Wearables, connected car and digital health & fitness highlighted CES. Compass Awards luncheon well attended by the press.
Compass Intelligence held its first annual Awards luncheon at CES on Wed, Jan. 8 in South Hall, Room S228. This event included three classes of mobile awards: 1) Mobility Awards, 2) A-List in M2M (machine-to-machine) Awards and 3) the Bamboo Mobile Green Technology awards. The event was attended by members of the press who write about mobile and wireless. A press release at this <LINK> has been issued announcing all the winners of the 2014 Mobility Awards that were selected by 63+ members of the press.
The one hour program included a Fireside Chat with Glenn Lurie, President of Enterprises and Partnerships, that was moderated by Doug Newcomb of Wired Magazine. They discussed a number of new initiatives at AT&T including the connected car. A second Fireside Chat was conducted with Chris Horner, , Director of B2B Marketing at Samsung Mobile, shared insight on Samsung's growing enterprise offerings during a Fireside Chat moderated by Dan Meyer of RCR Wireless . David Lowe, VP of Enterprise Sales at Samsung Mobile, spoke with Dr. Gerry Purdy regarding larger enterprise trends and new opportunities on the horizon for Samsung.
The event also included four interesting new technologies that are making waves in the market: 1) George Abdelmalak of eRecyclingCorps (sponsored by Sprint) that described how they are solving the gigantic recycling problem with cell phones, 2) Ken Hosac of Cradlepoint that presented their solutions to provide commerce transactions wirelessly using LTE in places like movie rental kiosks and buses, 3) Kevin Keith of AirWatch that has grown into a major enterprise software from starting a few years ago as just a mobile device management (MDM) company, 4) Werner Sievers of Nextivity which has an interesting solution for solving the low wireless operator signal strength in the home or office with small device that looks like a router that connects to your home/office internet connection.
A highlight of the Mobility Awards event was a presentation by Jamison Cush, Executive Editor at TechTarget. He very humorously reflected on the mobile and wireless products that had won high praise and, in some cases, 'Best in Show' at prior CES events that are no longer in the market - products like the Palm Pre, the Palm Folio, the Plastic Logic Que eReader and the Lenovo Skylight.
He used this 'dead and gone' products as a method to demonstrate that the mobile market is still quite subject to many changes in a relatively short time.
In reflection, I think that Palm was headed in the right direction with their Folio product. You had to use your Treo smartphone to enable it to communicate but that would end up being embedded over time. Their ability to tie a keyboard to a tablet to process email and browse the web is very close to the concept of tablets today. Clearly, this was a product that was ahead of its time. And, of course, WiMAX was being touted as what 4G was all about until both Verizon and AT&T got behind LTE and WiMAX died a quick death which also took down a number of companies with it including Clearwire.
Instead of announcing award winners in the many different categories, Compass Intelligence had the Award winners who were present all line up at the stage so that series of photo graphs could be made with the representative from the winning company, Stephanie Atkinson (Founder & CEO) and the appropriate Compass Intelligent analyst. Here is a <LINK> to the photos of all the award winners.
I held a number of interesting meetings at CES including the following:
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Loop Pay - I meet with Will Wang Graylin and Damien Balsan. They have created a very interesting mobile payment system that includes a small transmitter that emulates the swiping of a credit card in any POS card reader in the world. The user selects the payment from those stored in his/her smartphone and puts the transmitter near the credit card reader. The reader reacts the same way as if you swiped the actual card. They just closed on $12 million in angel financing. - Castrol Ventures - I met with Angel Gambino, head of Smart Mobility. Castrol is making investments in companies that can leverage the use of Castrol products and (even more interesting) into ventures that will help enable the connected car to become a reality.
- Wi-Fi Alliance - I met with Edgar Figueroa, President and CEO. We discussed a number of topics related to the development of Wi-Fi including the fast adoption of 801.11ac, the connected car and the role of Wi-Fi, certification and adoption of Hotspot 2.0 with Passpoint.
- SOMO - I met with Michael Becker, Strategic Advisor. SOMO is one of the world's largest digital agencies. They help major brands deal with the fast emerging role of digital advertising and promotions. What sets them apart is that they do actual web and mobile development in addition to promotions and ad placement.
- ScanBuy - I met with Mike Wehrs, President and CEO. ScanBuy is most known for managing QR codes but, in fact, can manage any code that a smartphone can capture. They are focused on influencing the purchase of products since most smartphone users who use the QR code in a store display or magazine are thinking of buying that item. Their analytics are helping major brands not only advertise with QR codes but also influence the resulting purchase.
Some themes I see coming out of CES include:
- Connected things (large and small) - The expression the "Internet of Things" (IoT) is taking shape faster now that the cost of wireless communication modems is coming down. The reduced cost means that manufacturers of goods can more cost effectively include a wireless modem which, in turn, makes that product able to communicate (either status out or directions in from afar).
- Things that fly - little robots, helicopters, spy cams and all sorts of things were flying around the show floor. The Parrot booth cleverly showed 4-5 small drones all moving in a caged area moving in synchronization to rock music. It was 'drone dancing' and it was crowded all during the show. My 'cause for concern' was their senseFly product that appears to be able to do real-time video and photos of just about anywhere. This could, for example, do real-time videos of sports scenes or, just as easily, monitor a movie star 24 hours a day. It's both exciting and a concern for privacy.
- Connected car - you could see the connected car all over CES. Wireless companies talked about it. Car companies talked about it. Music companies talked about it. Smartphone companies talked about it. It seems pretty obvious that within the next decade every new car will have wireless communications, sophisticated methods to monitor the car's behavior and wireless services for the passengers. The question is how these services will work and still provide for safe driving. Some suggest that the driverless car will remove us from worrying about it. One big benefit of the connected car: we should be able to prevent many accidents that happen now due to lack of communication.
- Digital health & fitness - CES had an entire area dedicated to digital health and fitness. One area that seems to be getting a lot of attention is sensors that can measure the status of your health with warning alerts and fitness sensors that will provide multivariate feedback on every workout you do. Mobile seems to be a clear choice to both measure and enable your smartphone to be a local processing engine reading information from the sensors and communicating to center servers.
- 3D printing - this is isn't really a mobile area, but you can see that 3D printing will enable people to make mobile devices in their home. Not a smartphone but clearly things like accessories and cases, etc.
- Curved, 4K TVs - higher resolution TVs are coming. Just when you finish buying HD TVs for your home, the industry is going to offer TVs with four times the resolution of current TVs. There's a bit of a 'chicken and the egg' problem that broadcasters don't want to invest in the higher cost to produce shows in 4K unless there are 4K TVs. And, consumers don't want to invest in 4K sets unless there is 4K programming. This new technology seems much more likely to succeed compared to 3D TV. And, many of these new TVs will be curved to provide more of a surround feel both visually and for sound. The impact for smartphones is that they will become the standard remote control and we'll be able to take 4K content with us when traveling. The challenge is managing internet distribution from firms like Netflix who will someday broadcast 4K video to TV, tablets and handsets.
Overall, it was a very exiting show - more energy overall than in the past few years because there are so many major technologies under development that will bring tremendous improvements in the way we interact with the world digitally and the way in which companies will communicate about products and services.
Written By:
J. Gerry Purdy, Ph.D.
Chief Mobility Strategist
Compass Intelligence
gerry.purdy@compassintelligence.com
404-855-9494