We were privileged to spend time at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show
(CES) in Las Vegas, where we joined hundreds of consumer electronics
manufacturing companies in showcasing their products.
Mars International and ciqada attend a variety of trade shows, but CES is
probably the highest profile, the place where thousands of people gather
each January to see what products might be in consumers’ homes in the
coming years. Here are a few things that stood out this year.
Alexa and Google
Another trend most media outlets noticed involved interconnected devices
from Amazon and Google, which have both launched voice assistant
technologies in recent years.
“This year at CES, the gloves came off,” Lifehacker writes. “Google and
Amazon are racing to integrate their smart assistants into every gadget in
your life.”
The website says the ubiquity of this technology “points to one very [big]
push in 2017: Smart Assistants will be everywhere. Amazon and – to a
lesser extent, Google want you to view Alexa and Google as a virtual
person that’s in every room with you.”
Smarter Cars
Not every consumer electronics manufacturing trend at CES involved
products for the home. Car companies were in the mix, showing off
everything from a self-driving mini-van (Chrysler) to Honda’s two-seat
NeuV, which PC says is “meant to act as a ride-sharing vehicle and
includes a slew of emotion-sensing features.”
Thinner TVs
A few consumer electronics manufacturing brands used this year’s CES to
display super-thin televisions. LG was there with the Signature W, “which
is so thin it practically looks like a poster,” PC writes.
Samsung, meanwhile, introduced a TV disguised as a painting.
“When you’re not watching it, the TV will display artwork rather than
turning off entirely,” Lifehacker says. “It’s like something out of Back
to the Future.”
The Internet of Things
“This year, manufacturers are keen on connecting even the most seemingly
mundane objects to the Internet,” writes PC magazine in its CES trend
report.
There was the world’s first smart hairbrush and other interconnected
devices, ranging from coffee makers to a mirror that displays the time and
weather.
“It is not doomsday and it is not nirvana, but our world is now populated
by refrigerators that track consumption, Fitbit monitors that track
movement and endless apps that fill in the gaps,” writes Brad Auerbach in
Forbes.
He notes that 71 percent of parents have purchased at least one Internet
of Things device, and another 37 percent plan to add another IoT product
in the next month or two. These include smart TVs, fitness trackers, toys
and smart home devices.
There’s even a smart toaster, Lifehacker reports, that lets you adjust its
settings via Bluetooth. “Your toast will still probably burn, but at least
you’ll have data to explain why.”
Mars International is proud to be a part of this trend. We make connecting
your product easy with our ciqada solution, a fully integrated system that
includes hardware modules, web portals, mobile applications, and a private
cloud.
You’ll find ciqada at work in everything from humidors to HVAC systems.
Contact us today, and we can get to work on creating the type of product
that can get your company noticed at next year’s CES.
