Cool startup products at CES 2018
Ultimate gaming chair
A Ukrainian company, MMOne Project, is offering a robot arm with a gaming chair on the end. The arm can flip you over and extends up to 12 feet high. Great for dogfighting in virtual reality. Watch their short trailer here.
Cinema snowglobes
Do you like snowglobes? What if they showed movies? Cinema Snowglobes has married the traditional snowglobe with a small projector, so the globe can present a video, with snow!
Wiral Cam
Wiral - pronounced "viral" - was promoting their low-cost cable cam for small camcorders and stabilizers. It's motorized and can go where drones can't, such as through a forest. Makes incredible shots easy.
Modular camera slider
Most camera sliders are pretty clunky, and not something you'd pack into the mountains to get a great timelapse shot. But Dyno has built a modular slider that snaps together in seconds and, being plastic, is light enough to carry anywhere. And it's affordable!
Open source drone
Zano has taken a defunct Kickstarter project and is turning it into a Raspberry Pi for drones. It isn't a product - yet - but they're looking for people to help develop the technology.
The Storage Bits take
Evolutionary biology has a theory called punctuated equilibrium, which posits that ecosystems remain stable until a major shock - asteroid impact, volcanism, global warming (or cooling) - punctuates the environment. In response, evolution creates lots of new creatures, many that go nowhere, until a relative few emerge as dominant.
Technology seems to follow a similar trajectory. The newest shocks are AI, blockchain, and IoT. Despite the hype around all three at CES, I'm sure that we have yet to see the vendors and applications that will become dominant around these technologies.
When the PC revolution started in the 70s, dozens of now-forgotten firms began and, for a while, flourished. Ohio Scientific, Cromemco, and Processor Technology, were all innovative PC companies who got rolled by Apple, Commodore, and Radio Shack.
CES is the world's largest toy show, and I've only scratched the surface of what the startups were doing. Smart furniture? Check. Smart glasses? Check. Smart clothing? Check. Smart pet bed? Yup.
Many of these will fall by the wayside, for reasons of cost, ease of use, or failing to find a niche. But the ones that succeed, even in a niche, will make our world a better place.
To the optimistic ones, I salute you. Good luck!
Courteous comments welcome, of course.