photo credit: © 2010 CEA

I was lucky enough to be one of the 110,000 people in Las Vegas for the 2010 Consumer Electronics Show this past weekend, and I had a somewhat unexpected reaction to what I saw.  I expected to be surrounded by a dazzling array of innovative (if not bizarre) consumer products, on display for the world to see and fall in love with.  What I encountered was thousands of products that showed little to no original thought, and a collection of giant companies continuing to refuse to work together to improve the lives of their customers.  Here are a few observations:

1. Where Is The Magic Black Box?

photo credit: nDevilTV

One of the few items that I thought was a genuinely good idea is the announced inclusion of Skype in several TVs from Panasonic and LG.  This will bring video conferencing into the living room and off the laptop, and will probably become a great way for families to stay in touch.  But why don’t we have Youtube and Hulu on our TVs by now?  Why is it 2010 and I cannot order and stream every TV show, movie, or song that I want instantly and on-demand?  The technology exists- Boxee is by far the closest to what I’m talking about, but why didn’t the Apple TV ever get there?  It’s been around for 3 years now, and still doesn’t do as much as it could or should.  I saw a Boxee equipped box called the Nuu that adds skype and bluetooth and a few other apps (it is basically an Atom powered custom linux box).  But why do I need a box to do this?  Where is my God TV with a built in camera, on-demand everything, internet browser, Pandora/Last.FM/iTunes/etc. music, Youtube/Hulu/Vimeo/etc. fullscreen playback?  Why do I need a computer still to consume media?  I don’t particularly want to read on my TV, that can stay on the computer (or better, eBook or tablet), but I do want it to easily display all the video and audio I want.  The technology to do this 100% exists, so why don’t we have it?

Because nobody wants to rock the boat.

There is a lot of money to be had in selling a bunch of gadgets that together serve the consumer’s needs, and not as much in Übergadgets that do a whole lot of things at once.  The first major brand to make a TV that provides almost all of the media serving needs of a common home, wins.  Nobody wants a clunky, hard to use, harder to wire up box (or worse, a series of boxes) that all somewhat do what you want.  ‘Convergence’ was a big buzzword a few years ago, but it has quietly been put away in favor of incremental improvements in the ways that devices can work together, instead of making new gadgets that do more.  This is not innovation, it is exactly the opposite, and CES showed that everyone is on board.  So don’t hold your breath, Boxee and Nuu will get neutered, access will be blocked to content that is available on your computer.  For various reasons, they don’t want you watching whatever you want whenever you want it; they want you watching on the devices they choose, on the schedule they want.

2. Imitation ≠ Innovation

photo credit: © 2010 CEA

There were so many small companies selling pretty much the same product that it became a running joke for us.  Anyone who was at CES will appreciate this.  How many flat-panel TV mounts did you see?  We didn’t keep count, but it must have been 40+.  That is over 40 companies that are built on manufacturing and marketing the exact same product.  I saw one company that added butterfly wings to theirs, and a few that were motorized, but on the whole, there was absolutely no reason that one was any different than the others.

What the hell are they thinking?  Would you dedicate your career to doing exactly the same thing as dozens of other people, without changing a single thing?  There were other products that fell victim to this total lack of imagination: headphones, LED lights and iPhone cases were high on my list, but they are far from the only ones.  Why isn’t anyone thinking big and outside the box and trying to make products that actually have a chance of standing out?

I find it incredible that so many companies not only spent so much money making their lazy copycat products, but that they flew to Vegas and rented booth space right next to each other to try to pitch them to the World!  By the end of the show I was just giggling every time I saw an LCD wall mount, with marketing materials surrounding it touting their revolutionary ‘new’ ideas.

3. 3D Is Going To Change Some Things, But Not Everything.

photo credit: [kerwin]

The word of the show was “3D”.  Every major exhibitor had at least something in 3D, be it a TV, projector, computer monitor, BluRay player, or some other gimmick, and everyone was drinking deeply from the Kool-Aid.  I really liked this op-ed post from James McQuivey on the reality of 3D adoption in the home.  Basic gist: it took 10 years to get people to buy HD, it’s going to take a while to get them to buy 3D TVs, and not everyone is going to want one.  I completely agree with his assessment that video games are going to have the biggest impact on the adoption of this tech in the home:

3D viewing requires focused attention, and only a few people can do it at a time because the ideal 3D experience can only occur with a fairly direct view of the TV (don’t let TV makers kid you about viewing angles—you can see the 3D effect from an angle, but it’s distorted and not nearly worth sitting through a 2-hour movie for). Gaming is the ideal environment for 3D—gameheads stare straight at the screen in immersive gameplay for hours. That’s why gaming will lead in 3D. Sports content is the best broadcast content suited for 3D, and movies are next in line, probably delivered via Blu-ray for the next few years. Total hours a week you might want to watch in 3D? From two to five hours for most, up to 10 for a real serious gamer. That’s between 10% and 20% of viewing time, and that assumes that content is available, which it’s not. Would you be willing to spend the extra thousands in order to enhance 10% of your viewing time? Probably not.

3D is going to really shake things up, and I do think the technology is going to have a big impact on consumer electronics, and on media creation and consumption.  But I think it is very important for everyone to stay level-headed about it, and to not outpace the consumers’ desire for it with their own enthusiasm for it.  People do not buy things because they are told to, they buy them because they feel that they need them.

At CES it seemed like the pitchmen were not as focused on convincing the consumers that they need 3D as they were on convincing themselves that this is the Next Big Thing (TM).  3D gaming is going to be big, it was the most impressive application of the tech that I personally saw on the floor, and the one that is most likely to succeed.  So why were almost all of the displays showing clips of “Avatar” and “Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs” and not games?  Gamers are going to lead this trend, they buy new displays and computers more often than families buy new TVs, and their experience is genuinely improved by 3D.  Please, everyone, eyes on the prize: pay the most attention to the people who are most likely to want your technology.

4. True Innovation Sometimes Gets Overlooked

photo credit: © 2010 CEA

In 2009, the promise of laser TVs was all the rage at CES, and this year Mitsubishi had their LaserVue on display, but even they were focused more on 3D than this potentially game-changing technology.  I missed the LaserVue, and I’m sad I did, because the promise of 2x the brightness, 25% the power consumption, and 80% of the human visible color gamut are all my kinds of features.  I am sad they chose to shout “me too!” and tout their 3D displays instead of putting this one front-and-center.

Pico projectors were in full force this year, but almost nobody seemed to notice the laser pico projector Microvision was showing off.  I loved this product.  With no lens required, the image is always in focus and the color and brightness were much better than anything I saw from the other pico beamers at the show.  At 10 “laser lumens”, it was still dimmer than I know this technology will need to get to for people to fall in love with it, but it was a huge step in the right direction.  And apparently their goal is to license the technology to cellphone manufacturers, so who knows what will happen next.  Not to get too punny on you guys, but I think there is a bright future for laser projectors, and I saw a lot of promise in this little device.

The most fun and wiz-bang product I saw was the AR Drone from a French company called Parrot.  It is a 4-rotor helicopter controlled using an iPhone app with 2 video cameras and some brilliant augmented reality intelligence.  You can fight them against each other or computer generated enemies, all while watching a live video feed on the screen of your phone.  It was crazy to see, really stable and responsive and smart (they were pushing it around the booth, slapping it and letting it self-recover over and over).  This is the best remote controlled toy I have ever seen, and it was exactly the sort of thing I expected to see in every corner of the convention halls.  If more companies thought like this, my entire view of the industry would be different. [Interesting that a company called Parrot is the one not parroting everyone else's incremental "innovations"]

One of the silliest products I saw, and the only one that I actually took a sample of, is AdWipes. These things could not be any simpler: a small microfiber cloth you can print your logo or message on with a “suction material” on the other side to stick it to the back of a phone, laptop, etc.  I took one for my iPhone, and it works fantastically at cleaning my screen and obviously does its intended job, because here I am remembering the name of the company that gave it to me.  Useful for me, useful for the advertiser.  Win-win.  I wish more companies (especially ones handing out free schwag at events) would start with something that is genuinely useful and then add their marketing to it.  The last thing I need is to be handed a cheap yo-yo or blinky magnet or other piece of barely-recyclable trash just so that some company can try to get me to buy their products.

5. So What Have We Learned?

photo credit: © 2010 CEA

I would say that CES 2010 highlighted a few important problems in the consumer electronics industry.  The refusal or inability to converge existing technologies into truly useful gadgets is hurting everyone.  Media companies are not helping matters- trying to firewall their content into different areas to try to control revenues (as they understand them) as tightly as possible.  If Hulu were on every TV set, it would be able to charge ungodly amounts of money for its advertising, which unlike TV advertising is target-able and track-able.  The few companies that are trying to create convergence will probably have their products handicapped, blocked, and otherwise disabled, as happened to Boxee with Hulu.

There is a lot of bad business sense in the Industry.  Many of the biggest manufacturers were demonstrating absolutely identical products, with no significant reasons provided that would indicate why anyone should choose one over the others.  This was not just the LCD wall mount army, this was the BIG companies, all showing off the same large flat TVs and 3D displays and LED backlights.  Any smart businessman will tell you that you don’t make the big bucks by copying what everyone else is already doing; you have to come up with something new to really hit it big.

3D displays are going to change video games significantly; the industry needs to realize and focus on this fact.  The simple truth is that gamers want 3D, home theaters might want it someday, but right now there isn’t enough content in 3D to justify the expense.  The big push needs to be games initially, as the 3D TV channels and 3D BluRays increase and the glasses and displays get better and cheaper on the backs of those video gamers.  This is the only way their grand vision will come to pass, and hopefully somebody in a position of power realizes it soon.

The truly innovative products were hidden, drowned by the buzz of the “me too!” chorus coming from almost every booth.  The few products that really jumped out at me were the ones that took existing ideas and built on them, or combined them in a useful way.  The lessons they hold for both inventors and businessmen are pretty clear, I just hope they got some notice.