entertainment booking agency: Steve Rosenbaum: CES 2012: The Year of iStuff

Monday, January 16, 2012

Steve Rosenbaum: CES 2012: The Year of iStuff

This year's massive consumer electronics show had plenty of shiny new screens, tablets, and ultra-books.

But if you looked closely, the star of the show wasn't the hardware - it was the emergence of the connected world that is changing the way we live.

We've all expected our TV's would connect to the web -and now that's here. Our laptops and tablets, sure of course. But what about our shower?

iShower is a WiFi enabled streaming device. But it doesn't stream water, instead it streams songs. Music from any discoverable device in your home is now putting a soundtrack to your most private morning rituals. Waterproof? Of course it is.

Wander in to the back yard and fire up the Webber for the summer tradition of a Barbecue
and you'll find that this old style tradition of flames and coal has been 'enhanced' with technology. iGrill turns the famous 'is it done yet' game into a digitally accurate - wireless - solution.

Elsewhere around the house, any concerns you may have about your children or misbehaving nanny can be monitored - wirelessly - using iBaby.

Now, you can't put an RFID tag on your children (that would be creepy) but what about the four-legged family member who tends to run off and leave you searching the neighborhood till Fido gets hungry? Well, now there's iDog (which is actually called Tagg) a wireless GPS dog tracker that gives you a real time map of your escaped puppy's current position.

And, back at home - the whole medicine chest and family first aid kit has been wired, with iHealth providing digital blood pressure monitors, pedometers, even blood glucose levels.

We've arrived at a moment where anything that has a battery or a plug is expected to have a connection to the wired world. While there's been the novelty of the wired refrigerator at CES for years, this year for the the first time the almost universal access to wifi, along with web services that can provide a useful service to web-connected devices seems to have turned a page in the history of our world and our electronic connection to the devices we count on to manage our complex lives.

It used to be their was our digital life, and our 'real' life. Now - post CES 2012 - you can see the convergence of connected machines.

But now in the world of iShow, IGrill, and iBaby - we're wired 24-7 to the things that matter.

There's even - iLove.