What we got out of CES
Connect Wolf - in the desert with consumer electronics!
Connected Life!
aka Tuesday Morning
The smart home folks (Bosch, LG, Amazon, etc) are positioning their ecosystems as “Connected Life” with AI-driven insights beyond the front door. I watched and listened to the stories they are telling and talked with them about positioning the connected family integration.
Booth Goals!
aka Tuesday Afternoon
Checked out the booths in Eureka Park like what we could likely have next year, found set-ups that worked well logistically and aesthetically to tell their stories and some things that didn’t. Build a plan to revisit when useful.
Random New Tech Friends
aka Tuesday Night
I spent some time swapping ideas and cautions with others in the IoT space.
Baby Tech!
aka Wednesday Morning
Checked out the Family Tech Marketplace- made some suggestions to folks who really needed it, learned that we talk to moms a lot more than most, identified some trends about style choices and the importance of an ecosystem mindset over a product mindset. Spoke with the baby tech division head of an established company interested in continuing a conversation.
Women in Tech MeetUp!
aka Wednesday Afternoon
These ladies.
Crowdfunding!
aka Wednesday Night
Crowdfunding experts gave their insights and answered our questions about how best to leverage those platforms to build community around our products, raise cash, and demonstrate traction.
Family Tech Summit! aka Thursday Morning & Afternoon
This was spectacular- lots of validating our take on trends like the prime driver in baby tech being simplicity of use and Facebook mom groups were specifically called out as one of the best sources of information and advocates. Also, some surprising insights about how parents assess the security and quality of a product ahead of time!
Content! aka Thursday Night
There’s too much good stuff in all this experience not to share it out, so I drafted 4 articles on our CES experience and a product review blog post.
Meetings! aka Friday Morning
I met with some companies in their fancy suites and found a simple interface for prototyping and categorizing IoT data in the device’s firmware like that we’ll be using and a hardware platform that will support a feature highly requested for our product (watch out, iteration- here we come!) but not technically do-able from a power perspective before this technology.
Suppliers! aka Friday Afternoon
I hit the component supplier booths and identified some potential battery suppliers and found a contract manufacturer from Asia that can do our hardware and the case (in medical grade plastic!). We have a strong preference for manufacturing in the US, but since there aren’t tons of manufacturers operating here anymore, that’s tough, and it’s great that we have a back-up plan if we can’t make that happen.
