Typically, the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), which just wrapped in Las Vegas, is a place for announcements with more light than heat. But amidst the bizarre and unnecessary gadgets that will soon be forgotten, big companies rolled out a handful of technologies that could be truly transformative.
What’s noticeable about these game-changers is that, despite CES’s doggedly gadgety nature, most of them weren’t gadgets. For example: While flat screen TVs may have reached the zenith of their development (paywall), the services piping content to them, mainly Netflix, are for the first time innovating in ways that are impossible for cable operators and with physical media like disks. Similarly, “connected cars” were a big part of the buzz at CES, but the software for them is likely to be a much bigger industry. Meanwhile, a company called Nuance pointed the way to a future in which all of our devices accept voice commands.