The more things change. January 2024 brought announcements, updates and a plethora of new tech, some a dream in the eye of a startup, some in the market and some likely to improve lives, if not right away than soon. In fact, the most intriguing aspect of the month of CES 2024 was how much like previous events it was – and yet it was the first post-Covid big event, and the first for many new to the tech industry. Also 2024 is shaping up to be a big year of change for the older adults-tech market – some actually think it is disappearing into the tech market for all. Maybe! Here are the six blog posts from January 2024:
The cell phone – imagine a connected life without it. The story of that invention, particularly the context of an AT&T monopoly of the time period, is instructive about what it takes to get an innovation into the market – when many are involved, including government agencies; and obstacles, in-house and competitors, are all around. According to interviews and his many anecdotes in his book, Cutting the Cord, Marty Cooper, aged 94, it was just one thing after the other to get the cellphone fully designed, manufactured, and into the marketplace as a mobile phone – when even his own company, Motorola, thought that the car phone market was the real opportunity. Motorola’s own estimates of the cell phone market opportunity in the 1970’s was a wild underestimation, predicting that millions of devices sold. Today the total number is closer to 18 billion phones worldwide. Many of those users in other countries own no other device.