Date: 14/01/2013

CES 2013: Core technology trends for smart world

Large screen high definition displays to watch digital media content or to surf favorite websites at home/office, and keeping power packed (digital and communication capabilities) mobile device in the hand/pocket to access digital information is becoming common factor among the global middle class community. This drives home-system to become a server and the mobile device a client. Home systems can take some more space for the sake of extremely high performance and portable device need to be smaller and pack max it can. The size and performance is metrics both in stationary and mobile.

In this small-connected cyber world, you are either digitally controlling the world around you or getting digitally controlled by the world. The electronics is becoming another tissue/organ in the body. So wearable electronics to see nothing less than double digit growth by shipments for lot more years in the future, but the big growth is anything post year-2014. The devices, which are now in the pocket, will move to a wrist-watch kind of device or some similar wearable device. The shape, size and technology is the task for innovator minds like Apple's engineers or may be a startup anywhere in the world. Today’s digital gadget is a mix of powerful technology in the backend and a humane like behavior in the front. So today’s engineers should have a great sense of art along with Maths and engineering knowledge.

Romancing with the sight: The display need to be bigger, brighter, clearer, Natural image quality, 3 Dimensional, interactive, lighter and more importantly less power consuming. OLED is great, but the projector technology has a huge scope. For time being OLED to see fast growth for 5 years. Flexible and foldable displays are useful features for lot of different applications, including foldable book like tablet.

Hearing magic: The quality audio is at peak with the sound comparable to natural sources. The latest technologies making the quality audio travel along with the listener, whether to bathroom or to a cricket stadium. User wanto listen to his favorite music wherever and whenever.

Touch: Devices controlled by a natural touch is already proven. Now it will proliferate to all the machine/equipments/devices human operate. Motion sensor based gesture user interface is already popular, it will peak in next 2/3 years.

Speech to text: Its fun to watch the mistakes the speech-to-text software commit when you speak in some non mother-tongue accents. India, where English widely spoken, the speech to text software fail miserably due to the local accent. Rather teaching global accent to every English speaking citizen in the world, its better the other way round to convert even non-English speech in to English and vice versa. This is the great opportunity for tech innovators. This technology is going to cause paradigm shift. The world is getting closer to this technology.

The connectivity between the devices: Is IPV6 enough! For time being, yes. It’s going to be IP network at protocol level and physical layer can be electrical wire to optical to wireless. The standards of today turns irrelevant tomorrow. The spectrum turns into as valuable as gold. Optical and GHz wireless to fully dominate the space, so more copper is left for motor winding, which is continue to be hot business due to robotics and electric car growth.

Internet of Things: Human, Machine, Material; everything on the net. Each becoming smart and altogether becoming even smarter resulting in smart-home, smart-car, smart-fridge, smart-toy, or just make anything smart by embedding connected digital device with it.

Energy for all this: Sun; Solar has yet not arrived in its best value for money. In 2013, solar business is under huge loss. That’s going to change by end of 2014. Any Solar PV less than 18% efficiency is not going to work. Any disappointed souls in solar industry need to hook to business with innovative technologies for a year or two more. Battery technology has huge opportunities to improve. If solar improves there is no need of any other dirty and dangerous energy sources.

Others trends: Wireless powering, rugged tech, recycleble/refurbishable devices, Green tech, low cost and very important is security.

The inner power:
The semiconductor, mainly silicon driving the growth will play an even important role in the coming years. Qualcomm keynote speech at CES 2013 indicates the importance of semiconductor chips. At 14nm, present day phone can fit into a watch and much of the device integration happens inside the chip by 3 dimensional packaging. The LCD or some sort of display unit in your hand and wireless-headset can be wirelessly linked to the watch-phone. This is just an example of innovation. Semiconductor companies with huge cash and IP will leverage the opportunity better than startups for some more years as long as Silicon dominate as material and lithography is used in making chips.

What enables semiconductor and every other research is software. It will continue to generate more revenue than many other fields. Money making is easy in software compared to others.

Sense: We want the best of the quality when it come seeing, hearing and touching through electronics devices’ output and input. The electronics is competing with nature in performance. The e-smell/e-nose and e-taste is the big opportunity for the sensor innovators. Sensors give best opportunity for startups in electronics domains. MEMS is already a well established technology, lot more sensor technologies are required. Patented technologies here can reap high revenues.

Companies: Vertical integration is the answer for long-term profit and stability. IBM, Samsung and Apple are good examples. Single domain focused companies like Intel, TSMC, Dell, Nokia, ARM and many such big and small companies to face more challenges. Between these companies Google stands out as totally different company. That’s where is the fast growth lies, the value generation with totally different model.

What’s must for companies: Have a direct/indirect revenue generating software business along with whatever business you do. Best thing is acquiring rather than building. Otherwise pure software companies can venture into product/device development.
Author: Srinivasa Reddy N