MWC 2018 First Impressions: A Connected World Congress

A strange week we had, with most of the technology world focused on another edition of GSMA's Mobile World Congress (MWC), with the usual gush of new iPhone-clone announcements and most of the key semiconductor giants dividing their announcements with embedded world 2018, taking place at the same time in Nuremberg, Germany. Still, neither was much affected by the clash. MWC is more and more consumer electronics, autonomous cars, cloud solutions, and software developers pitching their latest ideas on social-engineered apps.

A new report by Juniper Research predicts that revenues from smart audio devices like the Amazon Echo and Sonos One will grow from an estimated $2.5 billion in 2017 to over $10 billion by 2022, as more audio brands integrate voice assistants into their devices. With competition heating up in the smart speaker space, the new research, "Smart Audio Devices: Strategies & Forecasts 2017-2022", looks at Amazon’s main challengers.

Market research and consulting company, Futuresource Consulting recently released a new report in the consumer electronics CE space covering the emerging voice personal assistants (VPAs) category and smart speakers. The report highlights that we are the beginning of a wider market transformation, with voice personal assistants (VPAs) at the heart of a new CE land grab.

The audio industry was once again shaken to its foundations by Apple's announcements at the Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) 2017. The product updates and sneak peeks made at this Apple Special Event, on June 5, 2017, were extremely rich in surprising technology revelations, even though its implications might not become clear until a few weeks or months later. After all, the WWDC conference - a developer's conference - is traditionally where Apple builds the foundations for what will be its underlying short-term/long-term strategies, serving mainly to motivate developers and strategic partners.