Since I'm going to talk about a French language report, this may not concern all of you, but it's not every day that such a professional and valuable document is made available for free, so for those of you who read French I thought I'd raise your attention to it. Olivier Ezratty is a French technology consultant who goes to CES every year and writes a report that he releases under a Creative Commons license. This year the report is a whopping 178 pages long!
In the interest of international understanding, here are the headlines from the exec summary (and I will admit to not having read any more than the exec summary yet):
- Everything connected: This trend would make my CEO proud (Yankee Group's research focus is Anywhere, ie. Ubiquitous Connectivity.) Basically Olivier says that every little gizmo now has network connectivity, often wireless. Home Networking and geo positioning were also significant network" trends.
- Design-led innovation: Following in the wake of Apple's products, design is becoming a key feature of just about everything presented at CES.
- Hard drive less and/or low cost laptops: Solid State Drives are leading disruption in the laptop space, and even though they are still expensive, prices are coming down. They are lighter, more silent and faster. On the opposite end of the spectrum, many laptops come in at under $300.
- HD race: HD is everywhere, from cameras to screens. Full HD is no longer the end-game with Super HD emerging at 4 times the pixels. Blue-ray seems on its way to winning the format war.
- Gaming is a driver: Gaming is more and more present at CES and the gaming experience impacts many other consumer electronic aspects from PCs to screens and HD DVDs.
- Influence of Internet: Embedded net services or apps are also present nearly everywhere, through partnerships. Holywood embraces advertising financed broadcast of content with Hulu.
- Robots invade: Asia is investing heavily in robotics and even though the models presented were still "simple", the trend is evident.
- Greener than thou: Green is the new black, with a focus on energy production, distribution or reduced consumption.
- Impact of technology on society and business practices: While CES tends not to care too much about that aspect of things, Olivier sees a little change in that respect with more focus on environmental and societal impacts of technology.
This ultra quick summary of Olivier's summary really doesn't do the document justice, so if you read French or can afford to get a professional to translate the 178 pages for you, I can only state again that this is a must read. And while it may not have a lot in common with FTTH, these trends have impact everywhere: remember recent news on WiiWare, the current debates on grid or cloud computing, etc. It's all intertwined!
