1/ Why I liked #CES2020: a tweet list with example highlights. First and foremost, it was the first year I didn’t encounter a single booth babe, even in the fringes of the show. It seems the absurd practice can finally and formally be deemed dead.
2/ The hardest corporate #innovation is lateral: moving beyond your core product/service as industry lines blur (vs. vertical: improving what you already do). This year, corporates were doing that more relevantly than ever. Sony stood out here (electric car, Atom software).
3/ Experiential marketing made a leap. Brands at CES too often focus on features over the benefit, instead of using their spaces, brands, and tech to tell stories via experience. Bosch told a genuinely compelling connected home story using video, actors and dynamic staging.
4/ Smart, portable speakers may actually soon be good, well, speakers. Audiophiles and hosts have "real speakers" and voice interface ones. Those techs are coming together now with audio room bouncing and virtual surround working much better (Sony had a speaker that stood out).
5/ Everyone knows the “first screen” is your mobile device and your TV is, at best, your second screen. This year some TV makers seemed to understand & design for that. Highlight was @SamsungTV Sero, which rotates dynamically based on the content it’s playing (from your phone).
6/ There was significant improvement in companies thinking about their employees (previous years were alarmingly non-human). @Delta's exoskeleton was the highlight. It's about enhancing a person's strength while allowing for their intelligence & dexterity as they do maintenance.
7/ By tweeting my original CES headline, a set of twitter dominoes went off that resurrected @the3six5. So basically this CES now lets us time travel:
8/ (a wish) Now that companies have stopped using booth babes & acknowledged employees are people not resources, I wonder if they’ll figure out we care about sustainability in our tech. That’s my #ces2021 wish as they think about what to prioritize in their innovation pipelines.
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