Making a play in Vegas
For the greatest tech show on Earth, newbies Adam Miller and his colleagues from Fort Collins high-tech laundry startup Tersa Inc. will enter the great hall of Eureka Park on Tuesday nervous and excited. This is, after all, the annual International CES, which has been the launch pad of the VCR (1970), HDTV (1998) and Blu-ray player (2003).
“This is the first time for all of us. I’m a little anxious,” said Miller, chief marketing officer of Tersa, whose founder, Aaron Tate, invented a shirt-pressing cabinet that steams out wrinkles in 10 minutes. “We said if we’re going to go to CES, we had to have a new product to show off. If we could get a new prototype ready, it would be worth going. It’s been a very intense few months.”
Like many new and longtime exhibitors of the Las Vegas trade show, formerly called the Consumer Electronics Show, Tersa isn’t focused on being the next must-have consumer gadget. The company instead is taking advantage of what CES is known best for today: a place to attract publicity, network with potential clients and partners and trade tips with other geeks. At this year’s show, which opens Tuesday, Tersa is just one of 3,900 exhibitors. And Miller is just one of an anticipated 170,000 attendees.
But at least Tersa has another way to stand out: Support from the massive Arrow Electronics, the Centennial electronics distributor, and Indiegogo, the crowdfunding site that offers inventors a place to attract
funding and customers. Tersa will be demonstrating its technology Tuesday at Arrow’s booth, #51033 in Eureka Park at the Sands Expo Convention Center.
“Any extra exposure of having our booth and that two-hour demo on Tuesday could go really far for us,” Miller said.
Arrow plans to showcase about a dozen startups at its booth, including Goldenbased sleep tracker Eversleep and app-controlled garage door controller Garadget from Grand Junction. And that’s just a tiny fraction of the 6,000 crowdfunding campaigns that joined its certification program as part of Arrow’s partnership with Indiegogo since 2016, said Matt Anderson, Arrow’s Chief Digital Officer.
But even for a large company like Arrow, which ranks as Colorado’s top company by revenue in the Fortune 500, CES is also a relatively new event for Arrow and it, too, is looking for ways to stand out.
“Arrow didn’t have much of a CES presence before we launched our collaboration with Indiegogo because we’ve historically been focused on the (business to business) market,” Anderson said in an email. “Arrow is always transforming and evolving, however — it’s how we’ve managed to stay relevant and successful in the constantly evolving world of tech for 80-plus years. CES makes more sense for us now as we look to connect with non-traditional customers, like startups and entrepreneurs, who we’ve actively evolved our offerings to better support.”
This is the second CES Arrow will have a booth with partner Indiegogo. Last year, it saw “a 265 percent increase in the number of campaigns opting into the program during the show, so that’s a pretty good indication that we’re attracting the right customer base,” Anderson added.
The company also got a good response with the 1,000 Raspberry Pi boards it gave away at the show. This year, it’s handing out 10,000 free Arduino boards.
At this year’s show, some of the companies getting the most publicity are also ones who haven’t frequented the show until recently. Most notably, Google, with its first booth in years, and Amazon are battling it out to get attention for their digital home assistant devices. Other companies with a large presence in the past, such as Douglas County’s Dish Networks, won’t be there this year.
Of course, if you make it out to the Las Vegas event, the usual technologies will still be present, such as TVs. LG is showing off a foldable display that rolls out of sight when not in use. Samsung has an artificially intelligent 85-inch TV that takes lower-resolution video and scales it up to 8K quality. And numerous carmakers, such as Infiniti, are unveiling all-electric vehicles.
But for many, CES will continue to be a show to test the market and see if the world is ready for another gadget — and then come back again the following year with a bigger booth.
“Our booth will be four times the size it was last year,” said David Barnett, founder of Boulder-based PopSockets, makers of the prolific gadget holder that grips smartphones so they’re easier to hold. “That sounds like a lot, but our revenue has grown 10 times, so it’s a relatively small jump in the context of our growth.”
At the company’s first CES in 2015, Barnett had to persuade his sister to help him out with the booth.
“Our goals for CES have evolved over the years, from 2015, when my sister and I chased down every passerby with a plea to hear our PopSockets pitch (we were lucky enough to land T-Mobile), to 2018, when our team of 18 attendees aims to deepen our relationships with our current partners by revealing our new products and working together on plans to bring them to market,” Barnes said. “We also aim to meet new partners, especially international ones.”
That’s where the Tersa Steam founders find themselves this year. After a successful crowdfunding campaign over the summer, the company was able to perfect its design and 3-D print what is likely the final prototype in time for CES.
The gadget, which looks like a giant medicine cabinet, holds a hanging shirt or other wrinkly piece of clothing. Press a button and it steams out wrinkles within 10 minutes. While the $399 Tersa Steam doesn’t technically clean the garment or remove stains — that’s for a future product — there are disposable pods, much like Kcups for coffee machines, that add scents to neutralize odors.
“We 3-D printed all the pieces and assembled it ourselves. We have a very nice prototype made of the same plastics we hope to manufacture with,” said Miller, who has already lined up interviews with major hotel chains. “Now is the time to go out and show the world.”
Spotting what’s next
Wireless charging: Forget charging mats to recharge gadgets without cords. A new breed of wireless technology promises to charge up to 30 devices left on the kitchen counter overnight or wearables like a heated jacket hanging in a closet — as long as they’re within 80 feet of a special transmitter. Pittsburghbased Powercast received approval from the Federal Communications Commission for the transmitter, which uses radio frequencies to help transmit power. A competitor, WattUp, also got an FCC nod for overthe-air charging for about 3 feet. Key word though: Overnight. Wireless charging still takes time.
5-D printer: This may be a marketing term, but the Ethereal Halo printer from India-based Ethereal Machines prints five ways. The first three are typical for a 3-D printer, which is left right and up. But the printer includes a moving printer bed so it rotates in order for the printer to also get a downward print and diagoAs nals. Hence, it prints on a five-axis instead of three. Ethereal also adds a CNC (computer numerical control) router to shave and cut into materials. While not yet available, even CES organizers liked it. The show named it an Innovations winner for 2018. Watch it in action at ether e a l m a c h i n e s . c o m /p r o d ucts/halo
TV with AI smarts: Samsung added artificial intelligence to its new 8K QLED TV because it uses machine learning to analyze video and automatically upscale lower-resolution images to 8K picture quality, which is way clearer than what you’re watching at home. Most consumers today haven’t even upgraded to 4K TVs, which are more than double the resolution of HDTVs. But then again, most of the video available isn’t 4K either. Hence, the Samsung AI TV, which adds sharper edges, reduces noise and enhances details you never realized existed.