CES 2023 Day 3
Beautiful booth but vague focus. Do you get any sense of what they do?
After three days of CES, I’ve changed my point of view on this year’s show. Somewhat. What I observed is that the speed of innovation of larger companies seemed to slow down during COVID while smaller companies were moving faster than ever before. I can only make an anecdotal judgment call as I was walking the floor, however I think it explains the discrepancy in my observations thus far. I wish there was a way to measure the real difference, however it was a point of observation that kept coming up as I looked at various booths.
In my opinion this won’t survive because it’s just not convenient.
This year, as usual, there were a lot of solutions looking for a problem to solve, as I said before and while innovative, and a story to some, the upcoming failures are not really relevant to trends other than to point out the category.. So what if a camera can identify what you’re eating and your calorie intake, if you have to fool around with collecting the data, it’s not convenient and I predict it won’t be around in a year. If it’s not convenient, you won’t use the technology. That’s how it ultimately works at CES. The entire wearables section of CES is crammed with solutions that don’t remain.
The year of AI
Autel was demonstrating a drone catch and release that would allow for continuous autonomous remote operation for large longterm surveillance.
This was the first year where AI wasn’t the headline as much as it was what was taken for granted. It was like the years after the “smart phone” when people stopped using the term and just called it a phone. AI is now managing the behavior of many devices and we just accept it. It was most obvious in the many robot yard care and farming solutions. We accept what it does without thinking. Many of these robots are very good and not as dumb as a Roomba running into every piece of furniture in the house.
We stopped at ImediSync’s booth and had our brains scanned for the early onset of cognitive issues. They said we’d receive the results “after the show.” So far, I’ve received nothing. Imagine the legal dilemma, regardless of the results. It doesn’t matter what they indicate, if someone acts on them and it’s a misdiagnosis, they could easily be sued into non-existence. The $28k brain scanning device seems like an interesting concept, but for some reason, I’m very skeptical. I’m also thinking about how they are dealing with HIPAA issues at the show.
This is how your head looks after the scan. It eventually goes away.
Vision technologies have come a long way. It’s not about the image as much as what the camera can now detect and decipher. Years ago we wrote about the ability to find people in a crowd as demonstrated in the Panasonic booth, however this technology has gone so much further. As an example, you now have the ability to identify species of animals on cameras and announce accordingly. The Bird Buddy bird feeder that recognizes a species will be a hit. The convenience is that it records the species, something important to bird lovers.