Strategy January 09, 2019
More Sights From CES 2019
With more than 4,400 technology companies sprawled across more than 2.7 million square feet of exhibit space, CES is almost too massive to contemplate. There’s literally too much for any one person to see and do during the massive trade show that takes over Sin City for four days each January. Here are a few more highlights from the show.
Don't Miss: 4 Cool Products at CES
SOMAINNOFIT
Bra shopping can be a pain. Sizes are confusing and don’t necessarily match up from brand to brand. Soma, a 15-year veteran in the intimate apparel industry, decided to do something about it using wearable technology. “We saw a need to help women understand better what sizes they should be wearing,” says Cathy Devine, vice president of innovation at Soma. “In the industry, we say 70% to 80% of all women are in the wrong bra size. It’s a confusing process. We wanted to dispel some of the mystery.”
Devine discovered an Israeli company called Like a Glove, which uses smart leggings to help women find a pair of perfectly fitted jeans. “We decided this could be a great solution for bras,” Devine says. Soma worked with Like a Glove to create the SOMAINNOFIT, a stretchy bra that includes four lines of circuitry to take precise body measurements. A Bluetooth-enabled patch on the back of the bra collects the data and sends it to a proprietary phone app that recommends a curated selection of bras from Soma’s site.
Seems like the kind of product you’d only need to use once, but Soma is betting on customers plunking down $59 – it’s selling for an introductory price of $25 through most of January – for the tech. Mary van Praag, president of Soma, points out that bra sizes can fluctuate, due to factors like weight loss or pregnancy. Plus, she adds, Soma is always coming out with new styles, and customers can use the app to determine which would be most suited to their style and shape.
Bloomer Tech
Another company exhibiting at CES is hoping to use bras to promote heart health. Bloomertech, a women-led startup out of MIT, has embedded washable, flexible circuits into its Bloomer bra to track data like electrocardiograms, pulse rates, respiratory rates, heart rhythms and more. The company’s young founder, Alicia Chong Rodriguez, was inspired after learning that women were underrepresented in heart disease research, even though it’s the leading cause of death in women worldwide and women’s symptoms don’t always match the classic sign of chest pain. Embedding trackers into a close-to-your-heart item that most women wear routinely seemed an obvious solution to the dilemma.
Volterman
Volterman has a suite of stylish smart wallets with six features – seven if you count the original feature of carting around cash, cards and ID. The wallets include a built-in power bank for both wireless and wired phone charging, a distance alarm system that lets you know if you’re about to leave your wallet behind, a GPS tracker so you always know where your wallet is, a thief detection camera that snaps photos of the person opening your wallet when it’s in lost mode, a global Wi-Fi hotspot for internet on the go and a built-in 64 GB memory bank for extra photo and video storage. For a product seemingly stuffed to the gills with gizmos, the Volterman is still surprisingly slim and sleek.
Pigzbe
Pigzbe offers a different kind of money-storage solution, a sort of digital wallet meant to replace the old-school piggy bank and teach youngsters the value of a hard-earned dime, even if they’ve never held a physical coin in their short lives. According to the company, the Pigzbe consists of four elements: a handheld “wallet” device, an app that lets children track their earnings by growing their digital “money tree,” a family-friendly cryptocurrency called Wollo and a payment card kids can use to spend their Wollo anywhere that takes Visa.
Company founders say it helps make digital currency more tangible and “real,” especially for kids who may be more accustomed to the instant gratification and endless stores of “gold” that can be accumulated in video games.
Lotus by Seam
Toronto based Seam Technic has created the Lotus, a personal safety device that has a microphone and speaker embedded into it. Unlike many other personal safety wearables that are little more than glorified panic buttons, the Lotus has real-time audio streaming so you can record and share a potentially unsafe situation. It also has live GPS tracking, which you can send to up to five of your closest contacts. “You can even use it as your little communicator, your personal assistant,” says Damini Jain, strategic partnership manager at Seam. Using the Lotus, you can access Siri, make phone calls or send texts via voice.