The Consumer Electronics Show In Less Than 400 Words
If you’ve ever been to the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) you know that it’s overwhelming. The CES floor fills up both the entire Las Vegas Convention Center and the Venetian/Sands Expo area. It brings 20,000 people to the city, which makes traffic dandy. By now you’ve probably read the myriad of press releases about hot technology at the show, mergers, and acquisitions, and trends.
“While you can find technologies as diverse as dryers that automatically fold your clothes, to underwear that shields your private parts from radiation, a majority of the expo is more mainstream.”
Below, I’ve boiled down the CES to a pithy list of technologies and discussions:
- 5G – it’s 4G plus one! 4G will be around for a long time, but plans are underway by all the major carriers to support an even faster, ubiquitous cellular network technology.
- Amazon Alexa – over and over. In your car, in your office, how to program it, what it does.
- Artificial Intelligence – making machines smarter and smarter and until Skynet
- 8K TV’s – you thought 4K was enough? Nope!
- Sensors – everywhere things are being monitored, from your clothes to your wrist, learn more about yourself than you ever cared to know, and unwittingly share it with Google, who will keep good care of that information.
- Drones – still a thing. Lighter, last longer on a charge, better camera.
- Self-driving cars and bolt-on self-driving technology, along with sensors (see above) that detect other cars, pedestrians, small dogs.
- Augmented and Virtual Reality – live a life away from your dreary actual life, plus overlay your glasses with all sorts of pertinent information about the things you are seeing.
- Smart Homes – everything in your house will talk to everything else all the time and it will all do things that you want when you want it to.
- Internet of Things (IoT) – now that this is out there, the main concern is how do we secure it?
- Samsung – really wants to be a leader in all things technical, and even lead where Google is going.
- Health – clothing that monitors you (see sensors), glasses that tell you how healthy your work out is (see Augmented Reality)
- Robots – robots that watch your children, walk your dog, dance in unison, and serve your every need (see Skynet)
Those, to my best recollection, were the big items. Anything else that caught your eye from the press releases that I missed? Do let me know!