Debrief: CES 2016

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Silicon Valley, California, Jan 14, 2016/Meeting Recap/  At our CES 2016 Debrief, Derek Kerton led us in a round-up of the top trends and products from the Las Vegas Mega-show. He ended up with a 70-slide powerpoint that is available to members in the library, and a three-hour discussion that covered products from a connected baby slipper to a human-carrying flying quad-copter drone.

Helping Derek with contributions to the debrief were:

John Feland, of Argus Insights, who focused on what was hot at Vegas based on his research tools that measure social buzz and impact on the www.

Steve Augustino, of Kelley, Drye, & Warren, who gave us the DC viewpoint of CES, and looked specifically at the FTC and FCC’s participation at the trade show, and their stated plans for the year.

Chief among the many trends spotted by Derek were:

1. Autonomous cars
2. Drones with increased autonomy
3. Barriers and silos dropping in connected home. Voice control surging.
4. Virtual Reality. Lots of goggles, for sure. But VR was not just a product being promoted, but was being actively USED by other companies to share an experience for totally different products. ex: Kia cars.
5. Augmented Reality was in full force with many goggles, glasses, and heads-up solutions for giving us more info in real time.
6. Although there were more improvements at CES than totally new ideas, the pace of change and improvements is absolutely staggering. Products are benefitting so much from progress in tangential fields, which they can loop into their own, and surge ahead in terms of value, features, or safety–ex: Yuneec’s drone with Intel RealSense can now avoid collisions. That’s a drone company using a PC chip company’s vision system launched last year for laptops. Convergence. It’s on.

Thanks to all who participated actively in the discussion during the debrief.