Why weed tech is missing from CES 2018, even as the budding industry booms

As marijuana legalization sweeps through North America and governments relax their rules on cannabis, the technologies used to grow, distribute, and consume it represent an increasingly large chunk of the consumer electronics industry.

In other words, weed tech is big business.

Over the past few years, investors have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into weed-related startups, resulting in a corresponding flood of weed gadgets aimed at medical and recreational users. Between all the vaporizers, oil pens, dab rigs, automatic grinders, butter makers, and other miscellaneous ganja gizmos; there’s no shortage of weed tech on the market right now.

But oddly enough, you’ll find almost none of it on the CES showfloor. Despite the fact that cannabis is one of hottest spaces in consumer tech right now, it’s practically nonexistent at the world’s largest consumer technology trade show. What gives?

Don’t blame the CTA

Surprisingly, this actually has nothing to do with rules and regulations.

“Recreational and medical use of marijuana are completely legal in Nevada”

The Consumer Technology Association (the organization that runs CES) has no rules on the books that prevent or discourage companies from exhibiting marijuana-related products at the show. In fact, weed-tech startups have held booths on the show floor numerous times in the past (although not in great numbers), and there’s even one this year. Buried deep inside the “Smart Home” section of the show, you’ll find a startup called Vapium Medical, which makes a metered dosing device for medical cannabis users, as well as an app that lets them keep track of their use. So weed tech companies definitely aren’t being barred by the CTA.

You can’t blame state or local marijuana laws, either. Recreational and medical use of marijuana are completely legal in Nevada, and while the state does have a few restrictions on where and how cannabis consumption devices can be sold, there are no regulations that prevent weed-tech startups from peddling their wares at trade shows. As with gambling and strip clubs, Las Vegas has a fairly laissez-faire approach to regulating trade shows that visit the city — presumably because every convention attendee is another person who will spend money at hotels, restaurants, and casinos.

What’s going on?

So if the cannabis tech sector is booming, and there are no rules or laws barring weed startups from attending CES, then why on Earth isn’t the show floor littered with pot-leaf logos and vaporizer startups? There are entire sections of the LVCC dedicated to things like “baby tech,” “sleep tech,” and even “smart cities,” so clearly there’s room for fringe tech at this convention. So where’s all the weed at?

Getty

Bill Roberson/Digital Trends

To get an answer, we spoke with a handful of cannabis tech startups — including some that deliberately skipped the show; some that are here in Las Vegas, but don’t have booth space; and also the only one that’s actually exhibiting at the show this year.

Hazy answers

Broadly speaking, the consensus seems to be that cannabis tech just isn’t quite mainstream enough for CES.

“CES is a very mass-market trade show,” says Richard Huang, CEO of Cloudius9. Huang and his company don’t have a formal presence at the show (no booth), but he’s in Vegas to do business nonetheless.

“The buyers are all very mainstream merchants, and frankly the [marijuana] industry isn’t there yet.”

“It’s catered toward the entire electronics market,” he explains. “The buyers are all very mainstream merchants, and frankly the [marijuana] industry isn’t there yet. And it goes both ways. Generally, the big buyers [at CES] aren’t there to purchase, and eventually carry, any product related to the weed industry. So as a potential exhibitor, if you can’t find people who are interested in your product, it’s hard to justify going out and spending the marketing money on attending the show.”

Other weed-tech startups seemed to echo this sentiment. Chris Whitener, Executive Director of Magical Butter (a device for making your own weed butter) says that, “If you’re not a large-scale company that can afford the cost of having a full force on the tradeshow floor, it’s smarter to send a few scouts to Vegas so they can meet people and network and do business, but without buying exhibit space.”

This was a common theme. Most of the small handful of marijuana startups at CES this year aren’t running booths. They’ve deliberately opted out of getting formal exhibit space, and have instead chosen to do business on the periphery of the show — which is a fitting metaphor for how cannabis tech as a whole fits into the larger consumer technology industry. It’s here, but despite blistering growth and projected profits, weed tech isn’t ready for center stage. You and your friends might be into it, but won’t find vaporizers at Best Buy or Target anytime soon, and that’s presumably why CES isn’t the best venue for weed tech vendors to promote their products.

Even Vapium Medical, the only marijuana-related startup on the showfloor this year, seemed to underscore that it only made sense to attend CES because Vapium’s product is targeted at the medical cannabis community — a broader market with more potential buyers.

“Our product is a technology solution for medical users,” said Vapium COO Barry Fogarty. “It’s going to be available in every state in the United States where medical use of cannabis is legal, so it’s very much consistent with and in sync with the legal situation in the US. This is not a product that’s intended for recreational use. It’s specifically for medical users, and people in the medical community — so not just patients, but physicians and researchers as well.”

More time under the grow lamps

Weed tech will eventually have a big presence at CES, but before that happens, the cannabis industry needs to mature a bit.

First and foremost, legalization needs to happen on a broader scale. This is happening slowly across the U.S. right now, but until the majority of the world is OK with recreational pot use, weed tech simply won’t have a large enough consumer base. It just doesn’t make sense to hawk a product at CES if you can only sell it to customers in eight states.

Furthermore, society’s attitudes toward marijuana need to relax somewhat. Even after it’s legalized, pot consumption needs to be normalized so that marijuana-related products are no longer taboo to use or sell. When we reach that point, weed tech will likely be mainstream enough for CES — but unfortunately we’re not quite there yet.

Editors’ Recommendations

• Here are a few marijuana tech gadgets for your home and kitchen
• Power outage at CES plunges thousands of exhibitors and attendees into darkness
• TWB Podcast: CES preview; LG 8K television; Home assistant takeover
• This iKeyp Bolt smart safe features a variety of ways to open, including a keypad, smart phone, or remote access
• Bell flying taxi shows what commuting above the traffic might one day look like

Graphene-based wearable could help save babies from ‘crib death’

Graphene, a versatile material composed of a single layer of carbon atoms arranged in an hexagonal lattice, can do everything from making superior speakers to detecting cancer cells to creating ultrastrong shields. Its latest feat? Forming a smart sensor which could be used as an early warning system to help keep babies safe from sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), aka “crib death,” the unexpected and unexplained death of an apparently healthy baby.

Developed by researchers at the United Kingdom’s University of Sussex, the smart sensor is composed of a length of flexible rubber tube, filled with water, oil, and graphene particles. The device is able to detect changes including the rising and falling of a person’s chest, potentially to lifesaving effect.

“Normally what happens when you mix oil and water together is that they separate out; think about shaking a hot lava lamp,” lead researcher Dr. Matthew Large told Digital Trends. “Eventually all the small droplets you create collect together, because oil and water don’t like being in contact with each other. What we have done is put graphene at the interface between those two liquids, which both liquids are more happy to be in contact with. This has two effects: It stops the droplets from merging, so the liquids can’t separate, and it makes the bubbles conductive to electricity.

“It is that last point that has allowed us to develop a liquid sensor that can detect stretching; electrons can hop between the graphene sheets, but when we stretch the bubbles this becomes much more difficult. We detect that change in electrical current and can relate it to the strain on the sensor.”

University of Sussex

Spurred on by the Global Challenges put forward by the Gates Foundation, the team hopes that this relatively simple solution could be used to create a low-cost, wearable health monitor technology. In particular, they think it could be useful as an early warning system for parents if their baby’s breathing or heart rate changes dramatically — allowing them to seek help as quickly as possible. It could also be used for older patients in a hospital setting.

“We are working alongside an industrial partner, Advanced Material Development, to evolve our prototypes into a marketable product,” Large said. “Then we will be looking to talk to equipment manufacturers about production. We are anticipating having something marketable within four years.”

A paper describing the research was recently published in the journal Nanoscale.

Editors’ Recommendations

• Scientists use a supercomputer to simulate one of history’s biggest quakes
• GIF research from Tenor suggests we had a pretty bad 2017
• Here’s everything we know about Hideo Kojima’s mysterious ‘Death Stranding’
• ‘Happy Death Day’ slays ‘Blade Runner 2049’ to win the weekend box office
• Here’s how to watch the epic USA vs. Japan giant robot battle to the death

Watch as we crawl inside Furrion Robotics’ gargantuan Prosthesis racing mech

When you think of racing, chances are that either horses or something with wheels comes to mind, but that doesn’t have to be the case. Furrion Robotics is working on Prosthesis, a walking mech that it hopes will eventually compete in the X1 Mech Racing League, which Furrion founded. We caught up with the company’s founder and CEO, Jonathan Tippett, on the CES 2018 show floor to chat about Prosthesis, and even got the chance to climb inside.

“My youth was spent mountain biking and snowboarding and riding motorcycles in the mountains of [British Columbia],” Tippett told Digital Trends. “I also had a fascination with excavators, dinosaurs, trophy trucks, dune buggies. You kind of mix that all together at Burning Man and get yourself an engineering degree, and out comes a racing mech.”

Tippett started planning what would eventually become Prosthesis as far back as 2006. He and his friends organized a yearly local competition in Vancouver, BC, based on the show Junkyard Wars. The challenge one year was to build a walking machine, and Tippett’s team successfully built one in just 48 hours. That experience created a team that built a more advanced walking machine called the Mondo Spider, which gave Tippett crucial experience building this type of machine. Eventually, he and his team built a single prototype leg that led Furrion to sign on for a full prototype.

Still, building a machine is just the start. Actually making it move — and quickly at that — is a much trickier problem. While Prosthesis was hardly graceful at first, Furrion posted a video earlier this week that shows it moving much more like something that could eventually race. Eventually.

“We’ve literally just got this machine walking,” Tippett says. “So, the next stage is to increase the walking speed, which is an engineering challenge and a piloting challenge, because no one has walked one of these things before.”

While other companies are investing heavily in A.I., and machine learning will likely play a part in keeping Prosthesis stable and upright, the idea is that it will remain 100 percent human-controlled. “It’s a sport,” Tippet says. “The whole point was to invent a sport.”

Editors’ Recommendations

• Furrion Robotics’ 8,000-pound Prosthesis mech takes a big step toward the future
• EO Talks Furrion’s Gargantuan Prosthesis Mech At CES 2018
• The first day of CES 2018 saw racing mechs, futuristic skateboards, more
• Watching Red Bull Global Rallycross is like witnessing a real-life Mad Max chase
• Doctors will help end hearing loss by 3D printing tiny prosthetic ear bones

Let just the right amount of light in with Halio smart-tinting glass

Smart homes, once a fantastical element of sci-fi stories, are quickly becoming the new normal, as ever more “smart” appliances hit the market. With the growing popularity of digital assistants like Alexa (a 2017 study by the Consumer Technology Association predicted that 44 percent of adults in the United States plan to buy a smart speaker in 2018) consumers automate many of the daily tasks that clog up home life, from big things like keeping your home secure to less pressing details, like combining the weather report with breakfast. Kinestral, maker of the Halio smart-tinting window, wants to do away with pesky blinds, offering a window that can darken to dim incoming sunlight.

The Halio “came out of the need to solve one of the oldest problems in buildings,” vice president of marketing Craig Henricksen told Digital Trends, “which is as soon as you put glass or a window in, suddenly there’s all this light coming in, which we love, we love the views, until that point where it’s too much; too much glare, you can’t do your work.”

Like the thermostat wars, the battle over whether to leave the shades open or closed can be a contentious topic in offices. Some people want to let the sunshine in, others hate the overbearing glare of the sun on their computer screen. Unfortunately, blinds and shutters are generally a binary solution. Halio offers a more nuanced approach, allowing users to adjust the exact amount of light that comes through the glass.

How does it work? Henricksen described the process. “There’s two special chemicals on a piece of glass, separated by a conductive layer. And when you apply a voltage, it moves ions from one side to the other, and depending on which side you push it to, it either blocks light, or lets it through.”

The Halio can connect to digital assistants like Alexa, and users can fine-tune the tinting with remarkable precision. There are two models: The Halio, which can block up to 70 percent of light, and the Halio Black, which can block up to 99.9 percent of light, perfect for those who hate to be awoken by morning light.

You’ll likely see Halio in your office before your bedroom. Henricksen said that the company is planning to launch Halio for commercial buildings around mid-2018, with residential sales closer to the end of the year. Although the price is not yet set, Henricksen estimated the price will be around four to five times that of a traditional window.

Editors’ Recommendations

• Feast your eyes on the 5 best desktops of CES 2018
• Cracked screens may be a thing of the past with this self-healing glass
• Felix Gray’s new anti-glare specs make you look good while protecting your eyes
• Will we ever have unbreakable smartphone glass? We asked an expert
• Keep your eyes safe with Velocifire Computer Gaming Glasses (55 percent off)

A robot kicked my ass in Scrabble at CES

Look, there’s plenty of boring industrial robots on the floor of the Las Vegas convention center for CES. But I’ve got to hand it to the Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) — it really knows how to make a demo fun and interactive. The company combined a number of its technologies into a robot that is able to sit and play Scrabble against a human opponent … and win.

This isn’t some “AI” playing you in a digital world, to be clear. The humanoid machine, powered by what ITRI calls its Intelligent Vision System for Companion Robots, plays a physical (if slightly modified) game of Scrabble. Instead of tiny tiles with letters on them, the company used small wooden blocks like a child might play with. This, of course, means the board is slightly larger, but otherwise it is a standard Scrabble layout.

It’s hard not to be impressed by all the moving parts here. For one, the robot has to learn and understand the rules of the game and the best strategies for winning. It also needs to be able to see and recognize the game pieces and the spots on the board. That means it can read the letters on the cubes and identify the double-letter and triple-word score spots. And, last but not least, it needs the dexterity to place the pieces on the board and not disturb the existing letters — which is especially difficult when you’re laying down two words next to each other to rack up those two-letter combos.

Suffice to say, the robot kicked my ass. But that’s OK. At the end, it congratulated me on a good game and handed me an adorable robot-shaped pencil sharpener.

Click here to catch up on the latest news from CES 2018.

Sphero spinoff Misty Robotics unveils its first robot for developers

Misty Robotics, the company that spun out from Sphero’s advanced robotics division last year, is taking a big step towards its mission of bringing a mechanical helper to homes. Today at CES, the company unveiled the Misty 1 developer robot, a cute, hand-made machine that’ll be sold to a lucky group of customers. The company only plans to sell a few dozen units of the Misty 1 — at most, up to 50, according to CEO Tim Enwall. Developers will also have to apply to buy the robot for $1,500.

Misty Robotics will judge entries based on who has an adequate amount of time to spend with the device, as well as who can commit to collaborating with their team down the line. It’s an unconventional approach towards releasing a new product, but it seems a necessary step for Misty, since it needs to make sure it has developers committed to learning a whole new robotic platform. The company plans to release a mass-produced model later this year, the Misty 2, but this early batch will let it see which aspects of its technology devs like the most.

The Misty 1 looks like an early concept version of Wall-E with its mini-tank treads, squat size and large, expressive eyes. Naturally, there’s a ton of gadgetry hidden underneath its adorable exterior. There’s a occipital light sensor, HD camera and far-field microphone array up top, right above its 4.3-inch LCD display. Below that, there’s a speakers and RGB led, as well as sensors in the front and rear for avoiding objects. It’s all powered by two Snapdragon processors. With all of that hardware, the robot will be able to see and recognize faces, as well as map indoor environments.

So what does it actually do right now? Well, the company still seems to be figuring that out. Misty engineers are able to remotely control it from a smartphone, and they’ve also programmed one to act a bit aggressive when you get in its face (it growls like an animal, then performs a randomized series of actions to scare you away).

Now that the hardware is pretty much set, the company is more intrigued with seeing what developers do with it. To make it even easier to configure, the robot can also be programmed with Blockly, a simple language that’s used in STEM classes. The company has also found that even experienced coders appreciate having a quick way to tell the Misty 1 what to do.

Of course, this is just a start for Misty Robotics. The company recently held a “robothon” at its Boulder to give 25 developers a shot at building some experience for the Misty 1. We can expect to see that sort of experimentation on a larger scale once even more devs get their hands on it.

Click here to catch up on the latest news from CES 2018.

The Morning After: Thursday, January 11th 2018

Hey, good morning!

CES 2018 day two was interrupted by a two-hour power cut. It was as ridiculous as you’d imagine: The world’s biggest tech show meets a severe lack of electricity. Rest assured, we had time on either side to delve deeper into this year’s biggest incoming tech.

Big news from CESLights out at CES 2018

Possibly the worst thing that could happen at a tech show: Power went down across several halls at the Las Vegas Convention Center during this morning’s CES at 11:15 PT. Multiple booths suffered power outages, including swaths of TVs at LG. The South Hall was also affected as people were stopped getting to and from the exhibition areas. Security staff told Engadget that a power outage affected the majority of the halls. We looked at the resultant mess.

A projector with an expensive marble topSony’s $30,000 4K short-throw projector hides powerful sound

We’ve been eying Sony’s short-throw projectors for the past few years, but they’ve always been too obscenely expensive to really take seriously. Well, that’s not changing this year. In fact, the new LSPX-A1 is actually more expensive than last year’s $25,000 model at $30,000. But, with that extra cost comes a major new feature: six speakers that simulate 360-degree atmospheric sound.

Abyss Creations debuts its second robotic RealDoll at CES 2018There’s a new sex robot in town: Say hello to Solana

RealDoll’s first sex robot, at her home in Southern California. It was an arresting experience that has remained cemented in my memory. In that moment, I suddenly understood the uncanny valley, a theory posited by roboticist Masahiro Mori, nearly half a century ago. In it, he attempted to explain the feeling of revulsion and eeriness that humans experience when they encounter an artificial life form that appears nearly, but not quite human.

Oblivious attendees might have been the best part.Netflix hid a fake biotech booth in the middle of CES

To promote its new show, Netflix established a fictional exhibitor booth deep within Las Vegas Convention Center — and it worked a little too well.

The encryption debate rages on.FBI chief says phone encryption is a ‘major public safety issue’

The FBI’s stance on phone encryption hasn’t changed even if the president fired former director James Comey. At a cybersecurity conference in New York, current chief, Christopher Wray, reiterated that the agency failed to access the content inside 7,775 devices within the fiscal year that ended on September 30th, 2017 despite having the proper warrants. That’s over half the devices the FBI tried to crack open within that period, making encryption, according to Wray, a “major public safety issue.”

But wait, there’s more…

• Say goodbye to ‘Pokémon Go’ on older iPhones
• Philips Hue lights will sync with music and games on your PC
• The ASUS ‘Bezel-free kit’ is a messy multi-monitor solution
• GoPro’s Nick Woodman confirms he’s ‘open’ to selling
• Dell breaks down its new XPS laptops and jewelry debut

The Morning After is a new daily newsletter from Engadget designed to help you fight off FOMO. Who knows what you’ll miss if you don’t Subscribe.

Craving even more? Like us on Facebook or Follow us on Twitter.

Have a suggestion on how we can improve The Morning After? Send us a note.

Gaming laptops are cheap and portable at CES 2018

Buying a laptop has traditionally meant juggling price, graphics performance, weight and battery life. You want a powerful gaming laptop with good battery life? Sorry about that six-pound weight, bro. Looking for a lightweight, inexpensive laptop to take to events? Forget about playing games or editing video.

CES 2018 marks a turning point, however. With the arrival of Intel’s eighth-generation Core with RX Vega M graphics and recent models with NVIDIA’s shrunk-down Max-Q graphics, owning a powerful laptop no longer means sacrificing your back in order to do more than two hours of gaming. At the same time, you won’t need to pay a fortune for a lightweight model that’s also a decent gaming machine.

To be sure, the trend started in late 2016 with the arrival of powerful, lightweight laptops like the Razer Blade that used mobile versions of NVIDIA’s GTX 10-series chips. That trend has accelerated rapidly, however, with recent tech from both AMD and NVIDIA.

Archrivals Intel and AMD announced their surprising team-up late last year. Intel’s eighth-generation, Core H series microprocessors integrate a custom AMD graphics chip, GDDR 5 memory and the CPU all onto one chipset via Intel’s Embedded Multi-Die Interconnect Bridge (EMIB).

The resulting silicon frees up about three square inches of space, yet with speed a hair better than NVIDIA’s GTX 1050 mobile card (perhaps around the level of the GTX 1050 Ti) in the laptop GL configuration. GH chips suitable for small desktops or larger laptops can run a bit faster than NVIDIA’s 1060 Max-Q, Intel claims. The latter has enough power for VR, and to prove it, Intel unveiled Hades Canyon, the world’s smallest VR NUC, during its CES 2018 keynote.

Perhaps more importantly, Intel claims the chipset consumes a lot less power than current offerings with similar performance. The entire GL package, with a Core i7 8706G CPU, RX Vega M graphics and GDDR5 memory, sips just 65 watts, while NVIDIA’s GTX 1060 Max-Q chip uses about the same without counting the CPU.

HP’s new $1,360 Spectre x360 15 convertible (above), unveiled at CES 2018, is the first PC to exploit the tech. Even with the weight premium of a 2-in-1 shell and 4K touchscreen, it has a slim 19.8mm profile and weighs just 4.6 pounds. Yet according to Intel and AMD, it should deliver graphics performance somewhere between dedicated NVIDIA GTX 1050 and 1060 graphics — not bad for a single chipset.

Another new model boasting Intel and AMD’s chip combo is Dell’s XPS 15 two-in-one, which starts at $1,300. Like the Spectre (kind of a bad name choice now), it’s a convertible with a 4K touch display that’s 16mm and weighs 4.3 pounds.

The power and size savings pay dividends. While a smaller 14-inch Razer Blade gaming laptop with NVIDIA GTX 1060 graphics weights 4.1 pounds, you’d be lucky to get four to five hours of battery life on the 4K model.

However, Dell’s and HP’s models benefit not only from lower power consumption but also more space to put larger batteries. Assuming their claims are accurate, the XPS 15 two-in-one offers up to 15 hours of battery life while the Spectre x360 can run for 13.5 hours and get to a 50 percent charge in just 30 minutes. Both models are also considerably cheaper than the $1,899 Razer, too, despite having larger 4K 15-inch screens.

We’ll likely see more models roll out over the next few months with the Intel/AMD chips, and manufacturers should easily be able to get regular, nonconvertible models well under four pounds for even less money.

At the same time, laptops that tap the full potential of NVIDIA’s Max-Q graphics started to appear earlier this year. Max-Q offers nearly the same performance as regular NVIDIA GTX graphics but in a lighter, more power-friendly size.

NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang drove home those points while flaunting Gigabyte’s $2,200 Aero 15x laptop during NVIDIA’s keynote at CES 2018 (above). “OK, can you guys see this? This has four times the performance of a MacBook Pro,” he said. “Twice the performance of the highest-performance game console. This is what a latest-generation gaming laptop looks like.”

The Aero 15x squeezes NVIDIA GTX 1070 Max-Q into a 19mm, 4.6-pound size. Yet, its performance isn’t that far below the 7.6-pound Alienware 15 R4 with NVIDIA GTX 1070 graphics, and it blows that model away in terms of battery life (7.9 hours versus 5.7 hours of 4K-video-viewing time).

Moving down a bit in weight and performance, Acer revealed the $1,699 price tag for its 13.5-inch fanless 2-in-1 Switch Black Edition at CES, with an eighth-generation Intel Core i7 chip and NVIDIA GeForce MX150 CPU. While that combo won’t give you quite the performance of the Vega or Max-Q chips, it weighs in at just 2.5 pounds, shockingly little for a convertible with discrete graphics. If that’s too much to spend, other MX150-equipped models like the Acer Aspire E15 are as little as $700.

All of this will make 2018 a very good year for you, the demanding Windows 10 gamer, virtual reality user, video editor or graphic artist. The current and upcoming models will give you lighter weight and/or cheaper choices, whether you want a maxed-out gaming machine, a detachable 2-in-1 with discrete graphics or a lightweight laptop that can game and edit 4K video.

Even if you just do web and documents and plan to game here and there, why get a model with integrated graphics when there are better options? For years, I’ve dreamed of an affordable laptop I can take to a trade show to edit posts and videos without worrying about battery life, then game or use for VR afterward. By CES 2019, it might be unusual to see a laptop without those capabilities.

Click here to catch up on the latest news from CES 2018.

Google bought a UK startup that turns screens into speakers

Over the past year, Google has demonstrated its desire to step up its hardware game. The company bought HTC’s Pixel team for $1.1 billion, designed its own imaging chip for the Pixel 2 and also hired a key Apple chip designer. Bloomberg reports that in its bid to gain an edge on the competition, Google has quietly snapped up UK startup Redux, a small team focused on delivering sound and touch feedback via mobile displays.

According to filings, Google took control of the startup back in August and then subsequently shut down the company’s website. Previous demonstrations show Redux playing back music via a tablet device, which possesses tiny actuators that vibrate the screen and effectively turn it into a loudspeaker. By eliminating the need for smartphone speakers, Google may be able free up more space for batteries and other important components inside future smartphones.

Redux tech turns the screen into a speaker, and a haptic surface. Trying it out here. The sound is actually coming from the screen. pic.twitter.com/VPAi6TzKk9

— Stan Schroeder (@franticnews) February 28, 2017

Although Redux has already integrated similar technology inside PCs and automotive infotainment systems, it has recently focused on bringing the same technology to mobile devices. In April 2017, the company told Engadget in a statement that it believed it would begin appearing in smartphones from 2018. Google’s decision to buy the company may accelerate that rollout, meaning we could see Redux’s haptic sound technology come to a Google device later this year.

Source: Bloomberg

FCC Commissioner Clyburn talks about net neutrality at CES

Commissioner Mignon Clyburn has been a vocal defender of net neutrality and even helped author the Open Internet Order in 2015. She was on the ground and Las Vegas for CES and was nice enough to make time to swing by the Engadget stage. She sat down to talk about the importance of net neutrality and her quest to protect it for future generations as well as how current policies are putting at risk those most vulnerable. Unfortunately, there were some technical problems with our audio during the interview, so we’ve included a slightly abridged transcript after the break.

Click here to catch up on the latest news from CES 2018.

Terrence O’Brien: Hello, internet, and welcome back to CES. I am Managing Editor Terrence O’Brien, live from the Engadget stage from the floor at the insanely crowded and loud Las Vegas Convention Center, and we have a really special treat for you this morning. We have Commissioner Mignon Clyburn from the FCC. You’ve been there since 2009. You’ve helped draft the Open Internet Order, and you have been a very vocal defender of net neutrality.

Commissioner Mingon Clyburn: Absolutely. When we see all of this innovation in 2.4 million square feet of floor space — this was not accidental. This was pooled by good policy, I think, crafted and embodied in a 2015 Open Internet Order that provided certainty. That provided a means to oxygen, so to speak, to all of this innovation and investment.

O’Brien: So what is it about net neutrality that makes it so important to driving innovation? How does it fuel this market?

Clyburn: It took every aspect of the ecosystem and it took every player in this space. It provided certainty for those who need to access online. It said to you that no one, no entity would be able to block all the product or advantage of their business interests over yours. So it provided that level of certainty and openness and inclusion that I think we have taken for granted.

Now, the majority has said, we have basically handed the keys to the internet to large internet service providers. And that certainty is gone. They have the ability to do all the things that we fear the most. That, again, viewed all this innovation and inclusion. You don’t have to have a storeroom. It doesn’t even matter where you live if you have online activity. You are able to engage in the space. Commerce, education, help. All of these things are available to you. And that to me is the right shame in all of this.

O’Brien: And at the heart of the Open Internet Order was the reclassifying broadband as a Title II service. Do you still feel that Title II is the best way forward for protecting net neutrality?

Clyburn: It was the strongest legal authority prepared. It was upheld by the court. It provided the level of certain protections for everyone in this space. So I think that if you have that mind meld I’m gonna sort of trick you, or if you have that mind meld or regulatory meld that everyone is protected, everyone is enabled, then yes, I think that was the best foot forward.

O’Brien: Opponents argue that those rules were put in place in 1934 under the Telecommunications Act, and it’s kind of dated. But instead, they wanna go back to rules put in place in 1996, I believe. What’s changed? Why do you think going back to these pre-World War II rules is a better way forward?

Clyburn: I’m gonna take a slight issue with that.

O’Brien: Sure.

Clyburn: Foundation might have been laid by what we have learned in the past. Particularly when it comes to critical services like broadband. Like voice service. But what we did with the 2015 rules is we got rid of 25 provisions. We got rid of over 77 hundred rules in regulations. We got rid of those because they were no longer applicable in an innovative 21st-century space. You don’t throw away the foundation of what has enabled the protections and innovations in the first place. What you do is improve upon them. What you do is get rid of the rules that are no longer applicable.

You don’t just throw away years of what we’ve learned. Because again, what we see on this floor is based on years of what we’ve learned on the adapting of where we are headed. That’s to ignore and pretend that all of those things aren’t building blocks to innovative creativity and success. I think it’s shortsighted.

O’Brien: And I won’t lie and say I’ve read the entire repeal order. It is 546-something pages, I believe. But I did kind of peruse through it. I saw multiple times, stories cited, including from sites like Engadget. It seems as if they are trying to paint companies like Google who support net neutrality as being hypocritical and questioning their genuineness because they do things like remove YouTube from Amazon Echo’s shows and other things. Does that line of argument strike you as convincing?

Clyburn: Let’s be clear about what we are doing and what we have the authority to do. No. 1: We do not regulate air providers, which Google is one. And No. 2, which is really No. 1, is we’re talking about access to the internet. So I don’t want us to plate or confuse by how others who are not our internet service providers; how they conduct themselves. That’s another agency and another conversation.

What we’re talking about is your online experience and who is in charge of that experience. Is it you or is it your internet service provider? That is the question.

O’Brien: And I think critics say the repeal has put control in the hands of the service providers, and I’m gonna read a little bit from my notebook cause I wanna make sure I get these quotes right. So, not that long ago the chairman recorded a skit for the Federal Communications Bar event. He used to work at Verizon. He joked with a senior VP of Verizon that it was: “An awesome idea to “brainwash and groom a Verizon puppet to become the FCC chairman.” How does that impact his credibility and the credibility of the commission as a whole?

Clyburn: [I’m] not trying to defend the chair because again, he can do that for himself. But that night is a very quirky night in telecommunications. We call it the Telecommunications Prom, basically for geeks that are in the space. And so it’s sort of tongue-in-cheek. It’s our own correspondents’ dinner. It’s that. Again, people are joking around. You can take issue whether the joke was funny. Just looking at that at in isolation, I might not put too much weight on that. But I do put all the weight on what he’s been advocating for the past several years and what we did last month, which I think is problematic.

O’Brien: I think that what a lot of people took issue with is that in context it seems bad where Chairman Pai first announced the intentions to repeal net neutrality. I also believe Commissioner Michael O’Reilly suggested that no amount of public outcry could change their mind on it.

Clyburn: I’ll respond to that in this way: There were millions, tens of millions, of legitimate comments. The majority of those were not in favor of changing or shifting the course of repealing on net neutrality. There were 47,000 complaints that were not entered into the record, that the majority obviously did not take into account that showed that the ecosystem is not perfect. Those to me are problematic. They are issues that run counter, I believe, to us taking everything into account. Particular are people’s opinions about what direction I think we had.

So I do take issue with my colleagues ignoring all comments. Particularly the legitimate comments, because this impacts us. There are 300-plus million people who are impacted by the decision of three people. And I think, part of that evaluation matrix should include what you feel.

O’Brien: The impact seems to go beyond just this net neutrality repeal order as well. In November there was also repeal of rules around media conglomeration. Does that not also bode poorly for a future in which there is no net neutrality?

Clyburn: I think it’s problematic. The lifeline item that is problematic. People who are economically disadvantaged … their gateway to connectivity. You’ve got uncertainty, I believe, that will come at the state level. We’ve got a Universal Service Fund that is responsible for $4.5 billion a year going into local rural communities that would be impacted by our decision because we no longer have the strongest legal authority to ensure that money is flowing. So I know the headlines might read one way, but when you peel down; when you go to the next layer, there are a lot of everyday things that are happening that we take for granted in this country in terms of investments and local communities that are now at risk, because we moved in this direction.

O’Brien: And that lifeline also seems like it’s potentially in danger?

Clyburn: I am fearful that the one, the only program that we have that is targeted for affordability at the FCC is on. I can hear the death rattles right now, and that’s a shame. Because it’s not just about infrastructure investment, though that’s important. If you build it and I can’t afford to come? That’s problematic. I think we’re putting at risk the one program that will address those millions of people that can’t afford a dial tone and they certainly can’t afford Broadband access. That’s problematic for all of us.

O’Brien: I know you have a very busy schedule. I don’t want to take too much more of your time, but I also don’t want to end on such a downer note.

Clyburn: Oh no.

O’Brien: The Senate is about to vote on net neutrality again. What can people do if they really value those protections?

Clyburn: So, what I’ve been saying a lot is the FCC does not have the final word, and thank goodness for that. We’ve got a number of parties who said they will challenge this decision in court. I think if the court rules in favor of this innovation and listening to the will of the people, ensuring that we have certainty going forward, then I think that we have a positive feature. There’s a congressional resolution that you mentioned that I think is on the [verge] of reaching critical mass in terms of numbers. I think if they weigh in and say, and listening to their constituents, I think that there’s a positive future. I’m like you. I am an eternal optimist that the people’s voices and opinions will reign supreme, and I’m looking forward to that day.

O’Brien: Let’s hope so. Thank you so much, commissioner, for joining us. And make sure to stay tuned for more here live from Engadget.