Is Intel the new cool kid on the block at CES?

I love CES. I want to know what’s going on, what’s new, what’s hot. But I couldn’t go this year, and on top of it all, I was swamped with billable work that forced me to shut out any and all distractions (apologies to my family).

Sure, I could rely on the good folks at CNET and Mashable to summarize things for me, but I prefer to learn about tech at the grass roots level.

Lucky for me, I can use Nexamaster, the best social media analytics tool out there, to give me a quick summary of what people were talking about on social media.

I started by taking a look at the lexical map to show me what the overall conversations were about.

A few things to keep in mind, when looking at a lexical map:

• The bigger the dot in this map, the more frequently the word appears
• Words that are close together on the map, appear together more frequently in conversations
• Colors on the map indicate conversation clusters

I can see that there were a lot of conversations about smart cars. A few stories pop out:

• Jaguar distraction detection
• Driverless “living space” concept car by Mercedes Benz
• BMW self parking car 
• Control your Audi with an LG Smart watch

If you look at the top brands that are mentioned, at first glance there are no big surprises with Intel and Apple leading the charge significantly.

However, dig a little deeper and we see some interesting data.

Apple had primarily two conversations going on.
1) Their sales app store sales are through the roof and are giving CES the brushoff this year

2) There are lots of cheap Chinese knockoffs of the iWatch in attendance at CES

Intel, on the other hand, has lots of interesting stuff going on. Their presence at CES this year covers the gamut from hard-core technology like the compute-stick, to gee-whiz gimmicks like the spider dress. They even got written up in the NY Times fashion pages.
1) 300 Million for diversity after gamergate

2) a way cool “Spider dress”

3) Part of Jaguar’s distraction detection technology

4) Dancing robots

5) Hitech buttons – disappearing fashion.

6) Drones

7) a new computing stick

I wonder, has Apple jumped the shark? Is Intel the new cool kid?

Another surprise coming out of the brand data is that newcomers Razer and Yotaphone are getting a lot of buzz. Razer beat out Samsung and BMW in conversations, and both Razer Forge and Yotaphone ranked higher than Google. These are clearly two companies to watch this year.

If we look at the top hashtags from CES week we can see that the “internet of things” was one of the top themes this year. I was also happy to see that Gamergate got some significant attention.

Here is a sprinkling of some of the other major stories that came out of CES 2015.

• Swarovski crystals charge your fitness tracker
• Wearables were big this year
• Google quietly drops Google TV
• Selfie sticks were surprisingly big this year.
• But a wearable flying camera might be giving selfie sticks a run for their money.
• Lots of 3D printing and printers were introduced
• The awkward marriage between fashion and technology continues.
• Some pretty sweet wireless earbuds