The Three Best Things I Saw At CES This Year

Business Insider

Here's how conversations at CES, the giant electronics trade show in Las Vegas, typically go:

When did you get in? (Answer.)

How many times have you been to CES? (Answer.)

What do you think of CES so far? (Answer.)

What was the best thing you saw? 

This is always the trickiest. If you've walked the show floor, you better have a good answer!

I talked about the best thing I saw at CES with Farhad Manjoo, a technology columnist at the New York Times in our weekly podcast, which is embedded below. 

The podcast has my full thoughts on what it's like being in Las Vegas for CES. But, if you want the short version, these were my three favorite products from CES:

• Sling TV: The TV industry is finally getting a much needed shake up thanks to Sling TV, which offers 10 traditional TV channels over the web for $20 per month. It's not as disruptive as some people would like, but it's still an interesting change, and I think it has potential to be transformative in the next five years. 
• Gogoro: It's an electric scooter. I don't know if I would ever want a scooter. I prefer riding a bike. But, the Gogoro is pretty neat. Instead of plugging it in to charge, it has removable batteries. It plans to be city focused, and it will set up charging stations in a city where the user can pull the battery out of the scooter and replace it with a new, fully charged battery. 
• Self-driving cars: The auto industry was at CES in a big way. There was a lot of talk of autonomous driving. I got to test a car that could drive itself. The car I tested wasn't fully autonomous. It wasn't doing left turns and right turns. It was basically a glorified cruise control, allowing the car the stop and start in traffic, or on long boring drives on the highway. A few years ago, self-driving cars seemed like something that would take a long time to happen. Today, it seems possible to have a form of self driving cars in the next five years. 

Here's the podcast. You can subscribe to the podcast in iTunes here. Here's an RSS link to the show. I use SoundCloud as a host, so you can listen to the show over there, too.