At first glance, CES 2016 looks a lot like CES 2015.  Approximately 3,600 exhibitors will announce approximately 20,000 new products.  And while CES 2016 is set to be the largest, most diverse yet — there aren’t too many (if any) groundbreaking, game-changing or revolutionary (choose your hyperbole) new products.  

TVs are a little bigger, a little thinner, a little less or a little more curved, have slightly better screens, slightly better dynamic range, and slightly better color gamuts.  Everything on display has a slightly faster processor, a little more storage, slightly better battery life, a new app, some cloud computing component, is somehow related to IoT, is smart (in some way), and offers slightly better connectivity, etc. 

“New and improved” features do not generate big headlines, so if your innovation metric is new product announcements (defined as, products you’ve never seen before) CES 2016 might look like a gathering of iterators, as opposed to innovators. But this is not the case! The kind of iteration on display at CES 2016 requires an incredible amount of innovation. Each slightly improved feature, each price reduction, each simplification of user experience, each incremental improvement brings us one step closer to a more creative, more productive and more prosperous world.

The pace of technological change is exponential and accelerating, and the results are hiding in plain sight. I call it “inconspicuous innovation” and it’s the top trend of 2016.  Let’s have a look at some other macro trends that will be on display at CES:

It’s a Mobile World

Smartphones are the number one device for 92 percent of millennials — they are more likely to have a smartphone than a PC.  Over two-thirds of all digital media time is now spent on mobile devices with a staggering  90% of that time being in just a few applications. comScore says we use about fifty percent of our mobile time on a single, favorite app (mostly social media).  Meanwhile, time spent on mobile browsers declined by half.Handheld mobile devices have become our fastest growing entertainment centers, with blistering usage growth of 240 percent in video and gaming content. Mobile devices are now getting as much of our time as television! (Flurry). And Google says mobile searches (which exceed 100 billion per month) have surpassed now desktop searches (Cynopsis). The trend is clear; communication is becoming more mobile everyday.