CES 2019 Round-up
CES 2019 was my fourth year at the event. For whatever reason , this year held fewer “Whoa” moments while I explored offerings on display at this massive spectacle of a trade show. With that in mind, my approach in reviewing a “Best-Of” will focus less on each important innovation I highlight, and more on providing some context of what is trending, launching and maturing at the moment.
Some trends from CES 2019 include shifts towards:
- Ultra-low power electronics
- Solid state everything
- Simulation as a service/AI as as Service
A look back at my Best of CES for 2018:
Best of 2019
Circularise:
“The open , distributed and secure communications protocol for the circular economy
Making transparency and communication in circular value chains possible by utilizing blockchain and zero knowledge.”
Teslasuit
“Ultimate tech in Smart Clothing
Haptic suit with body-wide sensors and TENS (Transcutaneous Electrical Neural (or Nerve) Stimulation andEMS (Electrical Muscle Stimulation) actuators.
Mira Reality
A ‘minimalist, untethered smartphone based AR headset’
Worksite Augmented Reality will transform work, training and productivity. Mira is the best ready-to-use solution I’ve come across for field and factory .
Boreas Technologies
‘High Definition Haptics with ultra-low power consumption’
I’ve been using Apple products with the Taptic Engine for a while now. The demonstration I interacted with was a rebuilt phone with a seamless edge, with their piezo driver guided by a fixed surface bump. The feedback sensation of a two-click virtual button was so good it took me by surprise. I now expect to see this type of solution but an end to physical phone buttons in the next couple of years.
Sensel Morph
“One Sensor, Infinite Possibility.”
I remember when my friend bought a 4 track mini mixer in 1998 so we could record our band jam sessions to mini-disk. The Morph is a very flexible, low cost interface that will spoil young musicians everywhere, as they make music and ruin it by trying to make auto-tune cool.
Heatworks
“We use our patented Ohmic Array Technology to heat water in the simplest, purest and most efficient way. You’ll save money and help to preserve Earth’s most precious resources: water and energy.”
This is an interesting example of the current trend for innovations highly relevant to large industry start with products for the consumer market. This could end up being a highly deceptive technology that can advance multiple application areas of needed efficiency.
Innoviz
Cars have been transitioning from mechanical systems with basic computer monitoring to a new combination of solid-state electro-mechanical systems. The Innoviz LIDAR systems have a price point in the thousands of dollars, acting as an example of the price-performance improvements over the >$10K spinning LIDAR systems I saw on display a couple of years ago.
Grid+
‘Harness the efficiency of the smart grid with Grid+ Energy.’
With an existing demonstration with a Texas Utility, Grid+ has commercialized ‘methods for energy trading using Ethereum Blockchain technology.’ This feels like an achievement worthy of more than this solo slow clap of respect
Honorable mentions
Smart Trek Technologies
“True Simplified Cooperative Mesh Network. Designed for high coverage, low-power IoT applications”
Hide Smart Socket
No matter how expensive your home is in North America, you probably have electrical sockets that get in the way of how you want to use your space. The Hide socket makes the list because we need better design in our spaces, and this basic design is a big improvement on the status-quo. I wasn’t very intrigued by the smart socket components as all that was presented were less secure version of alexa and google assistance hubs.
O2N2: “Giving Oxygen and Nitrogen to Your Home”
Oxygen and Nitrogen are very useful gasses for multiple home applications. The use case displayed on the link below is for using nitrogen gas to fill food storage containers, reducing the oxygen that accelerates food decay. With development of larger scale systems, it may soon be possible for smaller healthcare facilities to produce low volumes of oxygen on site at low cost.
Metamoto
“Train, test, debug, and validate your automated vehicle software with
Metamoto’s simulation platform”
VoxelGrid
VG hasan integrated technologies approach to creating high resolution building models for heritage and legacy structures using non-destructive evaluation with machine learning for resilience and sustainable design.
Adapt my Web
‘Making the web accessible to all with only one line of code!’
Over 1 Billion people have some form of disability. Even if we agree that everyone should have rights to equal access to technology, economic participation and its benefits, solutions like this will go a long way to empowering the often forgotten 15%.
Hey Kangaroo
One of my first ever jobs was installing security systems in new home construction. This motion sensor provides better design with easier user install than anything I’ve seen on the market, resulting in use savings for a superior system to what is installed in millions of homes today
Hip’Safe
Personal healthcare products and services is a industry that really doesn’t have a cap on how large it can grow.
Geriatric healthcare is a massive area of expense for countries with ageing baby boomer populations. Falls and resulting broken hips tie up surgeons and hospital beds at the expense of billions in hospital and lost productivity, this strange airbag for hips is a preventative mechanism that has the potential to keep seniors more active, healthy and productive as they age.
We Fight
Our healthcare and social systems have huge gaps in understanding and supporting the human side of illness. WeFight is creating chatbots for cancer out-patients, to provide them with the information they may need without adding to healthcare costs and relieving some stress for the patient’s family.
AIaaS
A trend that has been emerging the last few years at CES has been AI services and edge computing. 2019 had a significant boost in the number of these companies boothing at CES with many of them starting to integrate the two concepts into products and marketing messaging. With the proliferation of services such as these, the barrier to entry for companies to start integrating AI into their operations will be reduced to the point that we will start to see a transition towards a world where every company will have multiple AI integrations in their backend integrations.
Prevision
“Introducing the first Automated Machine Learning SaaS that empowers both business and technical teams. Quickly build and deploy smart business applications for all use cases. Prevision.io helps organizations on their AI journey by enabling any user to become a Citizen Data Scientist.”
NALBI
“World’s fastest AI-powered Computer vision technology for embedded systems”
Invoxia
Bespoke “AI-powered smart devices” to “Improve efficiency, and availability with artificial intelligence and edge computing”
DarwinAI
“Our patented ‘AI building AI’ technology reduces the complexity and guesswork in designing efficient and high-performance deep learning solutions for real world applications.”
AgTech
CES has increasingly become a destination for agricultural and horticultural technology companies. As I know many people in the industry, this section is a ‘best-of’ for anyone in the space.
BluAgru
A project that is in prototyping phase, BluAgru is developing a two camera accessory for smart phones. The two cameras are in a configuration with one RGB camera with IR filter and the second without. The founder is targeting a $10 accessory, which would revolutionize the capability of small scale farmers worldwide in enabling them to start taking advantage of basic Normalized Difference Vegetative Indexing (NVDI) which was once limited to large scale farming that could afford satellite based imaging.
Quantum Dot UV Camera
Quantum dots are a mysterious technology that I don’t claim to understand yet. Their applications are widely varied, and I have so far only come across their use in filtering LED lighting systems for better human centric visual light spectrums. This following research projects would further revolutionize the affordable imaging capability that BluAgru is working on. I have for years been dreaming of seeing ultra-low cost basic multispectral cameras come online, the UV capability of this invention may be the key enabler for adding a significant improvement in the solution BluAgru is working on.
Dilepix
With multiple large scale agricultural customers, Dilepix has built an (outdoor) farm management layer based around machine vision that can track livestock and crop health remotely.
Axibio
Food waste continues to be a major problem for cities and global civilization. Axibio’s equipment line and online platform finally puts intelligence into measuring and managing out food waste.
Smart Homes/Cyber-Physical Buildings
The best design goes unnoticed. My primary goal at CES 2019 was to find the most exciting/boring technologies in the smart home category. While most smart home products have so far been consumption specific, smart technologies that are embedded into buildings are an important piece in virtualizing our building assets to enable predictive maintenance and increasing building efficiency through better energy management systems .
Bouy is a perfect example of how a single device at the right place is all you need to make an exponential improvement in a system. As opposed to placing leak sensors in every corner of a building, monitoring the waterline input with a cloud connection allows for algorithmic understating of water use patterns and can detect leaks based on the total water usage.
Lancey
“The first electric space heater with an integrated battery.”
With the ability to charge its battery in cheaper off-peak hours, Lancey provides a great retrofit heating option that self optimizes to reduce total cost of heating for European style heating systems.
CrownStone
Carbon Design Hexakic
Automated windows are a key component of whole building smart climate control. In efforts to retrofit existing building stock to increase in efficiency performance, there are many sensors available, but few actuators such as this.
BIM-Y:
“BIM-Y is a dynamic database with spatial and temporal analysis tools.”
Curate Kinetic Collisions
Not all innovations and companies at CES have booths, some of the best finds happen at parties or chance encounters. Here are some Wildcards from the infamous Friends and Family Party put on by a collective of organizations:
Fictiv: “The Airbnb of Manufacturing”
Fictiv is disrupting the barrier to entry for hardware manufacturing by acting as a front end service that integrates the various aspects of development, costing and production into a simplified experience for the client. Take a look at their Hardware Guide for some great resources on understanding what it takes to get a hardware product ready for market. Or focus on what you do best and let them help you get to market and back to innovating..
