Is anyone going to CES this year? A question that has long floated in the world of technology will finally be answered, as this highly influential fair returns to Las Vegas after a hiatus caused by the Covid-19 pandemic.
“We know that this year will be a smaller fair, for obvious reasons,” said Jean Foster, senior vice president of the Consumer Technology Association (CTA, for its acronym in English), responsible for organizing the event.
Large technology companies have given up their plans to attend the fair in person.
The latest sign of the show’s shrinkage was Friday’s announcement that CES would be one day shorter than originally planned.
The immense exhibition halls will open on Wednesday, although the spread of the omicron variant of the coronavirus has raised concerns about the safety of indoor events and international travel.
At the end of December, the CTA estimated between 50,000 and 75,000 attendees for this week’s conference, down from the more than 170,000 who attended the last face-to-face meeting two years ago.
Until last week, some of CES’s most die-hard fans were wondering whether they should go or stay home.
“An online CES is not a real CES,” Prince Constantine of the Kingdom of the Netherlands declared in an interview in December.
“You have to see the products and meet the people.” But a week later, the royal, who often works as a special envoy for Dutch tech companies, opted to stay home. Your country will send a small team to CES 2022, as will many big tech companies, if they send anyone at all.
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