By American Express open, helping you get business done. Hi there, everyone. And welcome to the future. Im j. J. Ramberg, and we have a special edition of your business for you this week. Im here in las vegas, at the Consumer Electronics show. For 50 years, ces has been the place for tech entrepreneurs to show off their new innovations. The show attracts more than 170,000 attendees from more than 150 countries. People are coming here to find out whats coming next. Weve come to ces a bunch of times now, and i have to admit, it is still a bit hard to navigate, because there is so much amazing stuff going on here. But, if you are a Business Owner and you play your cards right this show can be incredibly meaningful to you. We met up with two founders. One whos been coming here for 30 years to exhibit. And the second one, who has learned the ropes after just a few shows. So you have one of the most fun groups here that ive seen so far at ces. These are great. You have this beautiful booth that you spent a lot of money on. What do you hope to get out of the next few days . Well, for the most part, this is a great opportunity for us to hear from the consumer, twhat they like, what they dont like about it. Do they understand what were actually building. A great platform to get that kind of feedback where it will take us months and months if we dont have an opportunity like this here. The founder of ozobots company developed a golf ball sized robot that kids can program themselves, using very simple forms of computer codes. Oh, wow. No were not telling you guys what were doing. The secret ozobot is a small, smart robot that teaches kids coding through game applications. We want coding to be fun so everything that we did was focused around gameification, making it a more fun experience. Reporter the idea for these robots came to nader while he was watching his own Young Children passively gaze into their electronic tablets for hours at a time. They were unaware of their surroundings when they were engaged with the tablet. That was annoying to me. They were consuming whatever the tablet was giving them, but they were not actually creating anything. Reporter the challenge he saw was to develop a product that would get kids to create tech, not just consume it. And five years ago, he assembled a team of tech engineers who developed these tiny robots that could be programmed by kids to do different tricks. We launched the first product at ces in 2014. Reporter he chose ces as a key platform to test the market, because of the enormous number of attendees, representing the full spectrum of interests in electronics. In five days, we get to see so many different demographic groups. You dont get to do that in any other opportunity. Reporter what nader does at ces is listen. He says you can learn how to improve your product, and more importantly, you can also find which markets are the best fit. We found that the loudest, most vocal, most passionate group looking to us to develop something a little more customized to the classroom. Were seeing an uptick on that. Reporter the ozobot team jumped on the extra high interest from educators. And revised their Development Plans to make the classroom a priority. And he says, it worked. Where we are today, we have a very robust, active community in the education space. Weve developed north of 75 to 100 lessons ourselves. This year hes back with a brandnew line of robots much more tailored to the educational market. But hes not finished listening. Nader says this year hes still hungry for the next round of ces feedback. This year were excited once again to get the feedback and to get either the so whats, or the, thats really cool. Were here at the Venetian Hotel where a bunch of high end Audio Companies have taken over these suites so that they can meet with customers while theyre here. Im going to go meet with william lowe from audio quest to see how he does it. Bill, im j. J. Nice to meet you. What a nice cushy place to get to show. I feel like the sound is coming from everywhere right now. Thats what stereo is supposed to be. 40 years ago william lowe started his own business selling audio equipment out of his college dorm room. All because he didnt want to get a job. I did not intend to start a business. I just wanted to do something fun. And then that business got to where i now work for and i couldnt be happier. In irvine, california, his headquarters are here, in this 60,000 square food industrial building. Hes turned his company audioquest, into an Industry Leader manufacturing specialized audio cable known for reducing sound distortion. Wow. Thats good. He credits much of the growth of his business to the exposure hes received at ces. In january 1981, i exhibited my first Consumer Electronics show, and over the next few weeks i had dealers in Something Like 35 states and 19 countries as a result of Consumer Electronics show. Back in the early 80s, bill says hifi audio dominated ces and audio innovations like his were in the spot lights. It was the closest thing to playing in a rock n roll band. Everybody wanted to be your friend and get some advice from you. Today william says the Electronics Ecosystem is changing. As consumer attention focuses on Virtual Reality, robotics, and the internet of things, Audio Engineering products are no longer the main attraction. Ces itself has, of course, didnt used to include iphones, didnt used to include computers, didnt used to include car stereo. If anything audio was the number one definition of ces when i first went in 1973. William acknowledges his community is shrinking. While his customers may get extra pampering up here in this private suites, he also finds himself somewhat sidelined from the main show and he openly wonders how much longer ces will remain relevant to his business. Its just that its not the tent that our community is using to the. And it is possible this will be our last year exhibiting at ces. Thats an unknown. But whether or not he can continues to come to this show, theres one thing about the future of his business that is absolutely not unknown. This is the recreation business. If its not about fun, then forget it. Selfdriving cars, robots with personality, at one time these were just things that we saw on the jetsons cartoon. But here, it is in the present. It is all here at ces. And to parse through all of the new trends for 2018, we have our next guest, Rohit Bhargava who is the founder of the nonobvious company and a trend curator and its so good to see you. Im glad we found this one quiet spot in the conference that we could talk to each other. I know after Walking Around all this way. Lets talk about whats coming in 2018. Were seeing it here at the conference. And i want to start with one that i just think is fascinating, which is the idea of a human mode at a Technology Conference youre talking about human mode. What is that . Human mode is us as people wanting a version of technology where we can interact with real people. And that being an option for us, so you think about like the 800 number. And the idea that sometimes we just want the person. Right . What number do i have to press to get someone. Thats an option that we want. And so you think about so much technology, that we still want humanity. So this is fascinating, right . Because we talk a lot about bots taking over chats on facebook and what have you. So now people are talking about having a button that says let me talk to a human . Not only a button, let me talk to a human, but also technology mimicking humans. So now youre going to see all these robots at the show that have personalities. Right. That are quirky. That are sarcastic. Right. Its just an interesting technology. Which means theyre sort of the range like real human mode. You know, robot maybe you can have a volume dial to turn down the humanity of these robots. Okay. Lets talk about distribution. Because there theres all kinds of technology thats just disrupting distribution right now. Yeah, so disruption in distribution is ultimately the idea that we get our products and services to consumers in very new and different ways. So last year one of the biggest hits at the ces show was the mercedes autonomous van, and it was a van that had no driver. It was a selfdriven van. And it had drones on the roof. And the idea was it would drive up to your home, the robot would take the package out of the back. It would give it to the drone. The drone would fly it to your front doorstep and leave it on your door. And so now, youre thinking about that as a Business Owner saying well what sort of packaging do i need to have if a drone is going to take this and maybe drop it, and maybe have to pick it up from elevation. And what size . If i have a choice of what size to make my product, what size maybe theres a maximum size. So all these things are unknowns, which is really interesting, because its an opportunity to experiment. Right. And youve got to know about it or else youre going to be blindsided while the people with the correct packaging are going to get their products to people. Nobody knows exactly whats going to happen. Its a choice about whether youre early to experiment or put your blinders on and decide that it doesnt exist. All right. Lets talk about virtual empathy. I think this is fascinating. I had put on some Virtual Reality goggles last year at an event, and got to be in the middle of a refugee camp. Yes. Which was a, you know, incredible experience, you get to really feel it, not just have someone speak to me about it. But as a Business Owner how can you use this . Well, whats new this year, and this is how Fast Technology moves, people are saying Virtual Reality was so 2017. Right. And whats new is glasses that you wear that dont block you off from the world. So if youve ever had Virtual Reality experience, youre in that world kind of like youre in a Movie Theater and you dont see anything else. Yep. Where augmented reality is you wear the glasses but youre still seeing the real world. Youre just see information so if youre looking at the washington monument, you can see details about when it was built and everything through the glasses. It is so fascinating. Everything that we saw in movies is happening in real life. Lets get to another one touch worthy. Touch worthy is not just about touch screens, which is what you might think when you hear that trend. But a lot of our research, what it told us was people want physical objects. They want to feel physical objects. You know, i mean, when i write books people still want the print book and people thought awhile ago that print books would be dead, everybody wants the e book. You talk to my 10yearold and he still wants what he calls the real book. Thats interesting because i was going to say is that just for old people like me and you or young people want real things too . It really isnt. Its a human thing. Because you think about photos for example. How many thousands of photos do we take now on our phones. And if a photo ever gets printed out, like if you ever printed out a photo it would be a precious photo. Yep. And thats why you would print it. So the things you print now matter even more because so fewer. We should think even as were making things that may be virtual, may be apps and what have you, to have some sort of attachment, right . Something that goes with it that is real. Might be worthwhile. Yes. Well there is so much more here. Im glad i got to hear you. We found this spot. Thank you so much for stopping by. And have a great rest of your show. Thank you. Thank you. Many of the products and apps launched here at ces are entrepreneurial attempts to solve the worlds biggest problems. Todays disruptor is no stranger to solutions. Luis von ahn was one of the cofounders of capcha. Now hes trying to tackle the worlds education divide one language at a time with his free language learning ap duolingo. We met up with him at his headquarters in pittsburgh to talk to him about why transparency is so important to growth and how hes gotten everyone from students in columbia to tom hangs using the app. Education always thought of this thing that creates a huge gap between social classes. Most of the ways to learn a language before duolingo was very expensive. The irony was most people were trying to get out of poverty. We decided to launch duolingo in the year 2012. Everybody that came here came because of the mission, or most everybody. They had offers from other companies that five years ago had much bigger names than us. Somebody who doesnt have a bank account should be able to have access to all of our learning. We know if we charge people for our app we could be making more money. But weve decided no the to do that. Instead we put an ad at the end of every lesson. We also allow people to really, really dont like ads you can pay to remove ads. The main thing we think about is how can we provide a Better Service to our users. So thats the conversations we have here every day is how can we teach better . We do look at other apps, for inspiration. But theyre not direct competitors. For example we look at games for inspiration. We try to look up but not down. One of the big turning points for the company was when we hired our first manager. Somebody who had actual management experience. We only had like 25 people or something. And it was almost a revolt. People were like were going to have managers . That is so corporate. But it made a huge difference. We were able to hire somebody who was a director of engineering at google and she came. Ive learned a lot about management from somebody who has basically managed many more people than me. So hiring people who are better than you, and that you can learn from, thats a big thing. A lot of the way in which decisions were made, particularly when we were a smaller company, were just add hok. It was like sometimes we would be eating dinner between some random set of people in the company wed just make a decision. Because im the ceo, i can just make that decision. When that happened people would get upset if they werent there. I wasnt there and you guys just made a decision. And we made a big change so that decisions are kind of have to be made with a process. You know, in the office. And also, we do this thing every week, its a q a, friday q a, anybody can ask any question they want. The rule is ill answer it if i know the answer. A lot of people feel a lot better. They really increased commitment and trust of the leadership. We talk to our users sometimes. We just randomly contact some of our users and are able to talk to them. Another way is most everybody in the company uses the app to try to learn a language so we know. I use it to try to learn some languages. I know what the limitations are. Look, this kind of sucks. The mobile market has matured a lot. Users are a lot sevier. The apps that are winning are ones that are really fulfilled their promise and really fulfilling a promise to our users or are we just doing for a quick buck. Our goal is to really be everywhere where people are trying to learn a language, we want to be there. Technology is essential to almost every business, but electronics take energy. And that can get expensive. So here are five ways to save on your electricity bill. One, get a professional energy audit. Your auditor will be able to check for leaks, inspect your insulation and uncover hidden money wasters where you least suspect them. Two, get a smart programmable thermostat. And discourage employees from playing with the temperature. Set your thermometer between 78 and 80 degrees in the summer, and 65 and 68 degrees in the winter. Three, invest in wind and solar power. While renewables can be pricey to install, theyre eligible for some tax breaks, and can protect your company from sudden regulatory changes, or cost increases. Four, Pay Attention to your lighting. Wherever possible, use natural light. And switch to l. E. D. Lights, which last langer, or fluorescent lights. And five, look for the energy star logo. Electronics that are certified by the energy star arm of the epa are more efficient, and can often power themselves down when theyre not in use. Entrepreneurs from around the world come here to ces to get investors, and other companies, interested in their products. So we thought, what better place to have an elevator pitch . Jim come on in here. Hi. So jim poole, good to see you. I feel like i should hug you because i slept in your booth yesterday. Yes, yes, you did. All right. And we cheated a little this time because we got the judges to check out your product first. Dont tell them that. Yes, we did. We felt like we had to. I dont want to give away what it is. You have all the stuff here. I do, yes. You have two people youre going to be pitching to today. Nisa amoils and suzy willow. Lets go see how you do. Wonderful. Hi, my name is jim poole. Im president ceo of a Neuroscience Company that makes nucalm and im here to introduce to you a disruptive technology. We win in a culture far too stressed and plugged in. Wouldnt it be nice if there was a technology that allowed us to unplug, relax and restore . Nucalm is the first and only patented technology clinically proven to lower dress and help people recover from poor sleep without drugs. 20 minutes of nucalm is equivalent to two hours of restorative sleep. It sells for 4,295 medical device. Weve sold over 11 million. But were here to launch renu by nucalm, simpler, easier to use cheaper model so we can change the energy of the planet to calm, cool and confident. Were seeking 5 million of Investment Capital for 15 equity in the company so we can launch renu and grow this business. Thank you very much. Thank you. Nice job, jim. Thank you very much. So how long does somebody need to sit with this . 20 to 30 minutes. A day, a week . Depends on your stress level. If youre highly stressed 20 to 30 minutes. You both tried it. What did you think . I thought it was great. I felt much more relaxed. I did not fall asleep. But, hopefully if i used it at home, then i would use it regularly. I didnt fall asleep, either. It put me in a state of sort of in between sleep and awake, right . It levitates you just above deep sleep i