EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW AI
EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW AI WILL BRING A FUNDAMENTAL CHANGE TO EVERY ASPECT OF OUR LIVES. I.P. Park President and CTO, LG Electronics MEET THE LG THINQ HOME This year’s LG Electronics booth at IFA 2019 is centred around delivering new value for customers in line with changing trends in living spaces. We asked I.P. Park, the company’s President and CTO, to tell us more. Depicted through the LG ThinQ Home – the highlight of this year’s LG exhibition – the booth imitates six distinct actual living spaces and how LG ThinQ products will bring about transformational changes to the home. LG ThinQ Home will encompass both openness and integration, shown through the “Great Living Kitchen”, a combined space which can be used as both a kitchen and living room, as well as the personalised care expected from a home office or styling room. It features innovative LG ThinQ products, from the Rollable OLED TV to the LG HomeBrew, without compromising the personalisation capabilities that cater to diverse lifestyles. LG ThinQ will expand from its initial offerings focused on delivering AI capabilities of individual products to providing an integrated home solution. The visionary lifestyle realised by LG ThinQ was also explored through yesterday’s “LG Future Talk”, focused on technology that will drive LG into the future, including AI and 5G accompanied by exclusive new technology demonstrations that LG has recently been working on. In addition, the LG stand also features an OLED attractor at the entrance to emphasize LG Electronics’ OLED leadership, along with a separate space dedicated as the LG SIGNATURE Brand zone highlighting its ultrapremium image focused on the fundamentals. How is ThinQ evolving, and what does this mean to the consumer? As one of the three pillars defining LG ThinQ – evolve, connect, open – the ability to evolve has been fundamental in providing consumers with a more personalised product experience. LG ThinQ products offer features that are optimised and personalised for each consumer by recognising, learning and analysing individual patterns. They become more valuable with the passing of time, evolving to better meet consumers’ personal needs, as opposed to in the past, when it was natural for home electronics to lose value the more they were used. LG ThinQ allows AI devices to go beyond simply executing voice recognition and understand the purpose and intention behind each command. Such contextual understanding requires AI to evolve through accumulating interactions with the users. LG ThinQ products will thus evolve over time by learning about users, connect seamlessly with customers’ lives and open an ecosystem of innovation. How will AI affect our lives in the coming years? There is little doubt that AI will bring a fundamental change to every aspect of our lives. It will present new possibilities. We envision AI technology to convene all aspects of our lives into one connected flow and create a seamless living experience. Some specific examples include a home that knows what kind of day you had in the office and automatically prepares the perfect evening for you upon arrival. With AI, we can also imagine a kitchen that will learn what you’re watching on TV and order exactly what you need. Lastly, we can even envision self-driving cars that can pick up your orders just through a text message 44
EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW ConceptD REVOLVES AROUND FOUR PILLARS: PERFORMANCE, SILENCE, DESIGN AND PRECISION Emmanuel Fromont President, Acer Europe ACER BROADENS PORTFOLIO Already a reference for gamers, the brand gets even more “serious” and brings a new range for “creators” Acer arrives at IFA this year with a whole new product portfolio. We asked Acer European President Emmanuel Fromont to tell us about it. It’s a refreshing change for us who are probably best known for our gaming products. We’ve realised that people do want high-end performance but not necessarily just for gaming. 50% of our Predator customers use their PCs for both gaming and creative software, and almost 20% use them for high demanding graphic applications. That’s why we recently introduced ConceptD, a new brand for users interested in the level of performance of gaming machines, but looking for a more sophisticated design. Having already launched two workstations, four notebooks and two professional displays, it’s clear we are serious about this market. We have established ourselves as a reference to the most demanding gamers, so we have ample means to impose ourselves in the field of the equally demanding creators. What has the product range been designed to do? With this new brand, we target demanding users who do not compromise on performance. All the new ConceptD products leverage much of the technology from Predator gear when it comes to features like cooling, internal architecture, ergonomics, and so on. In the meantime, since these are workstations aimed primarily at architects, animators, graphics designers, engineers, film makers, product designers, visual effects specialists, and so on, stability and reliability are the cornerstones of these PCs. In fact, ConceptD revolves around four pillars: performance, silence, design and precision, and especially delivering accurate colours on monitors. Gaming is a fast-growing segment. What’s new in Acer’s gaming offering this year? Our mantra is “progress through innovation”. We are leaning into innovation that excites people, gives people a good reason why they need a new PC. That’s why we have largely invested in cooling systems, design, and portability starting from Triton 700 last year and moving to our new entry, Predator Helios 700. It features a unique HyperDrift forward-sliding keyboard that helps maximise airflow to keep the system running cool and quiet while delivering a sleek modern look. Then there’s the Predator Thronos, our giant and acclaimed gaming chair that will be available at our booth for media, customers and visitors. We are the only company to produce a gaming chair that has been engineered to work specifically with a set of components which deliver a fully immersive experience through sound, haptic feedback and vibrations that correspond with gameplay. What’s the strategy behind all those dedicated market segments? We already sell plenty of “value” PCs; commodity systems that offer good specs for the price and we are thriving in the gaming and education markets too, where performance and sturdiness matter. Now, we want to continue to pursue the so called “micro-trends” courting on segments which are growing within the PC industry. Here, we see an opportunity to shine by providing a more curated PC experience; a completely different strategy from its approach to mainstream PCs. How important is IFA as a promotional platform for Acer? Our main goal is to connect with customers and media from all over Europe right upfront of the most important season of the year. Most of our markets are attending, and we hope there will be much more in the coming years www.ifa-international.org IFA International • Friday 6 th September 2019 45
