Part 5 of 5 in Todd’s CES Tech Report coverage.

So, really, what did CES 2012 mean? Besides awful food, huge lines, and four days of extreme product overload and talks?

Game Changers. Maybe 2 or 3.

Out of the entire show, I thought there were perhaps three game-changers, for large values of game.  And one confused game that’s changing.

There were two consumer-targeted 3d printers. Their booths were always crowded, and you can see the incredulous wonder on everyone’s faces, wonder that was missing from even the geekiest gadgetry. Makerbot had the hacky hipster flair, and Cubism had the slick Braun-like design, but they both turn plastic wire into 3d objects based on plans you can download or develop yourself with Google Sketchup.

Cube/Cubify was a bit more commercial focused – they are pursuing license deals with, say, Pixar. Pay 5 bucks, download the control file for Lightnin’ McQueen, print one out. Makerbot was more into free plans from the community, but could easily add licensed content as well.

But imagine a 3d printer in your kids school. Imagine printing out parts for a stop-motion film your kids can make. Print out your own building bricks. Lost a chess piece – make a new one. Design a new tread for your Lego Mindstorm kit. The tech is in its infancy, but the possibilities are wide open, and kids can focus on learning design strategies and skills, rather than, say, whittlin’. Dream a shape – hold it in your hands.

Imagine a quality 3d printer in a Home Depot. How would that change inventory management on its head for a retailer?

And imagine a 3d printer in a village in India, with a channel full of plans curated by some NGO. Need a water pump? Print one out. Found an improvement to it? Upload new plans so everyone can update their water pump, whereever they are. And with microloans, you can be the family in the village with the printer to make gears and machines for people.

Digital distribution of physical objects. Game-changing. Still in it’s infancy, but rapidly improving.

The second was tucked up into a small booth in the Emerging Technology section. Modular Robotics, from Boulder CO has built small building blocks – kinda like BugLabs for computers – for robots called Cubelets. Each cube has a function, actuator or a sensor, and you don’t have to wire anything – just clip them together, they figure out what their job is, and off they go. Their point is that kids learn best through play and experimentation. To quote the site:

“You can build robots that drive around on a tabletop, respond to light, sound, and temperature, and have surprisingly lifelike behavior. But instead of programming that behavior, you snap the cubelets together and watch the behavior emerge like with a flock of birds or a swarm of bees.”

I can’t quite put my finger on it, but the amount of smart people on the team and board, the press (wired, Times, etc) – I think they will have a big impact on education. The simple plugging together of sensors, actuators and logic is a powerful concept for rapid prototyping. And having played with similar educational toolkits, this is dead simple and actually works [looking at you, Lego].

The third, to me, was the YouTube keynote. They are pushing, with not a lot of effort,  YouTube from a social video repository of crazy, goofy stuff to a real publishing and distribution platform for video content, open to everyone – a true content entrepreneurship infrastructure. It’s going to change the current advertising, marketing, and broadcast markets in unknown but dramatic ways. It’s pretty quietly audacious.

The Changing Game

It’s clear everyone with a hand in the consumer consumption of media is focused on convergence, whether through the end device or through owning the cloud. It’s where the next battle of media companies, creators, curators and distributors will be fought, and where advertising is going to be in a crazy state for a couple of years. Will the cable companies drag their heels? Will the studios and broadcasters fight back and keep relevant? Will the internet win (again)? Business models are in rapid and somewhat chaotic shift, and as < points out >, a $300B industry will not go quietly into that blissful night of all Internet, all the time.

The game is changing rapidly, but given the wide variety of approaches and proprietary clouds (all labeled “Smart” of course, and all with apps), there’s no real clear vision on how it’s all going to turn out. Stay nimble, people, experiment, and watch the data.

Take Aways

First, the media landscape is rapidly converging at the right place – at the user experience. Everything was connected, and the promotion of internet content to first-class citizens on cable boxes means a tremendous opportunity to grab attention and create your own channel. The nature of the ad serving, targeting and measurement infrastructure is merging broadcast and the internet. It’s going to be interesting. I mean, when everyone upgrades their TVs or the cable company updates your STB.

Secondly, the user experience of your product is critical. We all know that intellectually, but when you see 10 heartrate monitors (say) side by side, and only two are joyful to work with and look at, you really feel it. This played out all over the millions of products on the shelf.

Third, it’s the story, and the user experience. CES is now about Marketing as much as gadgetry. If you’re not clear on your “why”, or you can’t tell a human-driven story about why your products are great, you’ll lose to someone who can. No amount of specs or booth babe will beat a simple, inspirational, meaningful story well told.

And finally, all the devices are getting connected, are running apps and (mostly, probably) ads, and increasingly have gestural UIs. This has important implications on your overall user experience of your brand, across devices, across user contexts. Discrete, channels are outdated as a concept, and no longer fits the fluid, always-accessible Internet experience.

Instead of targeting the device context, it’s more important than ever to target the user context, and be prepared to render that on various devices. It’s quite likely your website is now your mobile site. Very soon, the “fixed” site will be the TV experience, and ultrabooks and tablets used on the go. How are they working together, and how are you tuning the experience to the user context? How are you using customer data and providing value at each point?

Personally Speaking

As I sat at the airport sucking down the free wifi (finally!) and dropping AT&T calls (WTF?), there was one other thought I wanted to put down before I can attempt to get on with my life.

It was geeky heaven (lots of stuff!) and hell (oi, too much stuff), but I came away vaguely depressed. 16 acres of products, and at best two or three things that really have the potential to change the human condition. Most things were incremental improvements or slightly different specs of other things [or, mostly, of Apple things]. There was literally an entire wing worth of iPhone case vendors.

I couldn’t help thinking what amazing things, big human problem things, could be solved with all that energy and creation. Instead we get a dancing robot MP3 player and an acre of iPad wall mounts.

Me, I’m just the tech guy. But the things that produced the most palpable delight and joy on the faces of attendees were deep products, with well-told stories that touched humanity.

What are you doing with your products? Are you just playing spec-games with your competitors? Are you chasing someone who keeps creating new markets? Is your marketing a great, human-centered story? And are you occasionally stepping back from the marketing and striving to make the product truly great?

Or are you making yet another dancing robot MP3 player?

Todd Drake is VP of Technology at Organic