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CONSUMER ELECTRONICS SHOW
Eureka Park: The Lower East Side of CES

By David Benjamin

starting at about US$300. The drive is just a
black rectangle, so we asked Lokly CEO Benoit
Berthe, a good-looking guy, to pose with it.

YOUR BATH MAT IS WATCHING YOU
The smart mat developed by Mateo (Neuilly-
sur-Seine, France) looks like a regular bath
mat, which is not that thrilling to look at, so we
opted for an image of the much more photo-
genic Mateo representative, Coraline Gag-
nadre, talking with a curious convention-goer.
The Mateo mat gets more interesting when
you step on it: It measures your weight, makes
judgments about your posture, and even
reminds you of your shoe size. “Not only can
it identify users by their footprint,” reads the
promo material, but “it can also create a heat
map of how your foot makes contact with the
ground. And an awful lot more.”

LAS VEGAS — During the great wave of European immigration to America, by way of Ellis
Island, New York’s Lower East Side absorbed a vast number of newcomers, struggling to gain
a toehold in the U.S. economy, sell their ideas, and work their way to the top. It wasn’t a fancy
neighborhood, but it seethed with human and intellectual promise.
CES 2020 had a similar enclave: Eureka Park, a slightly out-of-the-way area in Halls A and D at
the Sands Convention Center where many smaller European up-and-comers set up their booths
and hawked their wares. Some of the companies — like Hitblu (Luxembourg), a digital clearing
house for private air charters — had no products to show but sent their ambassadors. Hitblu, for
example, presented debonair founder Federico Podesta, who explained the service and men-
tioned — offhand — that new investors would be more than welcome to pitch in. Mateo’s Gagnadre (r.) pitches its mat.
The common denominators at Eureka Park were ingenuity, a vastly eclectic range of prod-
ucts (and investment opportunities), and youthful enthusiasm, as indicated by the companies A BANDAGE WITH A BRAIN?
profiled here. The WoundLAB smart bandage can’t give you
(Photos by David Benjamin for EE Times Europe) investment advice, but it can tell you if your
cut is getting infected. Connected via smart-
phone app, a tiny hexagonal electronic patch
YOUR GRANDFATHER’S VOICE Pimely touts the device as a teaching aid and a embedded in a larger bandage continuously
Pimely (Villeurbanne, France), part of the means to keep kids close to far-flung family. measures biomarkers like heat and acidity
growing presence of the La French Tech ini- in a healing wound and conveys the data
tiative at CES, showed a recording technology DATA SECURITY IN CANDY-BAR FORM via secure near-field communication. The
affiliated with children’s book publishing. A Lokly (Massy, France) makes an encrypted USB WoundLAB patch is in clinical trials now, with
compact plastic square with a smiley face and a flash drive, controlled by a user’s smartphone, a goal of receiving Food and Drug Adminis-
heart on its surface, Bookinou plays stories — that can store up to 64 Gb of data and can’t tration (FDA) approval in the United States.
recorded in the voices of a child’s loved ones — be cracked by an intruder. The drive is smaller Grapheal, WoundLAB’s developer, is part of
as the child reads along in a hard-copy book. than the average candy bar, but it costs more, a large and growing research community in
Grenoble, France.

CAR INSPECTION IN A HEARTBEAT
(OR TWO)
Getting your car inspected is always a pain.
ProovStation (Lyon, France) has found a way
to ease it with a 360° drive-through scanner
that uses artificial intelligence to diagnose
everything about a vehicle, from license
number to paint scratches (including repair
estimates), in 10 seconds. The application
Pimely’s Bookinou (unicorn not included) Lokly’s Berthe flashes its secure drive. secures exchanges, simplifies inspections, and

www.eetimes.eu | FEBRUARY 2020