Lab Weekly - 01/17/2025
CES 2025 Recap; New Floor 9 episode; Plus, the latest news on the TikTok ban, Venu’s fate, and some cool stats!
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CES 2025 Trend Recap
As the biggest consumer tech show in the world, CES remains a reliable reflection of the tech industry, as well as a harbinger of emerging trends across industries. After spending several days walking all over the show floor to scout new and noteworthy gadgets, we here at the Lab have identified four cross-category trends that we believe will shape the future of consumer tech in 2025 and beyond.
In case you missed it…
2024 Year-End Trend Recap
A major year of deployment for multimodal AI and Mixed Reality, as well as major behavioral and landscape shifts in search, streaming, and social media
What the Incoming Trump Administration Means for Tech & Innovations
Everything from antitrust & AI regulations to trust in legacy media, this presidential election’s effects will be felt across every sector of the tech world.
The AI Agents Are Coming — Is Your Brand Ready?
Exploring what moving on from AI chatbots to agentic AI systems might mean for brands
Episode 166: CES 2025 Highlights
Welcome back to Floor 9. As always, we are kicking off the new year with a CES episode featuring the entire Lab team. Together, we recapped the highs and lows of CES 2025, shared our personal favorites, and voiced some skepticism towards some potential "vaporwares."
From smart home and smart cars to cutting-edge food and health tech, we saw a lot of interesting, innovative products across categories from the show floor this year that could, down the road, shape consumer expectations and enhance brand experiences. If you're curious about the latest and hottest in consumer tech gadgets, this episode is a must-listen!
If you enjoyed the episode, please consider giving us a five-star review on Apple Podcast. Follow the Lab on LinkedIn and on Medium for our latest insights. Thanks for listening!
Chinese App RedNote Hits No. 1 In U.S. App Store As TikTok Faces Shutdown [TechCrunch]
Ahead of the reported shutdown of TikTok on Sunday, some 500,000 American users have flocked to another Chinese short-form video app called Xiaohongshu (known as RedNote in English). The app has surged to the No. 1 spot for free apps in the U.S. App Store and stayed there since Monday. But its moment atop of the charts might be short-lived, considering that the app is not geared at non-Chinese users at all, and that it could also be banned if its popularity sustains.
Regardless, it is interesting to contextualize why some users are choosing another Chinese short video app over, say, Instagram Reels or YouTube Shorts. This mass migration of the so-called “TikTok refugees” to RedNote could be seen as a protest vote by the U.S. TikTok users who oppose the ban. Another plausible interpretation would point to the recent announcements from Meta regarding its content moderation policies and the resulting backlash as context for why some people sidestepped Meta-owned Instagram and checked out RedNote instead.
But most likely, it’s the novelty factor of a brand new platform that caught the attention of young people, who are less inclined to be active on the same social platform as their previous generations. Should TikTok follow through on its promise of going dark on Sunday, we should be in for a fun land grab for user attention. I personally doubt that TikTok will be staying offline for too long, given that Trump is reportedly considering issuing an executive order once he takes office to postpone the TikTok ban for 60 to 90 days, so the window of opportunity for alternative short video platforms might be fleeting.
Related: Free Our Feeds wants to build a social media ecosystem ‘resistant to billionaire influence’ [The Verge]; Bluesky is getting its own photo-sharing app, Flashes [TechCrunch]
Disney to Merge Hulu + Live Into FuboTV, Settle Venu Lawsuit [Deadline]
Disney will combine its Hulu + Live TV business with FuboTV and become majority owner of the resulting new company. Hulu, the pure OTT streaming service, will remain under Disney proper. Also, this merger also settles the lawsuit that Fubo previously waged against Venu, the joint sports streaming service by Disney, Warner, and Fox. Unsurprisingly, this announcement was followed on Friday by the news that Disney and its partners have pulled the plug on Venu, given that DirecTV and Dish have signaled their intent to block its launch.
For now, both Fubo and Hulu + Live TV will continue to be available as stand-alone services, but presumably soon, the new company will be offering bundles that include both services to further entice sports fans to sign up. With this deal, Fubo will also be allowed to create new "skinny bundles" featuring Disney's channels. Considering that the current vMVPD leader, YouTube TV, just rolled out a massive price hike last month, perhaps there’s some room for competition. Regardless of who wins, TV has clearly entered an era of consolidation and re-bundling.
Related: Disney, Warner, and Fox pulled the plug on Venu [THR]; Prime Video’s use of AI, Next Gen Stats on NFL games is helping viewers understand the game better [AP News]
ChatGPT Now Lets You Schedule Reminders And Recurring Tasks [TechCrunch]
ChatGPT officially entered its agentic era with the addition of a new Tasks feature, starting with scheduled prompts. It allows users to set up ChatGPT to perform actions at future times, such as delivering daily weather updates, weekly news briefings, or reminders about events like concert ticket sales. Paid users can enable this feature by selecting "Go with scheduled tasks" from ChatGPT's dropdown menu.
By enabling users to delegate recurring tasks—such as daily affirmations, reminders, or news updates—ChatGPT assumes a role similar to a personal assistant or agent. It showcases the potential for AI agents to streamline personal and professional workflows through automation. But what’s currently missing from AI Agents is still the ability to reason, to learn, and to adapt contextually like a human agent would. Perhaps OpenAI’s latest o3 reasoning models could soon introduce more human-like capabilities to ChatGPT to make it an even more capable AI agent.
Related: Google Cloud introduced its Automotive AI Agent powered by Gemini [Google Blog]; Amazon further delays Alexa's generative AI upgrade [Tech Times]
Situational Awareness:
‘Severance’ cast brings Lumon Industries Office to life in glass box at Grand Central Station [Deadline]
Industry analysts always complain about the lack of promotion from the smaller streaming services for their shows, so it’s cool to see Apple pulling out a performance-art-level stunt for the new season of Severance. In addition to the cast performance, they also had extras handing out promotional merch to fans, as well as creating a mini-game inspired by the monotonous yet mysterious office tasks featured in the show.
Nintendo reveals Switch 2 console set to launch this year [CNBC]
Nintendo unveiled its much-anticipated Switch 2 gaming console via a video trailer. Following the trend we saw at CES last week, where both Lenovo and Acer launched new handheld gaming consoles featuring big screens, the new Switch 2 looks like it will feature a bigger display and joy controllers too. We’ll likely learn more about it at the next “Nintendo Direct” online event on April 2.
Reddit tests a conversational AI search tool [TechCrunch]
This new “Reddit Answers” feature aims to bring users curated summaries of relevant threads and responses to compete with AI tools. Rather than being scrapped to feed LLMs, Reddit is aspiring to prove it’s not just a forum and a data source, but the ultimate crowd-sourced answer machine.
iOS 18.3 temporarily disables Apple Intelligence notification summaries [9to5Mac]
This change is perhaps unsurprising following complaints from news outlets such as the BBC over botched AI-generated summaries in news notifications. But at least all the hilarious memes of the text messages summaries will live on forever.
Spotify reportedly has about 55 million subscribers in the US, with about 607,000 on a “basic plan” that excludes access to audiobooks, the company shared last week, per Bloomberg. In related news, the company also recently rolled out a video-creator program that will remove dynamically inserted podcast ads for premium subscribers.
The generational and gender gaps for AI skills in the workplace are widening. AI training opportunities are given to just 22% of baby boomers and 28% of Gen Xers, compared with 45% of Gen Zers and 43% of millennials, per eMarketer. Moreover, only 29% of AI-skilled workers are women, according to the estimates by Randstad.
A new report from Bloomberg Intelligence predicts that over 200,000 Wall Street jobs may be slashed in the next 3-5 years due to AI, with automation and productivity increases leading to up to 17% higher banking profits.
Traffic to retail sites that came from chatbots shot up by 1,300% year-over-year during the 2024 holiday season, as more shoppers turned to AI chatbots to look for gift ideas and direct them to cheaper items, CNBC reports citing data from Adobe.
If you find our insights valuable and would like to have a deeper conversation on technology and media innovations, or need to sound smarter in a client meeting or a pitch, please feel free to reach out to Chelsea Freitas, our VP of Strategy, at chelsea@ipglab.com.
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