CES 2019: Setting the Stage For This Year’s Trends in Tech

The tech world is kicking the new year off right with the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. Here, the curtain was pulled back on some of the major trends that are expected to emerge this year, including AI, improved self-driving cars, gaming, 5G technology and more. The four-day event also hosted many keynotes from speakers from Verizon, IBM, AT&T among others.

These were some of the top picks for new tech at CES this year

Sphero Specdrums

Apps and toys to teach children, or even adults to code, are not new, but Sphero has developed a way that may be irresistible for anyone. The Sphero Specdrums work like this: use the app to assign sounds to each color. These sounds can be beats, loops, musical notes, or even just a sound. Then with the silicone ring tap on the colored playpad or record your own sounds and capture your own colors to play on the world around you.  

FenSens

Make your car an intelligent, autonomous car with the FenSens rear-mounted easy to install sensor and app that can warn you if there’s something too close to your vehicle.

KitchenAid Smart Display

This isn’t the first Google Assistant enabled display, but this might be the first one you aren’t worried about having in your kitchen. The KitchenAid Smart Display has a 10–inch screen and the specs you’d expect to find in a smart speaker, but also is IPX5 water and dust resistant, so you can spill near in, drop food on it, anything you’d expect to happen while cooking. The company even suggests that you can wash it in your sink if the need arises.

Samsung GEMS-H

The Gait Enhancing Motivational System (or GEMS) is Samsung’s line of assistive wearable concepts. The GEMS-H is a lightweight lower-body exoskeleton that helps aid in mobility and can even add resistance for injury rehabilitation

FenSens

Make your car an intelligent, autonomous car with the FenSens rear-mounted easy to install sensor and app that can warn you if there’s something too close to your vehicle.

Bell Nexus

Uber and Bell Helicopter partnered with other parties to develop the Bell Nexus, which is essentially an air taxi. The concept goes along with Uber’s goal of launching and on-demand air service by 2023.

BotBoxer

For the techie that is also into fitness, BotBoxer is the answer to the Peloton trend of smart exercise. A punching bag on a stick that is loaded with motion and pressure sensors as well as analytics that can determine your body position and predict where your hits will be so it can react to your movements.

Otter+ Pop Symmetry Series

The convenience of a Popsocket with the safety of an Otterbox case. The Otter + Pop symmetry series lets you maximize your phone with easy swapping of Pop Sockets for personalization.

Royale FlexPai

The first genuine foldable smartphone isn’t really a smartphone at all, it’s a compact tablet with a 7.8 inch display that when doubled over and folded is a fully functional smartphone. It’s not perfected yet, but it is a glance at things to come on the innovation front.

Samsung 75-inch MicroLED TV “The Wall”

Samsung’s first MicroLED TV was introduced last year at CES, but that was mostly to show what was coming. Now, the technology is something that you can have in your own home. The 75 inch TV is going to be massively expensive but will have all the near-perfect picture quality as OLED without the feared durability issues.

BreadBot

While kitchen devices are nothing new to CES, but the enormous BreadBot may be more for bakery usage. The huge appliance says it can make 10 loaves of bread every hour.

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Event Profile: SXSW 2018

South by Southwest (SXSW) in Austin, Texas has become a cultural mecca for music and film buffs, as well as a place for hosting interactive events that cover a range of topics from everything new in technology, to entertainment and advertising. There is always a huge amount of news coming from this week-long event, so here is a breakdown of what we’ve seen so far.

SXSW Trust Barometer

Every year, festival attendees are polled for the Trust Barometer, which measures the general feelings those attending have towards technology, business, and media. The results of this year’s poll brought up interesting discussions, as there is a very low amount of trust in emerging technology, one of SXSW’s biggest draws.

Most of the distrust comes from a shift towards a need for more human elements in technological interactions, and a distrust in blockchain technology, virtual reality, and autonomous vehicles. Discussions about smaller, more personal social media platforms were held, as well as conversations about the widespread use of bots and voice assistants and how the reactions to these technologies have become more and more personal, with users sometimes treating bots as though they were chatting with another human being. There is without a doubt a need to shift to more personal communication methods and develop an understanding of how emotional attachments can tie into interacting with these responsive communication technologies.

Experiential Exhibitions: ‘Westworld’ and ‘Ready Player One’

HBO hit-show Westworld and Steven Spielberg’s ‘Ready Player One’ both partnered with creative agency Giant Spoon to bring the worlds of the screen to life for festival attendees. These immersive exhibits allow you to step into the ‘Westworld’ town of Sweetwater and the Oasis of  ‘Ready Player One’ interacting with environments, actors in character, and becoming a character yourself. Read a review of the ‘Westworld’ exhibit on Forbes and Business Insider and see a walkthrough of Sweetwater here and the ‘Ready Player One’ exhibit here.

Speeches

SXSW is focused on cultivating the creative and entrepreneurial spirit throughout the world, and each day speakers from convergence, music, technology, and film focused paths present their take on various topics. The hope is to generate meaningful conversations about the state of the world in each of SXSW’s featured verticals. Notable speakers this year include Elon Musk, Melinda Gates, Darren Aronofsky, Sadiq Khan, and Esther Perel.

SXSW ends this Saturday, so there is bound to be more excitement in the last few days of the festival. For more SXSW news and live streams of keynotes and other events, visit sxsw.com.

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Turn Your Home Into a SmartHome. Without Breaking the Bank

Turning your home into a smart home is a fun but daunting task. Many of the concerns people have when starting their smart home journey stem from how expensive it is to outfit or retrofit your home for everything from automation to voice control. But starting to venture into the land of Alexa and scheduled lighting doesn’t have to break the bank. Get started building your smart home ecosystem with these ideas for a low-budget, high-tech home.

Smart-Home Hub

The key to getting all of your smart devices to communicate is a smart-home hub. The Amazon Echo Dot ($49.99) and the Wink Connected Home Hub ($69) are great lower budget options.

Smart Plugs

Give the appliances you already own and intelligence boost with smart plugs like these from TP-Link ($29.99). These smart plugs make anything a smart device when connected to the TP-Link app, Google Home, Amazon Echo, or Echo Dot.

Smart Bulbs

Smart Bulbs can be expensive and some, like the Phillips Hue, require a hub separate from the voice control system. However, you can purchase less expensive options that also have great feature sets. GE’s C-Life Smart LED bulbs ($13 each) are controlled via Bluetooth and when paired with the C-Reach bridge ($49.99) can be controlled with WiFi and pair with Amazon Echo or Google Home, and TP-Link’s Smart LED bulbs ($19.99) are controlled via WiFi and can connect to your voice assistant without a bridge.

Smart Thermostat

At just under $250, a Nest thermostat isn’t exactly budget friendly, but if you are looking to really control every aspect of your home, there are other budget-conscious smart thermostats out there. Take for example the Ecobee 3 Lite ($169), which can pair with Apple HomeKit, Amazon Echo, and other smart services.

Smart Light Switch

For hands-free or app-controlled lighting beyond the bulbs, the Belkin WeMo light switch ($50) can respond to voice commands and schedule your lighting.

Smart Garage Door

Don’t panic about whether you left the garage door open ever again when you upgrade your garage door controller. The Chamberlain MyQ Smart Garage Hub ($99) works with many garage door opener brands, and the MyQ app allows you to control your garage door from anywhere.

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Marketing Tool: Chatbots

80% of marketers are expected to be using chatbots by 2020. Personalized marketing is becoming an expectation for consumers, and chatbots are another tool to bring personalization to your audience. It is certainly fair to say that not every company will need a chatbot, and that some customers will not utilize or like the option of using a chatbot, but for ever-evolving times, it is important to understand this trend as it is, as it can be, and to fully acknowledge the pros and cons of using chatbots within a marketing strategy.

What is a Chatbot?

NBC defines a chatbot simply as: “simple artificial intelligence systems that you interact with via text. Those interactions can be straightforward, like asking a bot to give you a weather report, or more complex, like having one troubleshoot a problem with your internet service.”

How do Chatbots work?

A chatbot responds to a message just as a customer support employee would, but is available at all times. Siri, Google Assistant, and Alexa are all examples of widely used chatbots. Chatbots are programmed with specifically coded responses to questions or can be built with AI and can, therefore, expand their knowledge base with machine learning.  When your customer asks a question or interacts with your bot, the responses that it gives are modeled to act like a real human response. Sometimes, a question will be impossible for the bot to answer, either because it has no prior experience with that question or because it is phrased in a way too complicated for the bot to understand. If that is holding you back, there are ways to program your bot to have prompts that might be able to get the bot and your customers back on track.

Why use a Chatbot for marketing?

Chatbots do more than just answering questions, they can also effectively drive engagement, make sales and nurture leads. Because chatbots built to use AI can learn, they can also remember details and have a more personalized and human interaction with your customers, something that is important as “nine out of ten consumers say personalization has an impact on their buying decisions, “ says research from LeadsCon. The evolution of social media and technology has played into the need to utilize big data in order to provide a more targeted and engaging approach to customer support and marketing.  Check out Hubspot’s list of seven brands using chatbots and get inspired!

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The Best Conferences to Attend in 2017: Tech, Marketing and Business

TechCrunch Disrupt NYC May 15th to 18th

Ideal for startups, TechCrunch Disrupt is for innovators, investors, tech fans and everyone in between, unveiling the latest in technology and key industry innovations. The Startup Battlefield puts early stage startups together to compete for the Disrupt Cup, cash prizes and the attention of investors.

World Business Forum May 31st to June 1st

Held in Sydney, Australia, the World Business Forum will host speakers including Arianna Huffington and promotes a “state of permanent beta”. Introducing new technologies and strategies is key to living in this state, and this conference empowers entrepreneurs, business owners and more to learn how to see new opportunities, use new tools and strategies and thrive with these changes.

Next Gen Summit June 2nd to June 4th

Specifically for the younger crowd of entrepreneurs, influencers and more, the Next Gen Summit was built for young minds by young minds in the entrepreneurial world. If you fit the bill for this niche opportunity, this conference in  New York City will be the place to be.

Confab Central June 7th to 9th

Minneapolis will hold the Confab conference for content strategy this June. Workshops, higher ed programming and great networking events for teams or individuals. With a focus on content strategy there are talks centered on UX, marketing, communications and more.

BlogHer June 22nd to June 24th

A conference specifically  for female content creators (bloggers, marketers, social media influencers etc.) this event is being held in Orlando, and  invites the fans, brands and other content creators to meet, collaborate and get inspired through networking with other attendees, workshops, and keynote speakers.

Summit November 3rd to November 6th

This invite only event in Los Angeles connects leaders in nearly every space, from technology to arts and culture, hosting thoughtful, well-rounded and meaningful discussion about the world we are living in. Keynote speakers at Summit 2017 include Kobe Bryant, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, CNN’s Van Jones, Jane Fonda, Olympic Gold Medalist Kerri Walsh Jennings and more. This impressive lineup of great minds will replace the Summit-at-Sea conference cruise.

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Smart Home Accessory Review

Perhaps our first real familiarity with the idea of smarthomes originated in pop culture, The Jetsons, Tony Stark (Iron Man), Disney Channel’s “Smart House” (1999). But now our perception has changed to a more realistic view.

Automated home security, lights, audio systems and more are all possibilities of the present.

So you have a smart home hub like the Amazon Echo or Google Home, but how do you use it to control all of these things? If you are looking to venture into the world of automation within the home these are some good places to start.

The Apple Home Kit

If you are an Apple product fan you may want to try out the Apple Home Kit. This hub allows you to control all compatible smart home products (lights, shades, thermostat, locks, outlets, garage doors, security systems and more) remotely from your iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, or Apple TV. Unfortunately if you are more of an Android fan, this isn’t for you.

Phillips Hue Wireless Dimming Kit

This white light dimming kit itself cannot pair with the Echo or and other larger set-up without the purchase of the Phillips Hue Bridge, but if you are looking for an easy way to control up to 10 lights per remote without setting up or using a hub, this is the way to go. This easy to install and customizable kit is a great first step into home automation.

Lutron Serena Remote Controlled Shades

These smart shades are pricey, but they are easy to use and to install. However, as far as smart capabilities go these shades are lacking in a few key areas. They can be programmed to open and close at certain times, but if you would like them to conserve heat and open and close based on temperature you have to use a third party app. These shades are compatible with Siri, and use the Apple Home Kit and the Caseta Bridge plug, but as anyone knows Siri is very particular and doesn’t always work to it’s full potential. While the shades have cons, they are also compatible with a longer list of other smart home products than many other smart shades.

Nest Home Accessories: Learning Thermostat, Smoke and CO Alarm, Indoor and Outdoor Cameras

All of these accessories are able to be set up in a larger hub using Google Home and Amazon Echo. The thermostat works with your schedules and learns your patterns to save you energy and money. With it’s smart eco-friendly temperature alerts and sleek design, Nest’s thermostat is both effective and attractive. In the same regard, the smoke and CO alarm is able to send notifications to your phone, identify fast and slow burning fires and locate where CO leaks are in your home. And perhaps the most impressive, the indoor and outdoor cameras are able to record, use intercom, and, with a subscription fee for Nest Aware you can access your video history up to 30 days later. You will also get alerts on your phone when the camera sees a person, and never lose power, as the cameras plug in rather than use battery power.

Blink Home Security System

If the idea of wired in home security sounds like too much for you, the Blink system is small but effective. These tiny battery powered cameras have a guaranteed battery life of two years, and replacing the batteries is easy, as they are powered by replaceable AA Lithium batteries. Motion detection, temperature sensors, Echo compatibility and tons of other features have put this home security system on the radar of CNN, Business Insider, Forbes and tons of other publications.

With the addition of these products into your home the smarthome once only referenced in pop culture is closer than you think.

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How To Use Gifted Gadgets

This year was a big year for advances in technology, so you may have gotten the gift of a brand new gadget that you have no idea how to use or how to get the full potential out of. Here are some of this year’s biggest gifts and how you can use them.

Google Home

These home assistant speakers can be the first step into turning your home into a smart home. Google Assistant speaks to all of your internet enabled devices, plays music, uses Google’s wealth of information to help you answer almost any question, as well as give you updates for the things that you care about including weather, traffic reports and upcoming events. When combined with other smart devices (Nest, Chromecast, Hue by Phillips) you can have your google assistant turn off or turn down lights, change the temperature of your home or even change what is showing on your TV.

Amazon Echo/Echo Dot

Amazon’s home assistant speakers utilize Amazon’s Alexa to control your home. The Echo is a dedicated speaker, with top of the line audio quality, whereas the Echo Dot has all of the functionality, just with a smaller speaker, for those that may own a great sound system already. With these you can connect via bluetooth and play your music from any source.

Fully integrated with Amazon, you can order from Prime as well as track those orders, use other smart devices to control almost anything in your home, and even order an Uber or a pizza from Dominos.

Smart Watches

Every watch has different specs, but one thing is true for all of the newest smartwatches: the designs are becoming much more attractive. Let smartwatches control your phone, send messages and emails, play music, answer phone calls, report the weather, give you reports on the elements and even track your fitness.

Fitness Trackers

The ever popular FitBit and it’s many competitors are absolutely one of the more popular gifts over the last few years, so it may not be a surprise if you found one of these in your hands this year. With tons of different features and specs, different models fit different people based on the type of athletics pursued and how fashionable one wants to look while tracking steps, heart rate, sleep patterns and a multitude of other statistics.

Drones

Drone technology will continue to grow and change, but the current models do live up to the hype surrounding them. Take videos, photos, practice just flying around. Just make sure you know if there are FAA regulations surrounding the model of drone you have, as this can cause you to need to register your drone, or limit the areas where you are permitted to fly.

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Top Tech New Stories You Missed Last Week

Happy Cyber Monday to you all, undoubtedly the most sanctified and unanimously-loved day of them all. It was one of the busiest week of digital news, but there’s plenty a discerning reader like you needs to keep abreast of.

Apple decided to do Black Friday

Last year it didn’t, this year it did. The mysterious Black Friday landing page carried no clues as to what might be on offer, except of course that big picture of an Apple Watch.

Google Maps tells you if a store is busy

Google Maps is providing real-time information about how busy a store is. ‘Popular Times’ was added to Search and Maps in 2015, but is now bolstered by this real-time data. The service aggregates anonymized data coming from Android phones that have opted to share location data. So, now you can know before you go.

Amazon Prime might air sports

Amazon is reportedly in talks with the NBA and NFL, potentially to air sports as part of its $99 Prime subscription. Such a move would obviously signal more danger for traditional cable networks.

Facebook’s may create a censorship tool for Chinese market

The New York Times reports that Facebook is building a censorship tool, which will allow a third-party to suppress certain posts in the News Feed. The effort is part of Facebook’s attempts to crack China, and has raised eyebrows in the US, given the networks failure to stamp down on fake news. Of course, as many in the press point out, it’s a lot easier to build a censorship tool than it is to build a lie-detector algorithm.

Amazon cracks down on ‘incentivized’ reviews

From early October this year, Amazon has made good progress cracking down on ‘incentivized’, less trustworthy reviews (for which reviewers receive free or discounted items). Analysis by ReviewMeta of 65m reviews for 32,000 products has shown these reviews, which have an average rating 0.38 higher than genuine reviews, are being removed. When Amazon announced the ban on these reviews earlier this year, it suggested retroactive action would only be taken in exceptional cases, but this new data shows older reviews are being impacted. Average rating for all reviews has fallen since the crackdown.

IBM launches Watson IoT Consulting Solution

IBM Watson (the company’s artificial intelligence infrastructure) continues to expand its impressive applications, launching a global consulting practice for the Internet of things (IoT). This will allow customers such as Ricoh to integrate Watson into IoT services.

A press release stated: ‘The practice will feature 1,500 experts across IBM Watson IoT headquarters…By integrating IBM Watson IoT Platform APIs and technologies, including cognitive, analytics, mobile, security and cloud capabilities, together with development and implementation consulting and ongoing support, clients can fully use the IoT without the risk and complexity of dealing with multiple vendors.’ 

Facebook follows Google & Apple, commits to bigger London HQ

Facebook has committed to employing a further 500 people at its London headquarters in Rathbone Square, increasing the workforce there by 50%. The news comes after Google has committed to a new building at Kings Cross, and Apple is in the process of creating a Battersea headquarters. Nicola Mendelson, Facebook’s European boss, said: “The UK remains one of the best places to be a tech company.”

Ctrip.com buys Skyscanner

Ctrip.com, China’s biggest online travel company, has agreed a deal to buy Skyscanner for $1.4bn. The acquisition of the Scottish-based company, which was founded by three Manchester University graduates, comes after it was valued at more than £1bn after a round of funding in January 2016. The Guardian commented that the news comes just days after ‘the chancellor, Philip Hammond, promised to stem the flow of British firms being sold to foreign investors before reaching their full potential’.

So, there you have it! Enjoy the rest of your week.

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The Nightmare Machine: A Spooky Look at Artificial Intelligence

One of the biological side effects of being a human is the will to live. Luckily for us, one of the ways in which our brain gives the heads up to inform us of potentially dangerous situations is by invoking that little old survival instinct called “fear”.

Have you ever been stuck sitting next to someone in a cinema, completely unfazed by a horror movie, while you diverted your attention to the closest escape door? Everyone gets spooked by out by different stimuli, whether rational—Trump/Pence, the NRA, embezzlement, or irrational—clowns, killer tomatoes, blobs.

Since we know that stimuli can evoke varying psychological responses, one group of researchers from the MIT Media lab, set out to find what unites us in our phobia and terrifies us on a universal scale. And so, they created a horrifying algorithm to generate scary imagery, designed to spook the living daylights out of us mere civilians.

Welcome to the Nightmare Machine:

A monster creation just in time for Halloween, which transforms an idyllic scene, say, an Ikea catalogue or the Taj Mahal, into a slaughterhouse or inferno, using cutting-edge Artificial Intelligence.

The spooky formula is powered by “deep learning algorithms”, and a secret ingredient claimed to be “evil spirits!” The team used two deep learning algorithms: one for extracting artistic styles from one image to apply it to another, and a second algorithm that generates “imagined” faces from trained data.

So far, the team has collected over 200,000 individual evaluations of computer-generated images, using a website form that presents a spooky image and asks the user to rate its scariness factor. The algorithm grew hungrier and hungrier for more user data, until it was able to think and feel on its own.

Starting little by little, experimenting with what they call the “nightmarifying” process, they used deep learning algorithms to learn first how haunted houses, then ghost towns, and more recently toxic cities look. Then, they applied the learned style to famous landmarks. It’s surprising how well the algorithm can extract the element from the “scary” templates and plant it into the landmarks.

The group’s primary goal is to understand the barriers between human and machine co-operation; psychological perceptions of what makes people tick and what make computers tick are an important barrier for such cooperation to emerge.

If you’re trying to decide what’s more terrifying, the images, or the idea that an intelligent machine is capable of generating them, the team assures you that they are interested in testing this experimentally to find out, so keep your eyes peeled for more updates from the Nightmare Machine.

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