While mobility and wireless technology have dominated CES for years, one of the more interesting things to note this year is how ARM processors have worked their way into almost every mobile device. TechCruch’s Devin Coldewey took note of this in his article on the winners and losers at CES 2012, stating:
“..smart TVs, tablets, phones, tweener devices, and half the other stuff worth looking at were sporting an ARM processor in one form or another. NVIDIA showed a great, cheap Android 4.0 tablet, Qualcomm had a ton of TVs and powerful media devices, Marvell showed their great OLPC XO-3 tablet and powers a bunch of other things — the list goes on. ARM was probably the most ubiquitous company at the show. Intel did show off their new smartphone, though, so a new battle may be forthcoming.”
As with many mobile innovations, cloud services were equally as prevalent at CES this year. Lonovo and Acer both launched a cloud-based service to compete with Apple’s iCloud. Both services allow users to perform full backups, syncs, and the sharing of content between devices. Importantly, one thing noticeable by its absence was any form of additional security for cloud-based storage and sharing services.
Several cloud based trends emerging from CES this year focused on consumer empowerment. By allowing consumers to use cloud based services without the limitations typically forced on them by the manufacturer, services like Pandora, Skype, Amazon streaming, and even those powerful enough to run Netflix, are being made available to users without having to go through the manufacturer’s application. This will allow for more streaming content in the future; pushing more content to the cloud.
Further to this, home networking has become more cloud conscious. The leading companies in this space (D-Link, Netgear, etc.) touted offers which allow for more control over your home network using cloud services. This ranges from being able to access cameras and other home monitoring solutions to being able to see who is doing what on your ‘home cloud’ and enabling full sharing between connected devices.
While this may not qualify as ‘cloud computing’ from an enterprise perspective, it is interesting that consumers will probably become familiar with a cloudbased application at home, as well as at work. The question remains, however, how they will secure these and whether it is even part of the deliberation process yet.
