David J. Danto
Business
Transformation Consultant
Collaboration / AV /
IoT / Multimedia / Video / UC
Dimension Data
Director of Emerging
Technology
Interactive
Multimedia & Collaborative Communications Alliance
eMail:
David.Danto@DimensionData.com 
Follow Video &
Technology Industry News: @NJDavidD
(Read
David’s Bio) (See David’s CV) (Read David’s Other
Blogs & Articles)
A View From The Road Volume 10, Number 1 –CES 2016
In This Edition:
· The Good, The Bad And The Ugly
· Cylinders Are The
New Hub
·
Device
Conversations And AI
· New And
Notable Products
The Good, The
Bad and The Ugly. You can just hear the
whistling theme, can’t you?
That
perfectly describes the just concluded CES 2016. It’s an every
person for themselves exhausting survival fest like the old west where one
can, maybe, eventually, find gold. While
there were certainly many interesting themes and good new innovations, there
were some really bad products/ideas and an environment that at times was just
plain ugly. As I look back at the event
from my admittedly unique enterprise / collaboration perspective, let’s go backwards
with our good, bad and ugly journey and start with ugly.
Las
Vegas itself leads the ugly list. This
was the worst environment for a CES since I started attending them more than
fifteen years ago. Getting around town
was a nightmare, with the city apparently having no desire to acknowledge that
they were hosting the largest conference in the US (with an announced
170K+ attendees.) Way too many
streets had lanes closed for construction – and so did the main highway between
the airport and the car rental facility.
The result was New York rush hour style gridlock at many
intersections. It took me half an hour
to drive across Las Vegas Boulevard at Sands avenue at 3pm on Thursday – that’s
driving about 1,500 feet at 50 feet per minute.
If the driving wasn’t bad enough, parking was also a nightmare. With the nearby Riviera Casino permanently
closed and the LVH hotel now owned by an apparently
greedy Westgate timeshare organization (charging $40 per day to park) there
were very few options. In order to get
around you either had to park very far away, wait on excessive taxi or bus
lines (and still be stuck in the traffic gridlock) or decide to stay at a hotel
on the monorail route (and pay $400 - $600 per night - PLUS a resort fee - for
a room that a week later goes for $50 - $100 per night.) All attendees expect to do a heck of a lot of
walking on the expo floor, but to have to walk the equivalent of ten football
fields to a parked car or stand in taxi or bus lines for up to an hour – and
then sit in non-moving traffic - just to get to a conference venue is just
unfair. Something has to be done to work
with the LVCVA to
make the work of getting around the town easier, moving the events to a single
venue, and/or getting the price gouging reduced.
A
close runner up to the ugliness of this year’s Las Vegas logistics was the app
that CES released for the show. The
entire point of having a conference app is to help attendees get around the
exhibits and meeting areas without the need of paper maps – saving trees and
adding convenience. The app used this
year was worse than useless. Instead of
the maps being loaded onto the app they apparently had to be downloaded from
the cloud each time one was requested.
Most of the time the maps wouldn’t load at all. When they did, they looked like this actual
screen capture from my iPhone:
Not
only were there no exhibitor names, there were no booth numbers. By the first few hours of the expo everyone
was complaining and asking for printed maps again – which CES stopped providing
because they relied upon this app. It
really shouldn’t have been that hard to get this one right. With the huge investment in time and money
all attendees were making this was just unforgivable. The app was definitely “ugly.”
Moving
up to the merely bad category, there were a number products that the show this
year that were candidates for the proverbial “what were they thinking”
face-palm. Here are my top four stinkers:
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
With
the Ugly and the Bad aside, we can concentrate on what was good and interesting
at the conference. CES has always been a
place to see the trends being set in both function and style. Flat TVs were all the rage till curved ones
came out, then last year “curved is the new flat” was the hot trend for
everyone. This year, the in-shape is the
cylinder.
Amazon
echo started it, now apparently many more firms are and will be copying that
form factor.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Before
his life was an unending controversy, Woody Allen used to be a pretty decent
stand-up comedian. One of his most
famous routines was about Mechanical Objects. He would tell the story of how his appliances
would misbehave and plot against him, how he’d occasionally mistreat them, and how
a voice controlled elevator chatted with him – hearing from the other
appliances about his device abuse. Years
ago the idea that your devices would be talking to each other was pure comedic
fantasy, but today it has become reality.
With the Internet of Things - IoT – exploding, these inter-device
conversations are moving at a fast and furious pace. What has changed this year is that instead of
these devices just reporting things to you for action, their conversations with
each other lead to them taking any needed actions without asking you. This includes things like
·
Samsung’s smart
refrigerator taking pictures of its contents, seeing you don’t have much milk
left and then either placing it on your shopping list – or just ordering it for
you.
·
Intel’s chipset in a
drone that you can’t crash. It knows not
to fly into buildings or people, won’t go near an airport, and will always give
itself a soft landing – even if you turn the controls off.
·
Panasonic’s &
Cisco’s “City Now” Smart Cities technologies that will keep all streetlights at
about 20% brightness till it detects a person and the direction that they’re
walking in. It will raise the brightness
to full for the next few lights to be walked to, and dim out the ones that have
been passed.
·
GE’s Bluetooth mesh
network of home lighting controls that will detect that you’re in the kitchen,
and the light there will tell the garage light to turn off.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
High
Dynamic Range was a hot technology with display manufacturers. HDR is the term
used to describe a wider range between the whitest whites and blackest blacks
in an image, so contrast is significantly improved. Manufacturers hadn’t really
agreed on how to do this till now – but most of them now support a SMPTE standard at least as one option offered alongside their own.
LG
demonstrated the vast difference on their display pictured above. In addition to HDR,
just about every manufacturer in the TV business announced they were taking pre-orders
on their new but not-yet-available 4K Blue-Ray player. LG also showed the thinnest OLED
display made to date – the size of “four credit cards stacked” and
practically invisible from the side.
They called it Picture on Glass.
There is no question that images on and styling of displays is
improving. The only question is how
viable manufacturing of expensive displays is in a world where they’ve become a
commodity.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
There
were many more themes and trends this year – too many to get into in full depth
in my coverage focused on the enterprise.
These included
·
Autonomous vehicles (self-driving cars) being discussed as inevitable –
and discussed often – and they’ll be electric – and apparently the fact that
they’ll have CarPlay and Android Audio compatibility was MUCH more important than if they’ll keep passengers
safe and alive.
·
One couldn’t spit on the
exhibit floor without hitting a fitness tracker wearable of some sort. For the insane amount of money these
companies are asking for these products I’d expect that the simple act of
strapping them on would magically transform the wearer to the body shape they
desire. It is pure overkill. I wish someone would make an "UnfitBit" or a "Smolder" for average folks
to wear.
·
Vinyl records are apparently back, with products
from Sony, Audio-Technica and Panasonic to name a
few. Audio Technica’s
actually transmits wirelessly to any Bluetooth speakers.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Product Highlights:
I saw far too many products and innovations that I
liked to list them all here. This is
just some of the highlights of what I found most interesting. If you’re interested in more info please take
a look at my CES episode of AVNation-TV’s Connected!- Everything
IoT where I show dozens of videos and demos – a one hour experience from
the show floor. As for the highlights:
· The KlickRnext is an
infrared (learning) transmitter that can connect to your smart device via
Bluetooth and lets you control just about anything that uses a standard remote
from your phone/tablet.
· United Sciences showed their system of
scanning the contours of an ear and then 3D printing custom fit
headphones. Here’s a great example of
technologies blending (advanced sensors, 3D printing) to disrupt a process
(making a wax mold of an ear) that’s been around for years. I’ll show video of the whole process on
Connected!
· A company
called Kino Mo showed holographic 3D images
seemingly floating in mid-air (using a spinning disk.) It was one of the most crowded demonstrations
on the floor. Click on the picture to
see a twitter video of it.
This was hands-down the most popular booth of the
Eureka Park start-up area. These
displays are just visually stunning.
· I met with
the team from a great, inexpensive new desktop videoconferencing product called
ChatLight.
For US $30 you can have a precisely color balanced LED
light that attaches to your device or PC and vastly improves the images to the
far end. Click the photos above to watch
a video and look at the difference yourself.
· Samsung
showed curved, bezel-free OLED TVs – up to 88”, and they showed smart menus that
aggregated all content from all sources (cable box, game console, over the air,
etc.) into a single menu that automatically provides control compatibility.
· A new
start-up, Touchjet, showed their TouchJet
Wave – a $199 device that makes any flat display an interactive
whiteboard. Click the picture to see the
video. Let the demo speak for
itself. If this functionality is
available in a reliable device for under $200 then we’re experiencing the
digital disruption of a whole range of products – some on the market, some not,
some that are apparently still somewhere in between.
· Plantronics
updated their USB headset dongle for their new UC headsets.
This unit now has a physical pair
button, can pair to two devices simultaneously, lights-up in different colors
to indicate use, mute state, etc., and is backwards compatible to their entire
Voyager series of headsets. Just the
ability to visually see that you’re muted by itself is an industry
breakthrough. It comes as standard with
their Back Beat pro plus and Voyager Focus units.
· Panacast updated their innovative 180 degree panoramic
videoconferencing camera to new, smaller, standard USB compatible model:
Their PanaCast
2 now works with any PC / Mac videoconferencing client – instantly taking their
solution from a walled-garden service to a credible accessory for Lync / Skype
for Business, Jabber, WebEx, consumer Skype, BlueJeans – anything. Click the picture above to see a demo.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
That’s it for this edition of A
View From the Road.
My next update will be in March when I’ll be presenting at three
conferences – InfoComm
Connections in San Jose, Enterprise
Connect in Orlando and the Missouri School of Journalism’s
Collaboration Symposium.
==========================================================================================================
This article was
written by David Danto and contains solely his own, personal opinions. David
has had over three decades of delivering successful business outcomes in media
and collaboration technology 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. David is also the co-founder of Masters
Of Communication. 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.