiple sizes for both enterprise and consumer
use.
It literally hangs with magnets on any surface,
with all the processing and I/O in an external unit – a soundbar
for the consumer models, but just a processing engine for the enterprise
ones. (It’s always difficult for a
picture to convey how thin something is, but I tried.)
I also stopped by the Samsung area to see their new
Flip IWB. I was told it will be
available “shortly” for a price of $2,695.
I’m skeptical that this “solution for new meeting
trend” will change my opinion of the enterprise Interactive Whiteboard space. The
whole space is overcrowded, overpriced and over-hyped right now - as I covered in my
recent whitepaper. The evidence of demand just isn't there no matter how
many vendors want to persuade enterprises otherwise. The unit was in a back-corner of Samsung’s
showcase that also had an AMX touchpanel and a Harman
camera – quite literally made to sit in the corner like a forgotten child.
One of the nicest series of products I saw today was
from the German manufacturer Conrad Electronics who are releasing a series of
Digital Multimeters under the Voltcraft
name in the US. In this world of ‘throw
it away when it breaks’ it’s great to see someone updating and reducing costs
on digital testing equipment. See my interview with them here.
My favorite item of today was from a company called
Unis who licensed Pong from Atari and built a coffee-table version with
physical paddles and a physical ball – click the picture to see a video I shot
of it in action on the show floor.
It has a price tag of about $3k US. Now all you people who claim to never know
what to get me have two options – the Solo electric vehicle below and this Pong
table. Find out more about it at
www.tablepongproject.com
January 9th, 2018 – CES Day 1
All you really need to know about how CES and the
industry has changed can be summed-up by one startling revelation – Panasonic
is not showing any TVs / displays in their booth this year. Yes, they’ll talk to you about how they make
cities and airplanes smarter, and detail all the other intangibles that drive
innovation, but there’s no hardware to show those off. No planes or cities on the show floor. CES 2018 will be looked back at as the time
when the industry took a turn from products to concepts (as I mentioned
before.) It will also be looked at as
the year Google said “hey!” There 
were
Google assistants everywhere, there were two story high
‘gumball machines’ giving out expensive Google gifts. All I got was a tote bag :-( Google definitely broke the trend of large
tech manufacturers (like Microsoft and Apple) not wanting to play in the CES
arena. Google seized on the vacuum and
is dominating the conversations about AI assistants.
I also did happen to see a lot of cool, new
products, and shot a lot of video:
·
Hear from
the CEO of Electra Meccanica about their new
electric, one seater car – the Solo
·
Take a look
at Wiz-Connected Lighting
·
Look at Flexound – a home theater augmented audio pad
·
See a demo of
Suitable Technologies latest Beam Telepresence Robot
·
Hear the
Kingston team explain the need for encrypted USB drives
·
Look at some
amazing light panels from Nanoleaf
·
And finally, look
at a punchy group of people (myself included) discussing the Plantronics
portfolio and roadmap.
Lots, lots more tomorrow….
January 8th, 2018 – 1 Day before the conference opens
– Press Day Two
The press conferences and events kicked-into
high-gear today with lots to report. At
a high level, I’ve noticed that there are more “concepts” and less “technology”
being shown this year. Concepts don’t
have to be working yet, and won’t fail in a demo. I’m not really sure if this is a good thing
or a bad thing, but it is a thing. As
for today’s highlights:
·
Both LG
and Samsung stated that IoT ecosystems had to be
based on open platforms to be useful.
Interestingly, LG showed off compatibility with their partner’s
ecosystems (having Google on stage with them) and Samsung said everyone needed
to work with their Bixby assistant.
·
LG had the first failure of the expo when their CLOi robot stopped answering to commands. I hope it wasn’t growing hostile (remember the four laws, remember the four
laws)…
·
CES 2018 will go down as the year the universal
translator actually worked. I know –
I’ve seen three so far at the show. The
best of the lot is Travis the Translator – with a full explanation and demo here. If you hurry you can still get it on
Indiegogo.
·
Samsung also announced it is getting into the
enterprise IWB space (to compete with Google’s Jamboard,
Cisco’s Sparkboard, MS’ Surface Hub, etc.) Meet
Samsung’s Flip here – a product they’re calling a
digital flipchart.
·
At the Pepcom Digital
Experience I came across a new, handheld 4K camera with a built in gimbal that
can track movement in multiple modes, has a four hour battery, built-in
display, and looks really slick. See the
Removu K1
demonstration video here.
·
I met with Jasper Meerding,
the founder of a new productivity suite called Gaiku. Their
platform is used as a supplement to collaboration apps to help organize
agendas, take meeting notes and track action items – all to make meetings more
useful. See my interview with him here.
·
I took to twitter to report all these things, and
point out that it’s life imitating art – as in the AI space we now have the
Clone Wars:
·
Finally today, meet the Thinium
Recharge – the only battery, power supply, power bank your smartphone will
ever need. See a demo here.
The Expo opens tomorrow, and for a second straight
year I’m starting it at the Sands location.
Lots to see, including a sneak peek at some amazing new headphones from
Plantronics, and the Showstoppers event.
January 7th, 2018 – 2 Days before the conference
opens – Press Day One
Wow, CES is barely even underway and the number of
stories coming out are overwhelming. I’m
a bit saddened by how much technology is being “demonstrated” well before it’s
viable or available. Anyone with an idea
and a crowdfunding campaign can apparently come here and say they have
something to sell. Only time will tell
how many are real.
My observations from today are:
·
There is an all-out war over AI voice
assistants. Google has made it clear
with their massive outdoor display that they are 
coming for
Amazon’s Alexa. At the same time Samsung
is pushing its own Bixby. There are two
reasons for this. One – the smart
speaker space is on an incredible growth curve (as shown here by CTA’s Senior
Director of Research Steve Koenig) and because control via a voice first engine
is now table stakes in the technology industry.
Everything being shown here – from cars to bathroom fixtures to home
aroma systems to washing machines now comes with compatibility to one or more
of these systems. This embedded smart
technology is driving industry innovation as we will now begin to have personal
relationships with our devices.
·
Also from
Steve’s Presentation was this excellent chart showing the data speed
differences between 4G-LTE and 5G coming shortly. The difference is downloading an HD movie in
a few minutes to downloading one in a few seconds. This type of high-speed connectivity will be
necessary as we allow AI systems in the cloud to make more critical decisions
that affect our lives.
·
I spent some time with the CES Innovation Award
winning firm MirraViz at CES Unveiled. Their co-founder described for me how their
new screen technology allows two video images to be viewed on one screen
simultaneously. Click here to see his explanation and a demo.
Tomorrow
starts very early, with LG’s press conference at 8am. Much, much more to come. Again, if you were following me on Twitter here you’d be getting this information
and much more in real time. Oh, and if
you’re playing the LingoBingo below, from the looks
of things, if you had Bluetooth Earbud then you’re a clear winner. You can’t spit without hitting a handful of
vendors showing their version.
January 5th, 2018 – 4 Days before the conference
opens
Did I stay hypestorm? The pre-show emails have been off-the-charts
this year. The buzzwords provide an
indication of trends people will focus on.
Firstly, everything this year is “Smart.” Just put that word in front of anything and
you can find a CES exhibitor with that theme.
This includes obvious things (smart lights, smart homes, smart displays) less-obvious things (smart toothbrushes,
smart underwear, smart backpacks) and things that are a real stretch (smart
food-poisoning detectors, smart life-bands, smart pet-doors, etc.) With all of the smart things being touted,
this year’s CES should be freaking brilliant.
To add some levity to this
situation, I created and tweeted a CES Lingo Bingo game to keep track:
And then someone tweeted the
perfect response:
I leave for Vegas tomorrow
(assuming the northeast airports open again) and will report more from there.
December 19th, 2017 – Before the conference opens
We’re well into the pre-show hypestorm. My email
account (as with all press and analysts) is receiving a deluge of messages from
manufacturers, PR firms and geographical support agencies begging us to visit
them and/or hear their story. I’ve
already filled up 75% of my event calendar for the six days I’ll be in
town. In trying to read between the
lines here are some initial thoughts I’m focusing upon:
·
The expo is even more massive than
usual this year, with added areas (like the South Plaza, south of the south
hall.) My appointments take me across
all of Tech East and Tech West, but I’d need two full weeks to see all of it,
so I’m already trying to prioritize.
·
It’s looking like real-time universal translators
will be a reality at the show this year, and I haven’t seen any real coverage
of them. I have two interviews / demos
scheduled as of now. If I could get a
device to carry that translates in real time I’d definitely feel more
adventurous about international travel and international business, and I’m sure
others would too. I’m hopeful these are
ready for prime-time.
·
This also appears to be the year that smart-home
devices go mainstream. AI assistants
(Alexa, Google Home) have now achieved penetration into a considerable number
of homes, and the devices that are supported by their voice first ecosystems
are now much easier to install and operate than those of the recent past.
That’s it for CES 2018!
==================================================================================
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 as an analyst and consultant in the collaboration,
multimedia, video and AV disciplines. He is also the IMCCA’s Director of Emerging Technology.
David can be reached at 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, develop a future-proof collaboration strategy
for internal use, or if you would like his help developing solid, user-focused
go-to-market strategies for your collaboration product or service.
All images and links provided above as reference under
prevailing fair use statutes.