CES Day 2 – The little guys.

The action at CES is all with the small companies.

Big guys are short of ideas.

• The big press conferences where the all the queues were to be found were more devoid of substance than ever before.
• Sony revealed a logo (PS5) that that was already blindingly obvious and showed a car that it will never make.
• Toyota reinvented the Truman Show (see here) with its Woven City which felt an awful lot like a game of SimCity being converted into bricks and mortar.
• Samsung showed a robotic tennis ball and a utopian home environment which only has any hope of becoming reality if the user lives 100% of his Digital Life with Samsung and owns every single hardware product the company makes.
• Given that almost all Samsung users live 0% of their Digital Lives with Samsung and see Bixby as an irritating cost of owning a Samsung smartphone, this is never going to come to fruition.
• Furthermore, Samsung’s ambitions for AI (Neon) are so far beyond its capabilities (see Bixby) that its other announcements in this area lacked any real credibility.
• BrainCo’s conference which had no line and was half empty was far more interesting with real advances and benefits such as limb prosthetics and meditation training being applications for the core technology of understanding brain electromagnetic patterns.

So what is hot?

• Given that the big companies failed to come up with any new ideas, what is on the floor that is worth looking at?
• There are a few:
  • First, far-field wireless charging: This is a technology that has been on the cards for years but finally looks close to commercialisation.
  • The idea is to have a transmitter in the ceiling or on a wall and every mobile device in the room will be able to charge wirelessly from it.
  • For the smart home, this is a big benefit as getting power to many sensors and devices is difficult and batteries kill both the functionality that is possible as well as the user experience.
  • There is a range of companies in this space each of whom has taken a different route in terms of implementation all with their plusses and minuses.
  • Ossia and Wi-Charge are the leaders in my opinion, but new-comer GuRu also has ambitions and is taking a different approach.
  • Second, Tanvas which has developed electrostatic driven haptics for touch screens.
  • I originally saw this some years ago and I considered it to be an interesting novelty with no real use case.
  • However, a good use case has emerged in automotive where hard buttons are being increasingly replaced with screen-based controls.
  • Finding buttons on screens is much harder and raises significant issues around driver distraction which haptics may be able to solve.
  • The usual haptics don’t work well in automotive which is why it has never really taken off.
  • Tanvas uses electrostatic charge to change the resistance of a finger on a screen and there is a range of different tactile experiences available.
  • The technology is now much better than it was when I first saw it and the company has signed a deal with Innolux to offer a haptics-enabled screen to OEMs.
  • Third, MedWand: This is a device that brings together a series of standard diagnostic instruments used by a doctor during a routine physical exam.
  • This enables a doctor to carry out a proper physical over the Internet which could help to reduce the cost of healthcare while improving service.
  • It is in the process of obtaining FDA approval but given it is using sensors that are already approved, the process should be much simpler as its simply a matter of verifying that they still work properly in a combi product.