The last couple of weeks have confirmed to me that there is a lack of compelling innovation in the consumer electronics space… at least right now. Phone and smartwatch launches have become small iterative enhancements rather than substantial innovations, while IFA, the large European consumer electronics show, was a muted affair with little to set the world on fire.
In an era of smartphones and tablets, schools are beginning to change their curriculum, taking the focus off skills such as cursive writing. As voice-based interfaces become more pervasive, what additional changes will the future bring?
Apple caused a stir this week with the warning that it was going to miss smartphone sales expectations for the past quarter. While much of the focus was placed on the Chinese market, there’s far more to digest here. Fundamentally, consumers are not upgrading their iPhones as frequently as Apple had expected, but this should hardly be a surprise. And there are greater concerns looking forward.
The smart city future faces a lot of challenges...
Yesterday Amazon unleashed a tidal wave of new products, from clocks and microwaves, to an in-car Echo, and a bevy of music devices. But what is most interesting is likely not the overwhelming quantity or specifics of every item, but the clear path Amazon continues to take in both owning and partnering within its ecosystems.
The technology ecosystem is evolving and the smartphone may no longer be the dominant consumer product. Welcome to the Age of Voice and Artificial Intelligence (AI).
The refrigerator demo was going well. The combination of cameras inside the fridge and artificial intelligence (AI) metaphorically wrapped around each item meant the external screen we were looking at not only showed what was inside, but also tagged each item with its appropriate food category. The demonstrator looked relieved and, in a moment of candid honesty, said, “Phew. Earlier the fridge labeled that broccoli as a peach and the bread as a watermelon.”
The show when:
- Blockchain, AI, VR and other buzzwords
- Hey Google!
- One well placed rant
- The robot uprising has begun
- Not all robots were feisty
- Time for a new body?
The U.S. is number four in the list of innovative countries worldwide, according to a June 2017 Business Insider article. On the surface, it's a puzzling rank. This is, after all, the country that put a man on the moon (and maybe will again soon), built the initial Internet, and is home to many of the major tech companies, such as Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Apple. And yet, Switzerland, Sweden, and the Netherlands all rank higher for innovation. Ouch.
The lady sitting in front of me on the tram was clearly into her music. She was using headphones, but it didn’t really make much of a difference. The tram driver came back with the request for her to turn her iPhone volume down, which she did. In the relative quiet that followed, I realized that there were two tech issues addressed by that single moment. Firstly, in a future (or in some places, current) world where there is no tram driver anymore, we would have continued to listen to the tinny echoes of Eric passing through the headphones; and secondly, tech smarts can (at least for now) be ignored at will by the consumer.
