CES 2019
Another year, another insane, overly-huge combination of hype, chaos, and some interestingness wherein I talk to several cool people and lose my voice.
I have been a Las Vegas resident since mid-2013 and I was an employee of Intel Corporation for a few minutes in there, which means I’ve had floor access to CES for free for a few years now (especially with the alumni registration offer each year), and though I find the show to be almost a caricature of itself at this point, I enjoy going for the fact that several people I don’t get to see in person too often make their way out here for the spectacle, and in some cases I manage to run into them here or there.
So here is my take on CES for 2019, and what I’d like to see for CES moving forward (and believe me, nobody asked for my opinion on this for future shows):
Eureka Park
I am biased (expect that throughout this article), but the Eureka Park section of the show, held in what appears to be a barely-large-enough ground floor hall in Sands Expo, is to me the most interesting. Certainly there are a lot of companies there who have signed up for a booth when they could have saved a lot of money signing up for some floor badges and a suite somewhere (or less… I’ve had that conversation with at least one vendor so far), but generally speaking these are people who are there to show you what they are making, what they are building, how they intend to inject themselves into something you might not know you needed to have disrupted, and in many cases the people making their pitch are the ones with their sleeves rolled up making it happen.
After working with Makers and Hackers in my Intel travels, wherein I discovered that I actually did have some Maker experience of my own here and there over the years, I find these people to be worthy of praise if not for the product that they show you this time, but for the fact that they are making the journey, and they are showing you and the crowd of people squeezing through the aisles of that massive hall, a snapshot of their journey. As I mentioned, these are often the people doing the work, driving their vision, making it happen. Not every booth is filled with brilliance and wonder as a demonstration, but certainly a great deal of character and inspiration is illuminating the whole place through the week.
The Main Halls
I can’t say that the Las Vegas Convention Center proper is so inspirational. This to me is the other end of the spectrum. Where Eureka Park is filled with people showing what they’re building, the main halls are filled with companies and their sales and marketing folks showing what they’re selling. Not to diminish the technology and the advancements, but where some of that speaks for itself in most cases, these super booths hammer it home with thick carpet, loud music, and bright lights. Oh, and the products.
I could include the other parts of the show that are essentially tacked on to the main halls. There were other venues in addition to Sands Expo (including the first floor of Sands Expo, which did have booths that were not quite so hype-centric as LVCC, if I can continue on that cynical bent) there was also Westgate, Venetian, ARIA, and then a less-specific “Area” as called out in the CES mobile app (I’ll get to that in a second). In two words: Too Much.
While there is certainly value in having the people attending this show all in one place for the week, I have to wonder if packing all of this into 4 days (of floor exhibits, plus 2 or 3 press and conference days for the overall CES program) is leading to diminishing returns for the companies paying to be there. It is indeed the place to be for so many, but when there is so much surface area to cover with so much logistical hassle involved in doing so, I have to think the returns begin to recede a bit.
The Crowd
The word on the street is, attendance for CES 2019 was right around 180,000 people. I never know for sure if that includes exhibitors but either way, it sure seems like a lot of people. It seems like a lot of people, until you notice on the tourism website for Las Vegas that week-over-week and year-over-year comparisons don’t show the dramatic impact that one feels trying to navigate the ridiculous shuttle traffic between…
The numbers don’t change a whole lot, though certainly the crowd density is thrown off a bit. With so many people clustered around the venues mentioned above, Sands and Paradise roads and intersections really get a workout, and since these are part of unincorporated Clark County (south of Sahara is outside of the City of Las Vegas proper), who knows who should be trying to improve the traffic flow (that’s beyond the scope of this article). End of the day, the Las Vegas metropolitan area can handle the crowd, but the blocks within the metro area are taxed severely.
All that said, I personally enjoy the fact that people I don’t see so often sometimes end up here in Las Vegas for the mosh pit that it is, so I get to hang out with them, run into them, and sometimes go to parties or meetups or sub-conferences with them. In a city where “Hey, I’m coming to Vegas, maybe I’ll meet up with you” is rarely to be taken as an invitation to make plans, the odds of professionally-relevant interpersonal collisions does go up at CES, which is generally a nice change of pace.
The App
Over recent years there has been an attempt to have a mobile application that participants of all flavors can use to negotiate the whitewater-like rapids that are CES. The features are many and the app [a term or expression I am growing to loath but it is what it is… a Mobile Application if you will] improves so hopefully that will continue for next year.
Here are a few things I would like to see addressed in The App for CES 2020:
- Coherent maps and directions inside halls. It is often tricky to navigate within halls and while the application does try to offer point-to-point directions drawn as a line on a map, we’ve all come to expect context-aware directions to help us out. If your favorite traffic navigation application told you to turn left at a street address rather than an intersection, you might get frustrated… so is the case with the route line drawn on the number-laden CES hall map.
- Personal Breadcrumbs. A nice feature is the ability to search for and mark the vendor booths on a personal wish list or wander agenda. This was a useful feature and it seemed to be fairly usable this year. What I would like to see to take that to the next level is a way to mark off the places I did visit (whether on my wish list or not), and perhaps a recording of my path through the show over the days. Placing this into the CES cloud is probably useful for the equivalent of Urban Planning for the show (as it grows, that is basically the scope of the challenge), but at least storing it locally so I can remember where I was and what I might have seen here or there would be a high-utility add.
- Crowd-sourced Highlights and Recommendataions. Since each of us can select the vendors we want to see already, and if we can add on the personal breadcrumb feature suggested above, then the next logical step would be to somehow share this information with other attendees who might have similar interests as I do, so that I can find the nuggets that I might have no idea are there to be found. This was true anyway and in speaking with a couple of people I identified a few booths to check out, but there is simply no way to scale that through serendipitous conversation, while we all [I’ll take this as a given since this is CES] have in our hands a device that can make this happen. Surfacing points of interest in the vastness of CES based on the places I am already interested in checking out seems like low-hanging fruit and certainly combined with the breadcrumbs feature makes for the potential to make the most of the time and motion study that is wandering the CES show floors.
- Networking. Obviously we are all running into people we know, and having chats with people we just met, so another logical step would be to make networking there on the floor a bit easier. Taking a break to grab a coffee or lunch or a snack, or even at the end of the show to grab dinner when there isn’t a dinner meetup already planned, is an opening with great potential. In the context of the show, the mobile app could itself point people to meetups with others of similar ilk. Not at all intended to be for dating (there are other ways to accomplish that in Vegas), this would be specifically aimed at those collisions between people who might take some professional benefit from such meetups.
All that said, the application, even with its shortcomings (searching for “LG” while standing in front of the humongous and visually stunning LG booth turned up “No Results Found,” so it wasn’t completely bug free… similarly, vendors within booths of other vendors — pop-up configurations if you like mobile vendor markets — did not always show up in the application) is a useful tool and most definitely a component of CES that would benefit tremendously from some Hackathon treatment…
CES 2020
Unless I find myself Up in the Air pursuing a Big Fish somewhere, I will most probably be at CES 2020 with the same goals, to see cool innovation at Eureka Park (or its equivalent, if it continues to grown beyond its own box as it appears to be doing) and to run into old and new friends who happen to find themselves visiting this crazy city for this crazy event. While nobody with any pull to make these happen is reading this, I would offer these suggestions to anyone who does happen to have some say in what goes on:
- Ground Transportation. This needs to be address, no question. There are already city buses that pass through the Sands and Paradise corridors and normal daily traffic doesn’t cause trouble nor does it suffer much from public transportation, so the solution is there somewhere. Ride shares and taxis need to do what they do at the airport… the problem has been addressed there, it can be addressed at the eye of the storm. With self-driving cars all the rage and since Nevada is a state where they can operate to some degree in public thoroughfares, there is no reason there couldn’t be Local Motors Olli people-moving vehicles and Lyft-powered self-driving cars moving people about in a much more orderly fashion, removing the human stupid element from the chaos. We can leave that to pedestrians…
- Badges and Access. Why are CES badges the flimsy, fragile, easily-lost things that they are at this late date? Remember when we used to at least get them encased in some kind of sponsored plastic holder? We all have mobile devices, we should all have credentials that are integrated into the CES mobile application, I should be able to show my phone to a door person and not worry about my badge falling off or getting ripped off or left behind somewhere. As I was told when I picked up my badge, “Don’t lose it, it’s $300 to replace it,”well that’s sort of ridiculous. The bus system, as it is in the Las Vegas Metro Area, has an application that enables bus pass purchase and use, with optical scanners at the entrances of the buses to scan the QR codes and authorize ridership, the same can happen at the doorways of the halls and THEY could capture all kinds of data from this (along with any geo tracking in the mobile application). On the one hand, some might cry Privacy! but really this is about looking at movement within a small area with the goal being improvement of the use of the venue, layout of the show, etc… I’d share some time and motion data for that.
- Indoor Navigation. The old Conan skit, “In the Year 2000,” had all sorts of whimsical predictions, but now it’s going to be 2020 so it’s time to get serious. Why do we have to look up at the ceiling for placards hanging in or around the aisles hinting at which booth ranges we might find here and there? My phone knows where I’m trying to go, there is no reason the venue can’t offer some hints… the floor should point to different booth number ranges, beacon technology should be helping my phone identify where it is, and personalized visual queues (who hasn’t see Minority Report?) should help me along the way to reach that booth showing the latest in GPS-enabled IoT technology. Right? Let’s fix this, especially if we can get some crowd-sourced agenda recommendations to drive my daily routing plans so I can make the most of my visit to the show!
This is well beyond the bounds of possibility, surely, but I would also ask that the show be broken up into two major sections, like maybe “Big” and “Small” or “Indoor” and “Outdoor” and have the show take place in a smaller space with overlapping physicality. That is, half of the show is the first grouping, then half of the show is the second grouping, in a smaller space. It sounds crazy, but if Monday and Tuesday are Group A and Thursday and Friday are Group B, or even if we make the transition overnight and keep it at 4 days for the floor show, imagine how much more effective your time could be used to see everything, and imagine how much money each of the vendors could save! There’s no way this would happen, so maybe take that same suggestion and split the show into winter and spring sessions… it’s just too dang big at this point.
See you next year…
