Well Known Fact

I’ll follow up in a separate post about my experiences with self driving vehicles on the open road. In the meantime, here’s a Vox article that is drawing firmer conclusions than I’ve seen lately:

The first publication of this article was in the German business and tech journal Marketing Scout, and can be found here: https://www.marketingscout.com/trends/ces-2024-publicis-sapient-erlaeutert-die-wichtigsten-tech-trends-fuer-verbraucher/. The English language version in which it was originally written is shown below for reader convenience.

The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) is a hub of technological innovation. From the omnipresence of AI to the rise of autonomous robots, home-based health tech, and other groundbreaking innovations, CES offered a glimpse into a future where technology is increasingly integrated into our daily lives. As my 17th consecutive CES draws to a close, here is a rundown of the broad themes I saw, heard, and frequently discussed with fellow attendees in Las Vegas at what is often billed as the world’s largest trade show.

1. AI is everywhere. AI will undoubtedly change the world. We should all keep our expectations in check, though: not all AI is created equal. Keeping in mind that everything that might possibly be called AI will be labeled as AI, frustratingly for the lay consumer there is no industry convention to discern machine learning from adaptive automation from full blown original thinking by a machine. In short, some AI is very sophisticated and intends to burrow into your life. Other AI is little more than a learning thermostat. However, on the packaging, they both will say the same thing: “Powered by AI.” From the perspective of the Consumer Technology Association (CTA), the trade group behind CES, explaining these distinctions to the masses is important, but probably best left to another day. For now, attendees seemed thrilled to have a new technology on the scene that genuinely delivers and has captured consumers’ imagination.

2. Robots are coming to help. Really. New this year were autonomous street sweepers that can self-fuel, take out their own trash and fill up their own water tanks. Also, fully autonomous robot baristas and bartenders. I didn’t try it myself, but a fellow convention-goer said her robot crafted-and-delivered latte was “excellent.” Next up were improved lawn and pool maintenance bots, security drones to monitor your property and recharge themselves without human intervention, and other robots tasked to sort mixed recyclables—but not before diligently emptying the drips from almost-empty cans or bottles that humans left behind. As pointed out in prior years, we humans can’t be relied upon to triple rinse.

3. Health tech is bringing versions of gear from your doctor’s office to your home. Seen on the CES floor this year were home-based: miniature urine lab appliances, respiratory monitors, devices to detect early signs of neuromuscular biomarkers, incontinence management systems, asthma management platforms, and a digital home stethoscope that your doctor can listen to remotely. If you’re in need of a blood draw, your new laser lancer device can make that process safe, pain-free and leaves behind the fear of error a distant memory. And that’s in addition to AFib detection and pulse oximeter capabilities that may already be in your smart watch.

4. CES is a car show, too, and that’s here to stay. The latest trends in automobile design—the term “software-defined vehicles” is central to this new way of thinking—mean that your car might be better compared with your smartphone than the station wagon you rode in the ‘way back’ as a kid. Increasingly cars will take advantage of over-the-air updates, power up opportunistically when you have access to a charger (whether that’s a full battery electric or hybrid drivetrain) and provide a driver/user experience centered on apps that you can collect or discard over time. Safety features are being added at a rapid clip, including several that use LiDAR to detect pedestrians, cyclists, and other road hazards. That same LiDAR telemetry is core to several driver assistance capabilities now, and eventually will be leveraged by self-driving vehicles, too. Level 5 autonomy isn’t here yet, but the industry is working on it. And when the open road calls, the latest auto campers will automatically connect themselves to your car’s trailer hitch in a docking procedure akin to a SpaceX Dragon capsule-to-ISS rendezvous.

5. AI took center stage, but there are other major innovations worth noting. Both Samsung and LG debuted transparent OLED TVs with eye-popping color and top-notch resolution. Speaking of resolution, your new TV isn’t waiting around for 8K content to materialize through your cable provider or streamer: your Samsung Tizen display will dynamically upscale existing content on the fly with magnificent results. Sustainability permeated every category of the show floor from the use of heat pumps in super-efficient washer/dryer combo appliances to sustainable, recycled paper-fiber based non-plastic bubble-wrap packing material alternatives from 3M. Tesla is no longer the only major supplier of consumer household-sized storage batteries that can connect to solar panels or be used to draw and store power from the grid at non-peak hours to be used later when rates are higher. And your home’s main breaker panel isn’t dodging innovation, either: watch for smart circuit breakers that can be added to your HomeKit, Alexa, Gosund, or Matter-compliant home automation platform.

In conclusion, the future is happening again. Most of it is handy, but as usual, the economic and practical value to each consumer is a mixed bag. In the health tech arena, some inexpensive home sensors might save your life, or help you live better for longer. That seems worthy of a swipe of the FSA card. There is legitimately cool and useful new tech that will make it to your local Best Buy, Target, Walmart, or online retailer in the coming days. As amazing as it looks, I’ll pass today on Samsung’s 110-inch transparent OLED screen for $150,000, but last year’s model at my nearest Costco is surprisingly affordable, if I can bear to see a blank, black screen when it’s powered off. That’s so 2023.

In addition to two different presentations delivered at the Washington DC Auto Show on Saturday, January 21, 2023, I had the opportunity to chat all about emerging car tech on stage with DC Automotive Journalist William West Hopper. The full chat is available on his DCCarGuy YouTube channel here: https://youtu.be/CTAWOcPeyKE

The first publication of this article was in the German business and tech journal Marketing Börse (Marketing Exchange), and can be found here: https://www.marketing-boerse.de/fachartikel/details/2302-ces-2023-overhyped--underhyped/188691. The English language version in which it was originally written is shown below for reader convenience.

This year’s Consumer Electronics Show is showing that some major themes hyped entering the show aren’t necessarily the ones that are going to carry the day coming out of it. Here are some of my favorites that are falling back into the pack and some stalking horses ready to charge to the front. 

Overhyped

Robots at home

While The Jetson’s Rosie the Robot remains a model against which to compare a future domestic automaton, and Boston Dynamics continues to wow with dancing two-legged robots and ungainly robot dogs, the hardware still isn’t quite ready for a full blown lifelike assistant that can help with household chores—although some impressive steps forward have been made in approachability and movement. Still, a reasonable lifelike, bipedal, ambulatory robot that people can interact with akin to another member of the household is still a long way off.  Home assistants such as Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa, and Hey Google all continue to gain momentum as their certified device manufacturer integration partner network grows. More participating products and the growing cross-compatibility of devices as capable with more than one of the assistants will improve the situation, but don’t expect anything groundbreaking yet. For now, asking Alexa to dim the lights and close the curtains requires additional, usually costly components, and remains unnecessarily complex arrangement to set-up. Still, there are now very effective robots that will unitask reasonably well: mow the lawn, mop the floor, clean the solar panels, and scrub the walls of the pool. But not a single one of those robots are well suited to cruise the house performing all of those functions one after the other and bring you a hot cup of coffee—they’re all single taskers.

Generalized Artificial Intelligence

At CES this year, it’s easy to see—especially among the winners of the top show innovation awards—that AI is becoming an intrinsic part in many successful, just-released hardware offerings. They excel when their algorithms have been trained—oftentimes through some combination of robotic process automation (RPA) and machine learning (ML) to inform the AI—to do one thing reliably well. Medical devices come to mind in this arena. When presented with a new case after training on a several tens of thousands of examples, AI-can be an especially effective, accurate and efficient tool. But in 2023, those use cases work well—only one problem at a time. The day of a more generalized AI that can reliably make good decisions in a more complex scenario is at the root of vehicle autonomy’s sluggish introduction to market: it turns out that driving is more complicated than many initially projected, requires thousands of different rules being considered simultaneously—some of which are sometimes in conflict with one another. Making complex judgment calls isn’t the sweet spot for AI in 2023. 

The Smart Home

With last year’s presentation of the CSA and the recent publication of the Matter 1.0 standard, there was substantial excitement that the day of a unifying user interface for home appliances and electronics may be upon us. Not so quick. The Matter 1.0 standard is very much an early draft, few Matter participating manufacturers are aggressively rolling out more than a few token compliant products, and questions over the protection of proprietary corporate intellectual property remain unresolved. These are all solvable problems, but shopping today specifically for a Matter-compliant product may be a long search, and in the near term may forego the most capable versions of manufacturers’ wares. This will improve for sure, but like any standard, there is a network effect ramp-up period, and until a tipping point of ubiquity has been reached, having a Matter-compliant thermostat may not have a radically different experience than the non-Matter compliant version.

Underhyped

LiDAR

Most consumers are probably familiar with LiDAR—a technology that has parallels to radar but with lasers as the transmitting tool—hearing about it as the technology that will make self-driving cars possible. Two things happened in the past year that tells me that LiDAR’s time has come. First, the traditional cylindrical, spinning can form factor is being overtaken by a solid state, no-moving parts form factor that is smaller, and easily tucked into tight spaces unobtrusively. Second, LiDAR manufacturers are now joining forces with software companies—most of which are startups at this point—that makes sense of that LiDAR data and puts it to use in the enterprise. Anywhere you have people or objects that move, LiDAR has a potential application for measuring and reporting efficiency and improving safety. And again, some of the most innovative uses are outside of the transportation industry.

Augmented Reality

Among virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and mixed reality (MR), the use cases for AR are by and large the most difficult to achieve using current technology. However, looking at the major, breaking advances on the hardware side from firms like Magic Leap, combined with a growing set of software development partners building on top of that platform, is producing a very compelling offering for the evaluation of products in a physical space, technical training, in the operating theater, for extremely technical industrial processes, and more. The best of this tech is ready for the enterprise right now, and a new wave in the learning and development (L&D) industry will surely emerge in the area of authoring technical documentation intended for AR delivery. In the near term, the strongest ROI will be in the commercial space, but the broad mass market adoption using these tools is in the 3-5 year time horizon—and will become more main stream, if not quite as ubiquitous as smartphones. If you’ve ever used YouTube to get a how-to for a DIY repair around the house, before the end of this decade, you’ll likely be consuming a more contextually rich version of that content using AR glasses to be even more effective. (In the photo, a CES attendee is learning how to use an industrial paint sprayer using an augmented reality headset and AR-enabled version of the paint spray trigger, which has sensors for angle, position and amount of grip squeeze.)

Skin-printed temporary tattoos 

There are a couple of related use cases coming out of CES 2023 that involve a bit of processing, artistic flair, and technology that lays down ink on human skin. One well publicized example allows the use of a wand over the selected body part that perfectly aligns the temporary tattoo with a few parallel swipes across the skin. A different device pulls off a similar trick except with the application of eyebrow contouring makeup. It may seem surprising that this item appears on my underhyped list—it’s been all over the news. The examples already shown are mass market and profit generating, for sure. It will remain to be seen whether this is sustained as transformational or just a passing fad. But easily overlooked are the potential applications for precision mark-up prep in advance of plastic and reconstructive surgery. This use case hasn’t been well explored, but the most enduring legacy of this technology may well be to ensure that a surgeon’s scalpel lines will be placed on the patient with millimeter accuracy guided by machine, and not the frailties and dexterity of the human hand using a pre-op sharpie marker. 

Wrap-Up

This far-from-exhaustive list offers a peek at some of the themes encountered on the floor, in-person at CES this year. There are lots of other topics that just about hit the mark of where we might expect the hype and market readiness to intersect. Some of those topics, briefly, include Digital Twins, advancements in virtual reality, e-gaming in all of its many flavors, publicly-facing EV charging systems, and perhaps unfortunately, interoperability standardization is moving ahead apace, which is to say, too slowly for consumers’ demands of it. 

This is no knock on Razer, they are bringing a credible solution to market.

It's not too often that a volume is published that so clearly delivers on its mission as Dan Roche's new book, The Total Beginner’s Handbook for Doing Business with the Government.

It's smart, cogent, deliberate and entertaining. If you're into that kind of thing.

If you do business as a federal contractor, are considering it, or just play ne on TV, run--don't walk--and get this book.

https://amzn.to/3hZguKk

tl;dr Video signals seen by most content consumers are grossly compressed and therefore obscures content intended by their creators that are never delivered to their intended audiences. I call for content distributor transparency in the manner and degree of their compression technology, and a means by which customers can elect to get the maximum viewing experience possible. And advertisers should be noisily clmmering for the same for their paid ads, which are no less affected, and in many cases, are delivered under worse conditions.

I'll admit it. I was a tech nerd growing up. I was the president of my high school video club. This is no embarrassment. This disclosure to you, dear Reader, is in the service of conveying that I'm sitting on more than 30 years of first-hand nerdery about how the technology of TV, and behind TV, works.

From the vantage of 2022 it's easy to disparage the stone age of NTSC analog-signal television of the late-20th Century. But missing in that conversation is just how good a 525i analog signal could be. And that was much, much better than the downsampled digital versions of 20th-Century content readily seen today. Put another way, TV in the second half of the 20th Century was not cause for mass complaint of poor image quality.

I say that because, in the stone age depicted as over-the-air, analog color TV, signal compression artifacts weren't a thing. Sure, there might be a degree of degradation due to atmospheric conditions (i.e., a bit of static noise in the signal), but on the whole, if your set was getting a strong signal--and in analog that is a relative term, to be sure--you could have a very fine, no compromises viewing experience, indeed.

Fast forward to digitally broadcast TV, and with it, the proliferation of video compression techniques designed to squeeze more channels down limited pipe. This is where the story gets literally, and not metaphorically, fuzzy.

At the dawn of digital transmissions in the early 2000s, a child in my house watched a lot of Dora the Explorer. Too much, probably. It was also around that time that a relative of mine worked at the Viacom satellite uplink facility outside of New York City, where the signal for dozens of networks was delivered to the bird (i.e., satellite) in the sky.

For every one of those dozens of Viacom channels, there was a console with a human operator looking at a monitor to make sure the feed was being delivered to the satellite equipment cleanly. Rows and rows of these workstations--think a dimly-lit version of NASA's Houston Mission Control.

Walking up and down the aisles of consoles tuned to different networks, what caught my eye was Dora. I did a double take because what I saw on the monitor tuned to Nick Jr. changed my impression of mass transmitted video forever. What I was seeing in that control center was the pre-compressed signal. At 525i, it was glorious. A very sharp picture with eye-popping color. Not at all like the murky, fuzzy experience of that same content in my home living room, delivered courtesy of compression by half-a-dozen systems between that Viacom network center and my in-home cable box.

It got me thinking about the various video compression experiments at that time pitted in a kind of technology survival of the fittest: Outwit, Outlast, Outplay.

Fast forward 20 years to the current state of terrestrial cable TV, satellite TV, and over-the-top (OTT) streaming, the results have been mixed: the sheer volume of content available today thanks to compression is unprecedented. At the same time, the picture quality--and more importantly to many--the fidelity of the original signal to what makes it to your smart TV, PC or other viewing device has been, underwhelming at best, and frequently disappointing.

A careful observer will notice signal dropouts, compression artifacts and some lack of definition that collectively make the signal fuzzy and blocky all at once. Today when I watch streaming 4K video on my LG Smart TV, the show content looks glorious, but the first 5 or 10 seconds of each commercial is unwatchable. After a moment, the high compression signal gives way to a higher bandwidth, lower compression signal that looks like the HD content the advertiser expected. But still surely less awesome than the original file delivered to the broadcaster.

(As an aside, I wonder how little telemetry from these partially degraded ads are ever delivered back to the paying advertisers. I would suspect that there would be a lot more make-good ads being delivered by OTT broadcasters if paying advertisers had full visibility into what little of the first few seconds of their ads many customers can see.)

While my TV of choice at home is labeled as 4K, unless I directly plug in a 4K camera to an input jack on the back of the display, I'm not seeing the richness and fidelity intended by the originating content producer. This is why the 4K image a shopper sees on the showroom floor is oozing of contrast and quality and nothing at home seems to compare. If the retailer has an in-store demo display unit set-up to spec, the in-store customer is seeing as close to an uncompressed, high dynamic range, ultra high definition signal, at max refresh rate and every bit of the Energy Star-certified auto-dimming energy saving features turned off. Importantly, that shopper may notice you're definitely not watching live TV from a cable or satellite provider--it's an on-site source running an uncompressed (or very lightly compressed) signal on a demo loop designed to tweak the available color gamut to its max.

If you haven't seen an uncompressed 4K signal live on a soundstage, inside a news studio, or in creating your own raw content with all quality metrics cranked to 11, it's hard to describe what you've been missing. Even a casual observer will notice details easily discerned in an uncompressed 4K video signal that don't stand a chance at making it through the meat grinder of commercial transmission compression.

My holiday wish is that cable companies, satellite providers, OTT providers and others would be transparent about the compression being used in their operation. It is an important factor that is easily overlooked. Until that happens, I will stare up at my live sports and streaming content with a wary eye, knowing that there is a better version available at the sacrifice of bandwidth. I'd love to have the option to experience a new tier of service that maximizes my image quality for the tradeoff of the unavailability of other content. I suspect there are quite a number of people who would pay a premium for that, too. Cable and satellite companies--are you listening?

Sometimes the right answer is right in front of you, but it takes more than 200 years to push the easy button.

Intellectual property rights in most of the developed world—and patents in particular—reserve special privileges to the maker for a defined duration for exclusive use of an innovation before it becomes everyone’s to use as part of the public domain.

The patent enforcement model prevalent for most of the last two centuries in the U.S. relies on individual rights holders self-enforcing exclusivity, with the functional enforcement routes through the beleaguered courts system. For pretty obvious reasons, enforcement a is hit-or-miss affair—akin to a single beat cop chasing down every pickpocket in Rome. It technically works, but the model doesn’t scale well.

Copyright holders have mostly solved this challenge by setting up companies whose sole job it is to license protected works for re-use on behalf of rights holders. This is based on the foundational assumption that if you are, for example, the author of a song’s music and lyrics, you could theoretically strike individual one-off deals with every radio station, tv commercial production outfit and motion picture studio interested in using your song, but instead outsource that task to an agency (e.g., ASCAP and BMI) that handles all of that licensing overhead for a commission and sends you checks for as long as the content remains in use and out of the public domain. Better yet, that agency has policing privileges to enforce stray, unlicensed use of protected works as a first step before getting courts involved, backed by a professional staff of enforcers who more than earn their keep in corralling non-compliance, and whose very presence serves as a deterrent for unlicensed misuse.

Finally we see this same kind of system previously used for copyright being employed in wider use for patent licensing. Due to the sheer complexity of the tech stacks involved, integrated systems embedded in vehicles have become an area of intense activity.

These one-stop shops for auto manufacturers effectively offload the hassle of licensing patented intellectual property and is de facto cheap insurance to put the onus of policing compliance on a contracted third party, which is just plain smart risk management.

More here: https://www.autoblog.com/2022/09/21/automakers-patent-flat-fee-avanci

This Wednesday at the Consumer Electronics Show, GM CEO Mary Barra introduced the new Chevrolet Silverado EV. It went on sale for preorders shortly thereafter, with the $105,000 variant first run—which won’t be available for more than a year.

It sold out in 12 minutes.

Separately, Ford is managing an overwhelming response to its entrant to the field, the new F-150 Lightning EV (pictured below). It has come to Ford’s attention that an audience of people who pre-ordered the EV F-150 have no intention of driving or keeping their trucks upon delivery in favor of a quick flip.

Scalping is uncommon in automobile sales, putting aside that auto dealers in most states and for most manufacturers are legally authorized to do essentially just that—but the manufacturer/dealer century’s old-practice arguably continues to serve a purpose for distribution and service. These F-150 scalpers don’t seem to have facilitating recalled suspension systems top of mind.

Ford is allegedly exploring the possibility of compelling its dealers to enter into sales contracts with prospective truck buyers that would compel each original vehicle buyer to keep the truck for a full year before putting it up for resale. You might well imagine that we haven’t heard the last of this kerfuffle, with issues at play that cover the waterfront of contract law, antitrust implications, the peculiar auto manufacturer/dealer laws that differ from state-to-state, and outspoken free market capitalists representing every possible point of view from laissez faire libertarians to consumer advocates looking to support a ‘fair’ allocation of a scarce resource.

Who said that EV’s won’t sell?

Tune in today to get a quick overview of this year’s Consumer Electronics Show, and live Q&A from steps off the show floor in Las Vegas. Tune in on Facebook Live at 11:30 AM ET/8:30 AM PT to join.

https://www.facebook.com/events/1568123840206411

As a successor to the government-backed DARPA challenge that sought teams to design autonomous vehicles that could navigate a variety of terrains and conditions, now comes the Autonomous IndyCar Challenge.

Later today at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway, fully autonomous IndyCars will race at speeds up to 180 miles per hour to demonstrate the bleeding edge of high computational racing. The vehicles will race on the track together and will need to navigate the course and other vehicles under conditions that push onboard computing power to its limits.

The various teams involved come from universities around the globe to compete using race vehicles that are mechanically identical. A photo of one of the race cars on the CES show floor is shown below.

The first edition of this series was held last fall in Indianapolis, where cars were averaging lap speeds in excess of 130 mph around the Indy oval. Speeds in Las Vegas today are expected to be up a few ticks.

Coverage is being live-streamed starting at noon PT/3 PM ET today, and full information is available online.

We will look back at 2022 as the year when all the major auto manufacturers put the stake in the ground on the electrification of the fleet. There have been faraway projections of so many vehicles in so many places being all-electric by some way-out-there timeframe.

No more.

This week, both from statements made at CES but also away from the show floor, the auto industry is going all-in on electric. There’s evidence in the form of manufacturers bringing to market more than a token compliance car for California regulators, more than a first-generation attempt to get their feet wet with EV production at scale, even if it might be at a loss for now. Notably, major manufacturers are stepping out of the shadow of small vehicles to bring to market SUVs and pickups with no less power and capability as their gasoline sipping cousins. Recent examples include Ford’s all electric F-150, and this week’s announcement by GM’s Mary Barra at CES of the ready to launch Chevy Silverado EV, with a variety of trim and price points ranging from approximately $30,000 all the way past six figures. Less well publicized was GM’s blink-and-you’ll-miss-it announcement of an almost ready for manufacturing Chevy Equinox EV, which will fill a hole in the EV form factor lineup long overdue for attention.

Also, there will be a hand-crafted artisanal Cadillac EV in extremely limited quantities meant for the if-you-have-to-ask-how-much-it-costs-you-can’t afford-it crowd.

We also see municipalities and state governments take notice of their obligations to promote policies that will compel multi-family and commercial residential real estate condominiums and rental communities to build and embrace the installation of electric vehicle charging infrastructure in common area parking facilities. Also, many of those same local governments are stepping up to the plate and building charging infrastructure where it is absolutely needed to get the ball rolling.

For the past several years, attentive readers have noticed the formerly-known-as-petroleum industry pivot to an ‘energy industry’ label. And we’re seeing those global companies put their money where it counts, both in the US as well as abroad. The sleepy gas station convenience store of your youth is a dinosaur ready for extinction. I can confidently predict that in 10 years we will all be spending more time at and talking about Wawa, Sheetz, Pilot Flying J, and 7-Eleven than ever before.

Finally, the accessory industry is stepping forward with equipment designed to get you out of a jam—the EV equivalent of a spare gallon of gas you could keep with you, or that AAA might bring to help you get to the next civilized outpost for a regular fill up when your battery is on E.

It means a lot that later this year, customers will be able to shop at mass marketers such as Home Depot and Amazon and purchase a 1 or 2 kWh portable storage battery in a luggage on wheels form factor, probably best used inside the house to keep the fridge working during a blackout, but can just as easily be used in a pinch to fuel your car’s battery. (Pictured below is the Zebdure Superbase Pro, with expected retail pricing around $1100 for a 1 kWH version and $2000 for a 2 kWh model.)

Time to plug in.