January 09, 2017
This week the word’s largest tech expo CES happened in Vegas. I was lucky enough to be there! I’ll quickly list my thoughts and then move on to some good reads.
VR/AR showed development but hasn’t proved itself outside of the entertainment sector. I met quickly with the VP of Product of Leap Motion, Ermira Murati, and she asked a lot about use cases of the other AR products I played with, which is telling because I think everyone is struggling to come up with effective use cases at the moment.
Wearing ODG’s AR glasses was pretty cool, while it seems like Apple is working on their own headset. The coolest futuristic tech was Sony’s Project T, which brings Ironman-like projected computer interaction.
Overall however, there’s a lot of ‘me too’ technology companies, and it’s easy to walk away thinking that most technology companies aren’t doing anything that special. Or in Stephen Sinofsky’s words: “A product that is not differentiated by software, arguably is not differentiated at all.” If you want more thoughts on CES, here is a great writeup.
“For the next two years, the Finnish government is handing out €560 ($583) tax-free every month to a group of citizens”
A 20 minute podcast on technology from a GS Managing Director, this was really excellent and I’d recommend to anyone wanting to get up to speed on Artificial Intelligence.
Great article on understanding why every tech company is scrambling to catch up with Amazon’s AI voice device Alexa and why Alexa makes a lot of sense for Amazon.
“While we remain a long way from anything that approximates what you or we would term intelligence, 2016 was a big year in which we made exciting progress on a number of the core underlying challenges, and saw the first glimpses of the potential for positive real-world impact.”
Thanks for reading! If you have any comments, questions or feedback please get in contact. Have a nice Sunday.
I'm Henry Moulton, a software design and development freelancer living in London, UK.
My portfolio will be online soon.