Trip to Vegas.

If you’re a techie or a geek you will probably have noticed that the 2018 edition of the Consumer Electronics Show was held in Las Vegas last week, although increasingly it’s with a sense of diminishing returns.

The show, which has been running in some form since 1967 and annually since the early 2000’s has come to dominate the consumer electronics industry, and certainly, in the ten years from 2005 to 2015, CES was the event for manufacturers: that one they couldn’t afford to miss. For consumers, it was something to look forward to in January: a way to get over those post Xmas Blues.

As I said, CES has dominated the consumer tech world for the last ten years. The last two years have show a marked decline in the show’s importance. Those were years when a smart hairbrush and an electric car that still hasn’t made it into production were part of the breakout news of the year.

This year continues the trend - Not a lot of big news from the show this year. It does seem that unless the show’s organisers can really pull something out of the bag for 2019 and beyond, there’s a very real chance that we have gone past the glory days of CES being the go-to showcase for the gadgets and gizmos we’ll all be buying up over the coming year. Which would be a shame. I’m a big fan of the show and trade fairs like this in general.

You might wonder why – as the kind of consumer technology that CES specialises in becomes more and more integral to our lives – that the show seems to be waning?

Partly it seems to be because technology is becoming too big for CES or any other single show. We’ve seen the evolution of CES: one year the smart home is the big thing. The next it’s robots. Then robot cars. But AI is upending that trend. As we build the Internet and communicability into every single device, everything becomes technology. Even the terrible ideas like smart juicers and salt shakers that track your sodium intake. When everything belongs at CES it’s hard to find the space or justify the expense. So, perversely, at the very time we should be celebrating the place of events like CES, instead it seems to be becoming increasingly irrelevant.

At the same time, the crowd-funding model has enabled smaller developers to enter the market, and because they are pitching directly to their target market, performing the not inconsiderable feat of convincing consumers to pay for something that may not have reached prototyping stage, let alone retail.

As well as allowing smaller players to fight against the big boys, it puts them beyond the rigid campaign cycle of the traditional retail sector. And it also gives them more freedom to maneuver. Instead of competing for air space in a crowded January announcement market, players both big and small can now decide on their own airtime and make their pitch more effectively.

We’re going to take a quick break. Stay around for more on CES.

Before the break, we were talking about CES, the ubiquity of AI and the Internet of Things, and the effect that the crowd-funding model is having on product release cycles.

Which brings us back to the big boys. A lot of the bigger manufacturers prefer to stage their own events where their hero status won’t be challenged. Where they can demonstrate their own eco-systems. And where everything can be stage-managed and controlled. Because, when they don’t do that = as this year has again shown, things can and do go wrong.

Those mistakes are far more manageable and a lot less glaring when the herd of journos is on the way to another of your brand’s keynotes rather than heading off to see a sex robot redefine the phrase non-erotic with a mechanical – in all senses of the word – striptease. And the last thing your brand wants to be is further down the pole than a robo-stripper, a fate that befell LG at when its home controlling robot Cloi gave up halfway.

LG’s