IoT Visitors at CES 2018 Showed Huge Increases in Smart Home, Automotive, Wearables, Healthcare
- July 25, 2018
- imc
Attendees from key IoT markets at CES 2018 showed dramatic increases over the previous year, according to the IoT M2M Council, a trade group that organizes a pavilion and conference at CES covering infrastructure for the nascent technology sector known as the Internet of Things. The show’s latest audit indicates that CES visitors interested in automotive and wearables increased by more than 40% over 2017, while visitors interested in healthcare increased a whopping 71%. Even attendees interested in the smart home/appliance/energy sector, thought to be a relatively mature market for CES, increased by 28%.
“The automotive and smart home sectors drew more than 20,000 attendees each, while wearables and healthcare drew over 17,000 and 12,000, respectively,” says IMC Chairman Syed “Z” Hosain, who is also CTO for IoT solutions provider, Aeris. “These numbers are from the official audit of the Consumer Technology Association, which owns and produces the show, and they are very surprising in a good way. CES has always been a major B2B event for those manufacturing and selling consumer products, and overall attendance was relatively flat, but now it’s clear that it has become a major IoT event in its own right.”
The IMC will again organize its IoT Infrastructure Pavilion & Conference for CES 2019, and has already surpassed the exhibition space at the 2018 event. The IMC’s conference program will cover topics in connectivity, hardware, and software for IoT applications – last year’s workshop about developing RFPs for IoT software was one of the event’s best attended. The IoT Infrastructure Pavilion & Conference will again be centered on the Westgate Hotel, directly adjacent to the Smart Cities and Driver-less Car demonstration areas, giving IoT visitors a destination at the sprawling exhibition.
“CES is one of the rare events where one can see a good cross-section of vertical markets that actually buy and deploy IoT solutions. It’s often the case that exhibitions billed as ‘IoT events’ attract mostly vendors. This can also be important, but CES attracts people that are putting technology to use. We like to think that the IMC played a role in increasing the attendance of these markets, and it is absolutely in keeping with the IMC’s mission as a technology accelerator.” says Hosain.
About the IoT M2M Council
The IMC is the largest trade group dedicated to the global IoT/M2M sector – with over 28,000 IoT adopters as members. Board companies include 1NCE, 2J Antennas, A1 Digital, Aeris, Airgain, Blues, Digi International, eSAT Global, Eseye, Fibocom, floLIVE, Friendly Technologies, Giesecke+Devrient, Globalstar, Ground Control, Gurtam, Hologram, iBasis, Ignion, IoT Launch, Keyfactor, KORE, KYOCERA AVX, Losant, MultiTech, OQ Technology, Pelion, Printed Energy, Quectel, Somos, Tata Communications, Telit Cinterion, and Vodafone. Visit www.iotm2mcouncil.org