it’s weird week. Strange and strangely familiar. I stay in the same hotel with almost the same room as I have stayed in the last 10 years or so. Meet friends and colleagues you haven’t seen in a while. All three years older than her and a little less worn. A global pandemic does it to man.
Last year was supposed to be a triumphant return to the show for the first time in two years. But when Omicron’s numbers started to skyrocket during the holidays, you cooled off. And you weren’t alone. Attendance, which in 2020 he reached 170,000, dropped to around 40,000, a 75% drop in attendance.
From 2021 to 2021 there will be no in-person CES at all. His CTA to host the event finally made the right decision and went fully virtual for the first time in its history. It was a mess of its own. An event of this size and scope did not have a simple infrastructure in place. I also suspect that the CTA will make people less accustomed to virtually covering shows like this.
But the world is slowly returning to normal, and so is CES. It’s like going back to your old school a few years after graduating. Some faces are familiar, some are new. For better or worse, life went on without you. Hell, the school even built a big new wing. In this case, it’s the shiny West Hall of the Las Vegas Convention Center. With South Hall more or less closed for the event, a growing army of mobility companies has since moved here.
This is partly due to one of CES’s greatest strengths and weaknesses: timing. Strength in the sense that it is the first show of the year. Who wants to think (emphasis) on the big show during the January 2nd holiday dinner or on the plane?
In the weeks leading up to the event, the CTA announced that it expected 100,000 people to attend the event. While this is far from pre-pandemic levels, it certainly represents a significant recovery for a live event. After the dust cleared, he revised the number up to 115,000.Purely anecdotally, it was not felt That’s high, but sentiment certainly doesn’t replace official attendance figures.
I will say that there were spots (for example, the big chunk of Central Hall) that felt as crowded as last year. Indeed, I felt myself trying to have lunch in the cafeteria on the first day. Other spots like North Hall seemed almost empty the few times I went back. I’m not sure if there are any particularly good signs for robotics companies to focus there. flew the
Most, if not all, of the media outlets I spoke to had fewer people than in 2020 for a variety of reasons. First, we are all adapting to remote coverage. Second, many people are still (understandably) worried about the pandemic. It turns out that despite our best efforts to pretend otherwise, it hasn’t really gone away. Budgets are getting tighter and many media outlets are running out of reporters.
For obvious reasons, the full name is The International CES. He can make a pretty credible claim that CES 2020 is one of the first major COVID-19 super-spreader events. However, travel restrictions are still in place. China is worth mentioning. A day after the show officially ended, the Wall Street Journal headlined ‘China reopens to the world as international travel restrictions end’. China is clearly a huge player in this scene and any restrictions will always hurt revenue.
We talked about this a bit in our preview post, but it’s worth mentioning again. The CTA calls it “CES” instead of “Consumer Electronics Show”. Pedant? of course. To tell? absolutely. The organization wants CES to be more for more people. This includes cars, robots, and lots of software/apps. There are ways in which the event is still strongly tied to tradition, but its organizers have adapted its scope well.
size too. CES is vast. It dominates the city, or at least the area around the Strip, and can sometimes feel like a temporary city. Like any urban area, there are pockets of concentration and their share of traffic jams. If I knew what was good for me, I wouldn’t try to hail a car outside the Venetian Expo (RIP, The Sands) around 6pm. You should also know that you need a 20-30 minute buffer to get to Tesla’s silly Small World Tunnel, regardless of your mode of transport.
For the first time in 11 (!) years, the Adult Entertainment Expo was co-located with CES, and the AVN show (Porn Oscars) was co-located. A little tidbit: The whole thing is actually derived from the adult software section of his CES that existed in the 80’s and 90’s. It’s a shame we didn’t have time to check out the event and its idiosyncratic tech this year. I was able to come across the. They are a fun bunch.
One of the show’s most positive changes in recent years has been a shift in focus to startup culture. His two floors in Eureka Park are arguably the most vibrant section. Booths and aisles are much smaller and more densely packed. Not everything you see there is a winner, but the people who show it bring a genuine excitement rarely seen in big companies. I would have liked to have spent more time there, but it didn’t work out this year.
The trend over the past few years has been for big companies to choose to launch new things at their own stage and time. But as big companies move away from the show, bright-eyed startups are willing to fill the void.
As I mentioned in my previous post, this year was the year I put things on my face: I tried the Magic Leap 2, Meta Quest Pro, Vive XR Elite, PSVR2, and the Dyson Bane mask. VR/AR/XR reigns supreme again. How it manifests itself in the wider consumer world, on the other hand, is an entirely different matter. However, with the exception of Sony and its pure gaming headsets, it’s clear everyone has their eye on companies. is easy.
Another theme I found in talking to people in that world is Apple’s genuine enthusiasm for headset play. The consensus with these companies seems to be that as the companies revitalize the scene, the rising tide will lift all ships out here. It means that it was. There is real fatigue here.
The same goes for crypto/web3, but for a completely different reason. Bad news is constantly ringing in this category, and many of the people who would otherwise have been shouting messages from the rooftops are now licking their wounds. There was not.
No doubt my inbox will be full of them this time next year.
The TechCrunch staff has been putting together a Hot or Not list over the past few days, so we’ll include them here.
Some of the brilliance has faded around smart home technology. I can’t help but see that reflected in the Amazon Echo’s struggles. At the very least, it’s clear that things didn’t go as planned for many companies. But it’s very encouraging to see a sort of united front in the form of the Matter Alliance.
Meanwhile, health tech continues to gain interest, whether it’s home fitness or wearables. There has been a widespread movement to take some of these products more seriously as medical devices. In the meantime, it was really disappointing to see what happened to Mojo Vision after so many CES coverages.
Economics, of course, loomed large. Overall, the frequency of new product releases appears to be slowing across the industry. At the end of 2022, there was no rush of new products before the usual holidays. The reason is clear. For one thing, money is tight and inflation is high, so people are spending less on unnecessary things. Another reason is that supply chain constraints are having a measurable impact on the industry’s ability to ship.
Before the show, I asked Sony what they planned to show. For the first time in my memory, I received an official statement from the person in charge telling me what the company was about. is not is showing. “Sony will not be sharing TV details during CES 2023,” a spokesperson told me. However, the company did have a trailer for the movie.
I wouldn’t say this year felt like a transition, but that’s been the case at nearly every CES in the last decade. We also recognize that it’s perfectly fair to judge by the first full-fledged show in three years. The number of participants is a really good sign. As for us, I’m sure we’re not the only ones rethinking how he handles CES going forward.
