CES continued to showcase innovation at this year’s conference with a new section of the show floor focusing on Smart Cities, bringing together an ecosystem of the corporate and government leaders from around the world.
With almost 60 percent of the world’s population predicted to live in urban areas by 2030, the development of smart cities is imperative. In the next few decades, 95 percent of urban expansion will take place in the developing world, and there is a real opportunity for private companies to play a vital role.
While still nascent, MediaLink believes that smart cities will fundamentally change the way people experience technology.
With this in mind, MediaLink asked U.S. News & World Report to co-author the 2018 CES wrap-up report, using Smart Cities as a filter through which marketers can think about some of the innovations featured throughout CES.
U.S. News has taken a leadership role in measuring countries, states and communities, using data to highlight how governments are leveraging technology to improve the quality of life for its citizens. We can think of no better way to ring in the New Year and wrap up CES than with the optimistic hope of a world in which innovation works in service of humanity.
“The development and success of the ideas we saw on the Smart Cities floor are contingent on many of the same things that are driving innovation for businesses and brands: connectivity, machine learning, data, and government regulation. Technology has the potential to improve the lives of individuals, not just as consumers, but as citizens. Brands, in turn, have new ways to think about how they communicate, and do business with, consumers in the context of the Smart City.”
– Michael Kassan, Chairman and CEO of MediaLink
5G: Connectedness from Connectivity
Dubbed “the biggest thing since electricity” by Qualcomm, 5G stood at the top of big tech topics at CES this year and is the forbearer of all that will be smart about cities and dramatically alter our lives in the future. Although not yet fully standardized, we see the industry charging ahead with the collection of new technologies that will underpin the next generation of both wired and wireless networking around the globe. Based on benchmarks agreed upon earlier this year by the 3GPP industry working group, 5G will bring data transfer speeds up to 1000 times greater than 4G (a full HD movie will take seconds to download versus minutes), support millions versus thousands of connections per square kilometer, and reduce latency from 4G’s current 50ms (milliseconds) to 1ms — at the same time, requiring less power to operate.
At this level of performance, it’s easy to see why 5G will go well beyond mobile communications and, in the words of Verizon CTO Hans Vesterberg, “transform industries and societies.” One can imagine the range of applications that may be possible as we move into the 5G era.
If “connectivity” is the state of being connected, “connectedness” is the quality or collective culture brought around by connectivity. In a world where 5G enables cars on the road to receive information about which vehicle may be braking or swerving in front of them before a human driver can react, imagine the possible impact on consumers. “Samsung on Monday highlighted the partnership announced last week with Verizon to bring 5G connectivity to the Sacramento, California, area at some point in the second half of the year,” reported Soergel. “Around the same time, AT&T announced plans to bring 5G to a dozen markets across the country by year’s end.”
The general consensus is that the innovations brought about by 5G will not be in action until 2019 or 2020, so we anticipate this being a highlight of next year’s CES.
“Enhanced virtual-reality capabilities, digitally integrated infrastructure and transportation systems, and ‘smart’ manufacturing — items and ideas all considered a ways off as recently as two or three years ago — stand to benefit immensely from the advent of 5G connectivity, which the world will begin seeing this year.”
– Andrew Soergel, Reporter for U.S. News on the ground at CES
AI Enables Everything
The only topic bigger than 5G at CES this year was artificial intelligence (AI). AI is a range of computing capabilities driving three major areas of technological advancement we see across both consumer and industrial applications: assistance, autonomy and optimization.
Most experts view artificial intelligence in the context of three types or stages: artificial narrow intelligence (the ability for a machine to do one thing or a set of tasks very well), artificial general intelligence (the ability for a machine to accumulate knowledge and use it to solve different kinds of problems like a human), and artificial super-intelligence (the ability for a machine to go beyond human capacities for understanding and problem-solving). While we are still in the first stage, experts believe we are inching towards general intelligence.
The ability for a machine to play Go or to find the best answer to a question are highly specialized abilities in the realm of artificial narrow intelligence. The steady progression toward general intelligence we’re seeing at CES is the ability to string AI technologies, like computing algorithms, natural language processing and deep learning, together in combination with an array of visual, voice and other sensors. Examples include autonomous vehicles; stores that know when we enter, take an item off the shelf and walk out (like 2018 Innovation Award Winner Aipoly in Eureka Park); or voice-enabled devices and sensors throughout our lives that control nearly everything and can even learn our behaviors and anticipate our needs, without our input.
Amazon’s AI-enabled Alexa digital assistant dominated conversations at CES 2018 as did, to a lesser extent, Google Assistant. A slew of partnerships and third-party products were announced that brought Alexa out of her silo and into everything from vehicles, to televisions, to kitchen appliances. Several third-party vendors showed off Alexa-compatibility that can be installed in cars, like Toyota, which announced it would bring Alexa functionality to more vehicles. Around the house, Alexa is joined by Google Assistant, Siri and Samsung’s Bixby in incorporating AI into TV’s, refrigerators, bathroom showers.
For marketers, Al opens up communication opportunities with consumers in ways never before possible.
Beyond assistance and autonomy, exhibitors and conference panels showed us that innovations in AI will help us live more sustainably and securely in our densely populated cities by optimizing things such as traffic and parking spaces, water and energy usage, emergency response and crowd management.
“Determining our over-arching strategy around voice is one of the most important priorities this year.”
– John Carroll, Vice President, General Manager eCommerce, The Coca-Cola Company
Data
As alluded to earlier, we seem to be narrowing in on a theme for our 2018 CES Takeaway: it’s not as much about what we saw at CES but how the innovations we saw at CES have or will come about. Most all of them appear to hang on the underpinnings of connectivity, machine learning, and data, as well as the infrastructure and regulations that governments impose — whether it’s net neutrality in the U.S. improving the fortunes of selective large companies or whether it’s GDPR in Europe, which is designed to protect the individual.
Indeed, many of the innovations in the Eureka Park section of Tech West seemed to revolve around security and privacy of data collection and use — and many of these companies are, in fact, European. Beyond compliance with GDPR, they may be seeding a privacy trend that, we predict, will ripple toward the U.S. in coming years. The use of citizen data by companies and by governments requires the tangible provision of utility combined with privacy assurance.
This notion becomes especially interesting in light of what Steve Crumb of the tech-focused nonprofit, Genivi Alliance, says are: “a lot more cooperative and collaborative projects launching.” One such project was announced at CES: Panasonic announced that it had secured bipartisan approval to construct a 90-mile stretch of smart highway infrastructure in Colorado — a move that’s expected to allow drivers and their vehicles to better communicate with both local government service workers and each other to pinpoint and potentially mitigate traffic jams and road hazards.
One of the impediments to private involvement in the public sphere stems from philosophical differences toward data and data sharing. The general view amongst corporate leaders is that first party consumer data is a proprietary asset to be protected from use by competitors. This view puts the company and its shareholders first, whereas, for the public sector, it is imperative that the citizen be at the center of data collection and usage.
“Data is going to introduce social and economic changes that we only see perhaps once or twice in a century,” Brian Krzanich, CEO of Intel, said Monday night during a keynote event to kick off this year’s CES convention. “I think we’re just beginning to push the envelope here.”
“Today, data is the foundation of innovation. Almost everything you’ll see here at CES — virtual reality, smart cities, autonomous driving, and, above all, artificial intelligence — they all start with data. What we’re seeing today is a rush — a rush of breakthroughs using data and AI.”
– Brian Krzanich, CEO of Intel
Net Neutrality: The Elephant Not in the Room
Perhaps there is no better example of the impact of government on innovation than the recent repeal of the net neutrality laws by the federal government. Indeed, so critical is this issue that the Federal Communications Commission’s Ajit Pai, who was scheduled to speak, was a no-show at the event due to reports of death threats in the aftermath of his decision to repeal the Obama-era net neutrality. FTC Commissioner Terrell McSweeny was also missing from her scheduled panel appearance with several FCC commissioners. What those absences left was Federal Trade Commission acting Chair Maureen Ohlhausen and a trio of FCC officials attempting to explain how the country will move forward without the net neutrality guardrails in pace. “As the topic of net neutrality has become top of mind in today’s digital advertising climate, there is trepidation amongst media companies because an open, transparent internet is a foundational element. There is however, genuine hope that transparency and choice will prevail as the courts get involved.”
Conclusion
So, where can marketers go from here to begin to put learnings from these implications into practice in 2018?
Moving forward, U.S. News will be working on an overall framework for smart cities and measuring their growth and benefits to inform readers as well as the corporations and brands on topic such as:
· What are the components of a smart city and what sectors are being transformed by technological innovation?
· How are smart cities getting built, and what are some of the barriers that must be removed and implications we must manage as we move forward?
· How do we measure and rate the progress of our cities — in the U.S. and abroad?
· How can we engage the business community to apply its own innovation in connectivity, data, machine learning and regulation response to further the progress of our cities? And as progress becomes a reality, how must marketers reframe their relationship with the consumer?
We at MediaLink and U.S. News are excited to see the new year bring about answers to many of these questions and foster an ecosystem where the wellbeing and happiness of the consumer is weighted equally on both a communal and individual level.
“Business can learn something from working with the public sector, especially when it comes to the data gold mine that cities are already collecting. Thinking of the consumer also as a citizen creates a context for quid pro quo. The result, as we see with Citi Bike in NYC, is marketing that leads with utility and authenticity.”
– Bill Holiber, CEO of U.S. News
