Why CES 2017 was surprisingly low on new trends
With CES 2017 wrapped up, the event was remarkably low in trending content, with Taykey reporting less than 10 trends for the four-day event. A small amount of trends means low conversation volume, and perhaps low excitement surrounding CES product announcements.
Alexa and other Smart Home devices will run your house in 2017
Why were people not as excited about CES 2017 as previous years?
Perhaps because CES took off right where 2016 tech trends left off. The hottest items at the event were largely connected home devices, especially devices which sync with Amazon’s Alexa. In fact, the biggest winner of CES was Alexa and the relevancy of the product for future connected home devices, such as Lenovo’s Smart Home Assistant, also announced at CES.
Sentiment for Amazon’s Alexa product was at 70% positive at the beginning of CES, by the end, sentiment was 85% positive demonstrating Alexa’s continued domination after being named the top tech trend of 2016.
Other notable smart home devices were L’Oreal’s Smart Hair Brush, which spiked huge conversation among millennial women and Mattel’s Aristotle, an Alexa-styled device for children, was popular with parents ages 35-44.
Autonomous Cars Hit the Streets in 2017
Another big trend out of CES was autonomous automobiles gearing up for a 2017 launch. Like Alexa, this trend came as no surprise since auto industry leaders were pushing for self-driving cars in 2016, which Taykey reported as a top auto trend of 2016.
Honda, Toyota, and BMW were the most talked about auto companies heading out of CES. Honda showcased a self-balancing, self-driving Motorcycle while BMW demonstrated in-car integration with Alexa, along with future plans to introduce many more autonomous cars.
The top overall trend from CES was Faraday Future’s electric car claiming itself a direct competitor to Tesla. Men ages 35-64 were driving the online conversation around the electric car, however, overall sentiment seems to be controversial. Perhaps many are not quite convinced if the Faraday Future car can outperform Elon Musk’s Tesla.
While Faraday Future was the top trend of CES and Alexa dominated overall conversation, Nvidia came away as the company best able to capitalize on their product announcement. Nvidia’s conversation volume spiked x15 higher than usual, the largest among any of its competitors and the biggest spike by any company at CES. The company announced their shift to GPUs instead of CPUs when it comes to video games.
Overall, CES 2017 had an array of predictable topics sprinkled with a few surprise products to keep the internet and consumers buzzing.
Amit Avner is chief executive and founder of Taykey, a real-time audience data company