CES 2022, with real humans inside

Fourty thousands of visitors, only 30% of which from abroad, that's a far cry from the heyday, but a quantum leap from last year's virtual event. 

Anyway, you can always show off without showing up - CES 2022 simply shifted buzzwords from WFH to metaverse, and amped up everything VRtual.

If NVIDIA's Omniverse predated Facebook's Meta*, special mention to Hyundai for their branding extravaganza: Metamobility, MoT (New Mobility of Things), MobED (Mobile Excentric Droid), PnD (Plug n Drive), DnL (Drive n Lift).... Of course Boston Dynamics' tireless robots are in the loop (always willing to play with BTS members or to showcase innovation campaigns), but there's also the possibility for robots to somehow become our IRL avatars or surrogates. A bit more ambitious than just using e Ink to turn your car into a chameleon (a fun BMW concept car paint, though).

Samsung flexed once again their muscles and screens, between the curvy AI-speaker unfolding into a display to the S-and-G-shaped Flex S and Flex G, and their big browser Flex Note, a monitor that goes laptop. 

 

Yet I fancied even more some of their more conventional hardware: not necessarily the QD Quantum Dot) OLED, but the elegant The Frame (a collector somewhere between The Wall and an upcoming The Stamp?), and the convenient The Freestyle, which comes with Alexa as well as Bixby, but also with Tap View (just tap gently the projector with your smartphone to project what's you've been watching on it).

 

As usual, you can find all kinds of gizmos at CES. I have yet to wrap my head around this one, though. What went wrong at Colgate, and moreover among CTA curators? Who wasted their 20% allocated to pet projects on this slam dung?

But when it comes to relieving an itch and solving pain points, mosqitter deserves more buzz. Maybe that's because this ugly Dalek is into removing buzzing beasts: it lures all female mosquitoes within a 50 m radius indoor or outdoor. 

Maybe that was the whole plan from the start: drawing from a close range annoying innovation suckers to Vegas in order to prevent them from reproducing.

mot-bile 2022

* see "Meta-Fiction or Meta-Stasi?"

Photos: Hyundai, Samsung, CES, mosqitter.

Japan v. Japan - Artificial Belligerence v. Artificial Intelligence

In a Trumpian move, Shinzo ABE started a trade war with Korea, so far not reciprocated, except by South Korean netizens threatening to boycott Japanese products. Japan is not raising tariffs for Korean imports, but making Japanese exports to Korea more difficult for key tech components, particularly essential to chipmakers and display manufacturers*. 

Pressed by national media to explain such a masochistic move, the PM ended up saying that there was a risk these valuable technologies could end up in North Korea. Of course that's a ludicrous statement, since such trade between both Koreas would not only contravene international sanctions, but also defy logic considering the North's situation and priorities. 

The actual motive was officially to punish Seoul for insisting on reparations for Imperial Japan abuses, particularly regarding sexual slavery and forced labor**, abuses denied by ABE, his government, and the revisionist lobby Nippon Kaigi he was instrumental in founding during the nineties. This lobby that has all but taken control of Japan politics, while keeping the population in the dark regarding its highly controversial agenda (restoring State Shinto, the Imperial rule, denouncing peace treaties and human right laws, denying war crimes, rejecting postwar's peaceful constitution, returning to militarism, rewriting history textbooks...).

Today, MOON hosts LG's KOO Kwang-mo, Hyundai's CHUNG Eui-sun, and SK's CHEY Tae-won, to prepare a response that likely will pass by the WTO. Samsung's LEE Jae-yong and Lotte's SHIN Dong-bin couldn't attend since they are in Japan. A few days earlier, LEE invited his friend Masayoshi SON (Softbank) to meet President MOON Jae-in and major chaebol leaders. Even before ABE's bomb hit the ground, Samsung was expecting to lose half its profits in the second half of the year.

Korea Inc. and Japan Inc. united swiftly for good reasons. Playing a Huawei-style blame card against South Korea could backfire for Japan, and China could actually become the biggest winner. Giant tech companies on both sides of the... East Sea agree on one thing: this is the worst moment to fuel divisions between them. Regardless on how the trade war between China and the US ends, the fact is Korea and Japan are lagging behind in key technologies, particularly A.I., where scale matters.

So why would ABE take such risks? Is he still blinded by his obsession with revisionism, worried he could lose support from his base ahead of elections? Nationalism could be a welcome diversion when Japan pensioners panic about their financial future, but is it the right time to expose Nippon Kaigi's agenda, and what they are desperately trying to hide from the public?


mot-bile 2019

* fluorinated polyimides and resists (Japan produces 90% of the World's total), and hydrogen fluoride etching gas (70%). 
** South Korea's Supreme Court recently ruled that Japanese companies should compensate survivors.

CES 2019 Who'll Pay For The Wall? And Y-brush?

At last, The Wall is up, but a bit too far from the border with Mexico: Samsung is exhibiting in Vegas the most titanic version of its monster, a whopping 219-inch, 4K microLED TV. At that level, you should measure your screens in feet (18), or yards (6), or simply dump these obsolete standards altogether (5.5 m). This wall will cost you much less than $5.6bn, and will much more easily fit your living room once it's curved. Like LG's rollable screen, which returned to CES but this time for sale, under the group's premium brand for home appliances, as LG Signature OLED TV R.

In the weird vehicles section, BMW proposes a driverless motorbike, Hyundai a walking car (Elevate), and Bell a flying car (Nexus Air Taxi) so huge, that it takes as much space as 4 cars, and probably burns more fuel than 10 - prepare to be Uber-charged for a ride on that one.

Otherwise, IBM is back to mainframe computers: it takes a 2.7 m x 2.7 m frame to host its IBM Q System One quantum computer. It only takes two of these to climb The Wall, if not to reduce it to quantum bits.

Meanwhile, the French decided not to punch below the belt, like last year (see "CES 2019 - Driverlessly nuts"), but straight at the jaw: Lyon-based FasTeesh claims its Y-brush can clean your teeth in 10 seconds.

You just have to keep a low profile for two times 5 seconds, as you chew on the thing:.

That said, this concept is also smartly proposed in a BtoB version targeting medical or retirement institutions. That's a real game changer for caretakers.

What else? Ah, yes, after all, there seem to be still some latency with 5G.

mot-bile 2019

South Cow-rea already cow-nected to 5G

Lazy MNOs usually settle for milking the cow, but SK Telecom is neither lazy, not your usual MNO. And in its latest presentation, the Korean leader suggested to IoT-ize the cow in order to generate new applications and revenues:

LiveCare: "oral implant of bio capsule in cow, extract real-time information through LoRa, provide analysis through Web/app, alert and message to farmer" - that was Korea's version of the classic 'you have two cows' parable.

Of course, LiveCare was only a niche app illustrating the way the MNO intends to leverage its core techno and infra (network, A.I., cloud, data) to boost new business (e.g. IoT, commerce, media).  

A couple of days ago, BT CEO Gavin Patterson called all players to 'build a strong business case for 5G', and measuring bovine farts doesn't exactly sound like the next killer app... unless you replace cows with humans, and alerts with A.I.-picked medical or culinary recommandations customized for your microbiome (expect more A.I. news from SKT, already present with NUGU or Aibril - the latter with IBM Watson -, and recently joined by Hyundai Motor Company, Hanwha Asset Management, and the Canadian Element AI in a USD 45M fund to invest in A.I. and smart mobility).


SK Telecom is already 'building a strong case for 5G', particularly with its rival KT about to showcase its own flavor during the Pyeongchang 2018 olympics. And SKT are not just into testing earlier than others (e.g. recently 4G LTE-5G internetworking, or VR 360 over 5G with Samsung tablet-size device), or even into going commercial earlier than others, but also into building a stronger 5G standard (e.g. recently pushed for 200 Gbps packet swiching), and a stronger technological environment around 5G (e.g. recently 4.8 Gbps WiFi with 802.11ax in Bundang, or 5G-PON / Passive Optical Network distribution).


'Building a strong business case for 5G' will be more fun for marketers. Even if it starts, as usual, like with 3G or 4G, with existing services that will saturate the previous generation anyway, like HD video these days, a booming category if we ever saw one. 

'Building a strong business case for 5G' will also demand a touch of emotion, so I'll finish this focus on SK with their latest ad for 5G. It features an endangered species, Jeju-do's haenyeo (female diver):




mot-bile 2017