Showstoppers at CES 2014
January 2014, At CES 2014, Showstoppers held several events – their traditional press event, a kickoff and press update event for the IFA conference in Berlin and a platform for startups called Launchit. The Launchit event was held on CES Press Day prior to the start of CES, and the other two events were held on the opening day of the CES conference. The format for the Lauchit event was a series of short (sub 3 minute) pitches that did an overview of the products being shown at CES. The majority of the presenters were exhibiting in the Eureka Park or the Eureka Next areas of the show.
Showstoppers had a large diversity of technology that went from accessories to technology, to services to new technology products themselves. We took the opportunity to talk to several of the nearly 100 exhibitors. These included, OtterBox, STM, Cambrios, Lepow, Fujitsu and Neat.
OtterBox was showing a new line of iPhone5 cases and accessories. The featured case was the Commuter Wallet which is a full surround case that has a removable compartment on the back to hold several bills, a driver’s license/ID and 2 credit cards. It simplifies activities by allowing the user to just carry the phone, and still have their necessary ID and payment capability without any other items to carry.
STM was showing their new light weight line of bags, as well as their tablet/phone centric covers. The issue with new Ultrabooks in their low profile and weight, is they are being transported in 4-5lb bags that were designed for traditional 7+lb laptops. Their new Trust and Sequel products are ultra low weight, offer the same damage protection as the older heaver bags and are designed for the new lighter/thinner computing products.
Cambrios was showing their nano-silver clear filament coating for touch panels as an alternative to ITO coating. The materials are in production an stable though use in automotive in-cabin applications even on flexible and curves surfaces. This allows for new application areas in the in-cabin / dashboard control design.
Lepow was one of many vendors showing solutions and accessories for the mobile products space. They were showing their new high fidelity Bluetooth speaker system with a retro design as well as backup power sources. They had on display several lines of rechargeable USB interface battery backup devices for tablets and phones. These products had easy to hold shapes and ranged in a variety of fashion colors – both pastels and bold colors. The nominal connector is charging through a standard USB power connector, and then output with a microUSB socket. Most of the devices support a microUSB to TB connector cable for charging current generation Apple devices.
Fujitsu was showing their SnapScan document scanning solutions. This line of scanners is USB connected to standard windows devices and some support wireless connectivity to mobile devices (iOS and Android). The SnapScan products include mobile/portable devices, a high speed desktop scanner which features double sided scanning including OCR for the data extraction.
In the same vein, as the Fujitsu products focusing on the paperless office, Neat was showing their newest standalone document scanner with a cloud based storage and analysis. The new scanner can store the documents on a local device or in default mode in the cloud for world wide access to the data. The new system also includes several pre-built reports and Quicken/Quickbooks integration though an export format.
Images from the Showstoppers event at CES 2014 can be found at: https://mandetech.com/gallery/index.php/Showstoppers-CES-2014
