Lots of the companies at CES were showing new concepts and future products that aren’t shipping yet. Here’s my list of up and coming products that you can’t get your hands on yet.
Foldimate’s Laundry Folding Machine
Foldimate is working on a machine to fold your laundry for you. Shirts, pants, you name it!
The major appliance vendors continue to innovate by adding features to new model machines but so far nobody has a machine that can actually fold the laundry for you. The promise of a machine that can do it for you is straight out of the Jetsons, that future perfect life that we haven’t yet managed to achieve yet (where is my flying car?).
The company attracted a lot of attention at CES with visitors to their booth from the press, representatives of appliance companies, and well, pretty much anyone who wears clothes.
The machine on display at the booth wasn’t functional, but the company has a teaser video that shows how the machine works.
Foldimate is about 12-18 months away from shipping a commercial product, but their booth certainly got them a lot of attention. I will be sure to track their progress towards a finished product and I’ll keep you posted!
AftermasterPro
One of the most interesting products I saw at CES was the AfterMaster Pro, billed as “one-of-a-kind personal audio re-mastering device.” It’s a small box that you place in-line with your music source, and it re-masters it on the fly.
AfterMaster’s founders are audio mastering pioneers Larry Ryckman and Shelly Yakus. Each of their founders has decades of experience making audio sound better. The company runs a professional service mastering audio for a massive list of top recording artists and has now shrunk their methods and algorithms into a box for the end-user.
The AfterMaster Pro unit contains their patent-pending audio re-mastering algorithm that “delivers an unparalleled clarity, depth, imaging and fullness to audio recordings while delivering a significant increase in volume without increased distortion, loss of dynamic range or affecting high and low frequencies. It brings audio alive and creates imaging and depth to the flat sound field inherent in digital audio.”
I had an opportunity to listen to audio both with and without Aftermaster and the results were quite remarkable. While watching a movie, their product brings up the levels of dialog and background sound effects without affecting the loud explosions and gunfire.
Paul Wolf, their Director of Product Management, explained the problem that many of us face watching a movie at home: We have to turn the sound up quite high to hear the dialog but we grab for the remote once an action scene starts and the sound is so loud that it wakes up the kids.
Movie sound was mastered for a movie theater with ear-splitting volume. At home when you turn the volume down, you can’t hear most of the original audio. With After Master Pro, dialog is clearer and the background sound comes alive even at a low volume. AfterMaster Pro has applications for music as well, bring you fuller, richer sound.
AfterMaster Pro is currently fulfilling products for their Indiegogo funders and then will be available to the general public very soon. I hope to do a full review of the AfterMaster Pro once they start shipping.
The Orbit Card Bluetooth Credit Card-Size Tracker
Bluetooth trackers like Tile have been on the market for some time. The company Orbit had several products on display at CES that rose above the crowded field of Bluetooth trackers on the market by being smaller and re-usable. The Orbit Card from HButler is a credit-card sized Bluetooth tracker.It’s extremely thin and has a metal case containing impossibly thin electronics and a battery. The credit card tracker is about the thickness of 1-2 credit cards and would fit into your wallet without you thinking much about it. It has a 3 month battery life and is fully rechargeable. It’s not shipping yet, but was on display at CES. They currently make a quarter-sized Bluetooth tracker in a sleek metal case with rounded edges. It is quite small, perfect for clipping onto your car keys and has a replaceable battery.
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