CES and the future of tech – WJCT NEWS

MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:

The Consumer Electronics Show, better known as CES, wrapped up on Friday in Las Vegas. The annual trade show is one of the biggest tech events of the year, a time for companies and inventors to display their latest and greatest ideas. And while the pandemic and politics put a damper on this year’s gathering – attendance was way down, and many of the big names stayed away for fear of blowback – we still thought it would be a good time to hear about the show and what it tells us about the future of tech. So we called John Hendel, a tech reporter at Politico who attended CES in real life, as they say. John Hendel, welcome. Thank you for joining us.

JOHN HENDEL: Thank you. Good to be here.

MARTIN: So first, what was it like to attend CES in person? As I mentioned, a lot of major companies decided to attend virtually this year. A lot of people did, too. So – but what was it like and how did that affect the feel of the conference?

HENDEL: That was the really kind of surprising thing in my mind because I think I initially expected just kind of pure tumbleweeds and, you know, no one really there even. You know, that was the initial kind of fear that, like, no one would come when you saw every major company from T-Mobile to Facebook to Amazon, you know, kind of pulling back from this. But there were still hundreds of people just all around the trade show. I mean, I think about 40,000 attendees still came to this.

MARTIN: Well, one of the points that you made in your post about it in writing about it with your colleague – because a lot of the big names stayed away, some of the smaller vendors got a chance to shine – right? – a little bit. So can you just tell us about one or two of the biggest trends that stood out to you from this week?

HENDEL: You know, one bigger focus we saw this year generally was on health and wellness very much front and center at the trade show. And you had health care companies like Abbott speaking when you really hadn’t had health care companies at CES before. You know, Abbott was on stage talking about their ways to test and, you know, how they’ve been able to help during the COVID-19 pandemic with rapid tests and how that technology might be used in other sort of testing. And you saw a lot of other vendors. There was …….

Source: https://news.wjct.org/2022-01-08/ces-and-the-future-of-tech