CES time

CES – The annual bun fight for consumer electronics is back on in Las Vegas.

This year the big themes are Car Automation, Wearable Tech and The Internet of Things or IOT as it is called.

CES is massive, on the times I have visited you can only expect to see half the show in two days, It is large, packed and noisy. Plus the city is crazy at all times of the night and day. As well as the exhibit halls there are numerous events and of course the parties and hospitality tents to visit.

Every year there are the Key Note speeches that set the scene for the show. These used to be the PC boys, The Microsoft and the Dells. Then we had networking the Cisco and Netgear. This years it is Mercedes Benz and Samsung giving their visions of the future.

Both are on-line to see at the CES website:  Dr Dieter Zetsche gives a good pitch on the future of self driving vehicles both cars and trucks. He shows the Mercedes concept car. It’s perry neat with 4 seats that can rotate to face each other.

While BK Yoon from Samsung delivers a rather bland pitch for the IOT and having purchased Smart Things they do have a reason to shout. This is one of the leading platforms for IOT see Smart Things they offer a large range of sensors for communications and monitoring. Some of the examples are a little far-fetched and seem a feature looking for a benefit. So we need wine fridges that speak to your phone? It is clever that you can choose a wine via your iPhone and the fridge lights up the chosen bottle. Neat, but unless you have a hundred or thousand bottle fridge a trifle unnecessary. Still Samsung will sell it to you. Interesting they did sell over 500,000 internet connected things last year. That’s a lot of stuff on-line. Some of the more practical components are the basic Window sensor.

For $50 you get a wireless window or door sensor that knows when a door or window is open or closed and fires off alerts and tigers when it senses a change. Clever and affordable.

More announcements and reviews to come.