Every year, many technology companies go on to flaunt the developments they’ve been working on through exclusive technology events. Through these events, companies talk about the new products they want to launch, new features they’ve included, and what the company’s goal and focus would be on going further.
In this blog, we have gathered a roundup of the highlights of some of the best IT events that happened in 2021.
Without any further ado, let’s get into it!
1. Consumer Electronics Show, CES 2021
Consumer Electronics Show 2021, commonly known as CES 2021 is one of the most influential and awaited technology events in the world. Following are the highlights of the CES 2021 event that concluded on January 14th 2021:
- SOSLAB won the Innovation Awards at the Consumer Electronics Show 2021 for its ‘Solid-state LiDAR ‘ML’ for autonomous vehicles’ in the Vehicle Intelligence & Transportation category. SOSLAB’s product allows simpler vehicle sensor deployment with regards to weight, size, and stability.
- Mobileye, an Israeli self-driving car developer, announced its collaboration and partnership with Intel (its parent company) to develop a groundbreaking of its high-performance and automotive-grade solid-state LiDAR to improve road safety.
- Skydio, a San Francisco-based drone startup received the ” Best of Innovation Award for Drone and Unmanned Systems 2021″ at the event for its Skydio X2.
- Verizon, Skyward, and UPS announced partnership over drone delivery for their retail market. This will be done using Verizon’s 4G LTE technology.
- Sony, a Japanese multinational conglomerate organization launched Airpeak drone calling it as the smallest drone in the world equipped with its Alpha cameras.
- General Motors and Cadillac unveiled a ‘self-driving electric party vehicle’ which is meant to provide an excellent social space for friends and family to gather and celebrate on their way to an event. The party vehicle is equipped with biometric sensors in the seats that help adjust heat, lighting, aromatherapy, humidity, and lighting. The PAV (Personal Autonomous Vehicle) also has a variety of voice and gesture controls, in addition to an interior camera and a journey information system.
2. Cisco Live 2021
Cisco Live! is Cisco’s one of the most celebrated and renowned technology and networking annual conferences. Here’s a recap of last year’s two-day global virtual event that was conducted on March 30-31 in the Americas:
- Cisco announced the integration of its internet intelligence technology ThousandEyes with the Catalyst 9300 and 9400 campus switches.
- As the transition to the remote and hybrid workplace creates an evident divide between in-office and remote workers, new features like “People Insights” in Webex features to be added that will help counter the problem.
- Cisco launched its first network-as-a-service product that aims at delivering a robust hybrid cloud infrastructure. It plans on selling the product and an all-in-one SASE offering in 2021.
- The company is to add lower end routers to 8200 and 8500L that are used for branch and aggregation use cases.
- Cisco also announced the acquisition of IMImobile’s voice and messaging APIs for boosting its CCC (Cloud Contact Center) offering.
- The company forecasts this quarter’s revenue growth to be between 3.5-5.5% which will be driven by increased sales of video conferencing software and hardware and wireless networking products.
SEE ALSO: CES 2021: Dates, ticket prices, featured speaker & more details
3. Microsoft Ignite 2021
Microsoft Ignite’s focus in 2021 was on the seismic transition from offices to hybrid working and overall digital transformation. Let us refresh your memory about what happened at the Microsoft Ignite 2021 event:
- Mr Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO kicked started his introductory keynote by talking about how the digital landscape has transposed over the last 18 months across all industries. He predicts that the world is to see more digitization over the upcoming 10 years than it has seen in the past 4 decades.
- The theme of the event was about the changes in businesses as a whole in a post-pandemic world which includes the fast transition towards hybrid working, making hyper-connected businesses, accelerating digital capabilities within businesses and the subsequent increased cyber security risks businesses face in the digital age.
- Tech giant Microsoft will be integrating new collaboration apps within Teams from multiple partners, including Atlassian, ServiceNow, and SAP. This is done with the goal of increasing flexibility and efficiency for employees.
- In Microsoft Loop, Loop components gets productivity unites for enabling users to seamlessly collaborate while working, Loop pages to get canvases that allow users to properly organize components with the capability of pulling in data, links, and files, and Loop workspaces which are shared workspaces where team members can track progress of the projects and organize content.
- The biggest announcement has to be Microsoft Mesh – the tech giant’s metaverse. Mesh will use mixed reality to boost virtual collaboration amongst the users in immersive spaces, like they are in the same room. It can be directly integrated into Teams and will help users engage virtually with their colleagues via holoportation and avatars, facial expressions, gestures, and detecting eye contact.
4. WWDC 2021
Apple’s WWDC event wasn’t really the most exciting Apple WWDC event of all time. With no hardware announcements made by the company, here’s a recap of what happened at the company’s virtual event:
- iOS 15 and iPadOS 15 were announced at the WWDC 2021 that’ll bring some useful features, like new Augmented Reality features in Apple Maps, text recognition in images, government ID integration, revamped notifications, background blurring in video calling apps like FaceTime.
- For iPadOS, Apple announced enhancements and improvements to the existing multitasking and widgets, ‘Quick Notes’ accessible from any app, translations for on-screen text, and coding capability apps with Swift Playgrounds along with the ability to publish them right to the App Store.
- Apple also announced at the WWDC 2021 event FaceTime will now be possible with people outside of the Apple ecosystem. iOS 15 by the company will now allow users to create a link to a FaceTime call. This means that any person with access to the link can join in via a browser.
- The tech giant is in talks with the TSA to enable users to use their iPhone as an ID at certain American airports.
- MacOS Monterey to bring a convenient, seamless multi-monitor setup with ‘Universal Control’.
Summing it up
These were some of the most awaited IT events of the world. These events shed light on what tech giants and companies are up to and how they aim at changing the future. Let’s see what these tech titans bring to the world in 2022.
SEE ALSO: Apple WWDC 2021 Dates, What to Expect & Hardware + Software Updates
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