The year has barely begun, and opportunities for startups to showcase their edge are already pouring in. The Consumer Electronics Show began on the 9th of January 2018 and continued until the 12th. After more than 50 years since its inception, the Consumer Electronics Show remains the most important exhibition of innovation in the consumer technology market.
Startups have not been left out of the festivities. Ever since the Eureka Park was added to the exhibition space at CES in 2012, startup exhibitors have grown from an initial five early stage startups to more than 900 startups in 2017.
The year promises to be even bigger for the Eureka Park with even more venture-backed startups showing up to exhibit at CES 2018. The event is for industry professionals alone, but the Consumer Electronic Show provides live streaming for the technology enthusiast who can’t wait to find out the newest toys to play with this year.
2018 promises to be a big year for startup consumer technology. Building on several innovations including: blockchain; virtual/augmented reality; and artificial intelligence in the past year, 2018 promises to be an exciting for innovation. We put together a list of startups to look out for while you enjoy the Consumer Electronics Show streams. This list is curated solely based what we believe would be exciting in 2018.
ROYOLE CORPORATION
The Royole Corporation is a Shenzhen-based company that creates and manufactures next generation human and machine interface technologies and products. Royole already has several patents to its name, including one for a 0.01mm thick (read: thin), flexible display with a bending radius of 1mm.
In 2016, Royole introduced the world’s first curved car dashboard based on flexible electronics at Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. With over $1.7 billion in funding and the likes of music superstar Akon in their C-suite as chief creative officer, it would be interesting to see what they bring to CES 2018.
ULTRAHAPTICS
The Ultrahaptics team was borne out of a research into tactile communication by the university of Bristol in the United Kingdom. The UK based startup that evolved from an academic project has secured over $39.8 million and currently has 8 patents to its name, including a method and apparatus for producing haptic (relating to the perception and manipulation of objects using touch) systems. Potential applications for their technology include automotive devices, smart homes and preproduction product design. The startup is currently partnering with blue-chip companies, developers, customers and the academic community for broader use case development. It would be interesting to see how its partnerships have paid off in market ready products at the Consumer Electronic Show 2018 exhibition.
SPEECHMATICS
Speechmatics builds on intellectual property developed in 2006 to provide automatic speech recognition software for industrial application. Speechmatics software provides voice recognition and transcription services. Use cases vary from creating machine aided subtitles for consumer applications such as Adobe Premiere Pro to instant transcription of Live feeds for media and broadcast houses. AL, their language building framework, uses cutting edge ASR technology and machine learning. According to the company, AL can build any language in the world in as little as a week using minimal data and previous language knowledge. With over 72 languages in its phase 1 Project Omniglot, there is bound to be some interesting applications of their software at Consumer Electronics Show 2018.
With over 3000 businesses exhibiting at CES in the next few days, there is bound to be loads of excitement for every technology enthusiast regardless of your technology preference. On the 10th of January, tech journalists and VCs will highlight what they believe would be the most exciting tech newcomers of 2018. What innovations do you think would make the cut?
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