People Movers with Local Manufacturing
As I mentioned before there were a lot of Automonomous Transit vehicles at CES 2020 but the standout for me was Local Motors which uses 3D printing technology to develop rapid prototypes and adjusts their designs based on customer feedback. They have been iterating on their design for a couple of years now. I really like their local manufacturing business model standing up facilities near the demand in warehouse facilities that nearly every city has available.
Digital Inclusion for Smart Cities
Sensible Innovations has developed something that is so elegant and impactful you have to wonder why this has not been available everywhere for years. They use indoor/outdoor Bluetooth low energy beacons to broadcast pre-programmed informational and navigational messages. Depending on the user’s need the message is played verbally or displayed on a screen.
Cancel All Your Meetings
Regardless of what industry you are focused on one universal truth is that everyone hates office meetings. Enter Klaxoon enabling collaboration and engagement into your meetings taking the best of kanban boards, interactive information sharing, and a splash of coolness that invites you to be an engaged participant. New for this year is a couple of tactile devices to make access to the main components easier. The Klaxoon platform brings a box full of tech gear to every meeting room. If you want to hit the decline button on the old way of doing meetings check out Klaxoon.
Simply your Video Conferencing Tech
As an “IT person” there is the point in most meetings where everyone looks at you to fix whatever conferencing snafu is occurring. From telephony, unplugged P.C. components, and the decoder ring you need to figure out what vintage projector is in the room, the digital triage can be an enigma. And don’t get me started on connecting “fruit vendor” products to corporate standard equipment. What if there was a non-tech-threating digital assistant that looks fun to engage with. Enter Owl Labs and the Meeting Owl that will make your next meeting a “hoot” (#SorryNotSorry). With over 20,000 units sold the Meeting Owl makes your next video conference as simple as turning on a light switch.
Making your Water Heater Intelligent
It’s true everything has A.I. embedded at CES, including your water heater. French company (yes, they are well represented at CES) Delta Dore has created a heating element control for your existing hot water heater and a sensor that measures the outflow to record your typical demand patterns and determine when hot water is not needed to save energy. They have an ecosystem of Smart Home products and you can add a display device to order up a bit more hot water. This display will also show a digital countdown of available hot water should you be overthinking the limits of your normal shower.
Hydrogen Fuel Cell Powered Drone
With over three times the energy density of battery-operated drones (meaning 2 hours of flight time), the Doosan DS30 drone equipped with a DP30 hydrogen fuel cell is a beast of a drone at 8.5 feet wide. I think it is interesting to see applications of hydrogen as a fuel source and this seems to be an excellent application. The window shopping line starts at Doosan Mobility DS30.
That’s a wrap from CES 2020 in Las Vegas. Thank you to Zpryme for allowing me to share my experiences on their platform and to all your comments which gave me the energy to write these posts after the marathon that is CES. If you are interested, I will be posting an article on the components of an innovation ecosystem under my LinkedIn Profile next week.
