The Consumer Tech retail channel is as massive as it is competitive. Products and brands that take over the market one year can disappear the next. Every year at the Consumer Electronics Show, which takes place January 6-9, 150,000 people converge on Las Vegas to get a glimpse of some 20,000 new products vying for shelf-space at a store near you.
Electronics retail has existed for over a hundred years. The biggest advances in technology over the past 30 years started out as two distinct categories: media and mobile. In the 1980s music and TV went mobile with the Sony Walkman and Watchman. Phones were those brick-shaped things we used for actually calling people. These technologies have converged into one single device that fits into your pocket. This convergence, however has not decreased consumer electronics market but led to an explosion of creation and consumption in which the sum of mobile and media is far greater than it was as discrete parts.
