Lab Weekly - 01/18/2024
CES 2024 recap; Plus, the latest news about "circle to Google," streaming services on Vision Pro, and Amazon's new AI tool for shoppers
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CES 2024 Trend Recap
CES 2024 marked a return to almost-normalcy for the biggest consumer tech convention. The official press release from the CTA says that CES ended its four-day run with “a total count of 135,000 attendees and more than 4,300 exhibitors, up 17% and 34%, respectively, from the 2023 show.”
As always, the entire Lab team was in Vegas in person, pounding the show floors to bring you the noteworthy exhibitors and must-see innovations. Here are the top five trends we spotted at CES 2024.
In case you missed it…
CES 2024 Daily Recaps
Over the course of the week, we have published the following daily recaps of the latest announcements from the show floors, as well as a pre-show preview the week prior:
2023 Trends In Review & Looking Ahead
From generative AI to Barbenheimer, here are the five key trends at the intersection of media, culture, and innovation that we keep writing about all year long
Floor 9 will return next week with a CES recap episode featuring the entire Lab team. Keep an ear out for that on your podcast app of choice!
Google Introduces “Circle to Search” on Android Devices [TechCrunch]
Google’s latest search feature leverages AI and visual search to make the search experience far more intuitive. Dubbed “Circle to Search,” this new feature coming to select Android devices will allow users to search from anywhere on their phone simply by circling, scribbling, highlighting, or tapping on the parts of images or texts they’d like to learn more about. For instance, Google suggests that you could circle the sunglasses a creator wore in their TikTiok video or scribble on their boots to look up related items on Google without needing to switch between different apps.
This is a cool addition to Android’s interface that could further upend how visual search works on mobile devices. Instead of using the phone’s camera as a direct input device, or using screenshots to feed into visual search, now users will be able to directly search for what they see on their screens. The sheer intuitiveness of this feature is what makes it seem so user-friendly and, if it works as advertised and becomes popular among users, potentially game-changing for upper-funnel discovery.
It will be interesting to see if Apple will allow such a system-level integration of visual search into the iOS interface. Right now on an iPhone, you can already tap on texts in an image to select and copy them. The computational photography features that Apple has built into iPhone’s cameras are great at separating different layers in an image, and that should help isolate different items in the same image. But one could see that, should such a feature take off on high-end Android devices, Apple would have to compete with similar features.
Related: Google adds AI-powered overviews for mult-isearch in Lens [TechCrunch]; Samsung’s latest Galaxy S24 phones will feature Google Gemini-powered AI features [Engadget]
Apple Reveals Streaming & Sports Apps Available on Vision Pro at Launch [MacRumors]
Besides nearly all the major streaming services that will be available at launch on Vision Pro (with Netflix and Hulu noticeably missing from the list), it is worth noting that ESPN, MLB, and PGA Tour will become the first batch of sports apps available on Apple’s revolutionary spatial computing device. In addition, soccer fans can also access MLS Season Pass through the Apple TV app on the headset.
Apple also shared that Disney+ and several other streaming apps will offer select movies in 3D on the Vision Pro at launch, and that the Apple TV app will offer a selection of content recorded in the new Apple Immersive Video (AIV) format at no additional cost. Could the launch of Apple Vision Pro usher in a new era for at-home 3D content? If so, Disney is certainly getting a head start on this.
One last thing to note here, Apple is certainly pushing the AIV format to become a new standard — it has even rallied up a bunch of big companies working in 3D tech to form an alliance that aims to standardize the Universal Scene Description (USD) format for 3D content. If your brand is looking to create 3D assets, then perhaps you’d want to make sure they are Vision Pro-compatible.
Related: Pixar, Adobe, Apple, Autodesk, and NVIDIA form Alliance for OpenUSD to drive open standards for 3D content [Apple]; Apple is now marketing Vision Pro as the 'ultimate entertainment device' [CNET]
Amazon Launches Generative AI Tool to Answer Shoppers’ Questions [CNBC]
Following Walmart’s AI announcements at CES last week, Amazon is hitting back with their own new generative AI features. Although the review summarizing feature has been reported before when Amazon tested it in August, it’s interesting that Amazon is now rolling the feature in a more comprehensive AI tool that can answer shopper’s questions about a particular product on its platform.
In recent months, Amazon has rolled out several AI-powered features and tools, most of which are geared towards sellers and merchants on its ecommerce platform. Besides AI-generated product listings and AI-generated images for ads, Amazon has rolled out “Q,” an AI chatbot for companies to assist with daily tasks, in December. It is interesting to see Amazon now turning their attention to consumer-facing features. Will Amazon shoppers embrace this AI tool to streamline their online shopping experience? Some undoubtedly will. The question is how many, and how fast. Trust issues between users and AI tools will be crucial to the adoption pace.
One more thing, although Amazon has mostly been letting merchants use the new AI features for free, one could imagine it won’t be long before they start charging for it. According to OpenAI COO Brad Lightcap, 260 businesses are now paying for ChatGPT Enterprise in order to access the latest GPT-4 model. There’s certainly a gold rush there, but Amazon’s AI model will need to be compelling enough to its customer base to remain competitive.
Related: Walmart’s AI search makes shopping faster, and its AI delivery makes it invisible [TechCrunch]; Google Cloud rolls out new GenAI products for retailers [TechCrunch]; FedEx is launching a new ecommerce platform as it competes with Amazon [The Verge]
Netflix’s ad business seems to be gaining streams. Netflix says its ad tier has 23 million monthly active users (MAUs) globally, up from 15 million in November 2023, and 85% of subscribers on the ad tier are streaming for over 2 hours per day, Variety reports.
In related Netflix news, Sensor Tower’s latest estimates show that Netflix Games downloads rose 180% YoY to 81.2 million globally across the App Store and Google Play in 2023, with Q4 2023 accounting for about 53% of downloads, TechCrunch reports.
Businesses are increasingly using WhatsApp to reach their customers. The latest tracking data from Apptopia showed that WhatsApp's daily business users increased by 80% in the US in 2023 after a 122% jump in 2022, and daily users in the US grew by 9% in 2023.
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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