Alt Digital

Released last fall to the adoration of design blogs, Hue provides enough innovations to the way we light up our homes to make you long for the days when a wall-mounted light switch will be a techological relic.

A Hue kit--sold for $199 at the Apple store-- come with four wireless LED bulbs, a wireless hub, and an app that you download for your smartphone or tablet and use to communicate with the bulbs, up to 50 at a time.

The LEDs can shine at any color on the spectrum, and, with a click, will absorb the exact color from a photograph on your phone. Or you can rely on Hue’s premixed color "recipes," which are tested to promote relaxation, concentration, energy, or reading.

Philips isn’t the only player in the game, of course. About the same time that Hue was announced, the Kickstarter drive for LIFX, another Wi-Fi-enabled LED, knocked it out of the park by raising $1.3 million, more than 10 times its goal. LIFX ups the ante by promising to "visualise your music with animated colors" and integrating with Facebook and Twitter for notifications.

A little less sexy than the latest smart TVs perhaps, but drawing significant crowds at CES, were displays of kitchens and kitchen appliances. It is now a very realistic possibility that we will soon (after years of hype) be using fridges that assess when we are running low on certain food items and automatically reorder through our regular online retailer of choice. Given coverage of retail results over the last week and the development of this sort of technology, Morrisons may have even more reason to regret its slow progress in online retail when compared to the likes of Tesco. Another interesting appliance was a dishwasher from LG that liaises with your energy supplier to ensure that it only switches itself on at a time of day when electricity is cheap.

There are a very large number of stands exhibiting smaller scale, wearable computing such as health and fitness monitors and smartwatches (often combined). One of the most interesting of these is the Pebble smartwatch which was the subject of much excitement at CES today. This hotly-anticipated smartwatch was created thanks to $15m of crowdsourced funding (Kickstarter's most successful project to date) and is being made available this month. The Pebble has an e-ink display similar to those found on e-readers and lasts seven days on one battery charge. The screen is able to display a multitude of apps as well as tell the time. Third-party developers will be able to create apps for the watch which can pair up with smartphones running Google's Android software or Apple's iOS. Perhaps of more importance longer term are the devices that will help us monitor our health; not only heartbeat, blood pressure and so on but food intake and amount of exercise.

A huge number of acres of exhibition space was taken by car manufacturers. It feels to me that much of the focus in recent years has been around using technology to improve the quality of the drive as opposed to the in-car experience. But that is clearly about to change. Many manufacturers were displaying technology that can seamlessly link car, smartphone and location data to deliver an enhanced experience. For example, Ford were showing a car that would read your text messages to you as you are driving. Others demonstrated how by synching car and smartphone, the music being played in your car could automatically adapt to driving conditions. One soundtrack for driving faster on an open road, another for city driving.

by Stewart Easterbrook

10 Jan 2013