This week CES was once again held in Las Vegas with in excess of 100,000 people in attendance.

Cisco demonstrated a number of CMX and IoT related things this week.

Firstly "The Internet of Everything:  On The Go"

In the Cisco booth some future thinking was applied with a concept that imagines the shopping experience with a simulated retail environment:  "BigBox." While shopping at BigBox, visitors can walk through a combination of experiences involving location-based data, video, predictive analytics, security cameras, and sensors -designed to help retailers enrich the shopping trip for their customers, and more efficiently manage their stores.

Somewhat scary for some and exciting for others, while all the time enabling retailer increase their bottom line and deliver improved and personalized shopping experience to the consumers.

The next demo "Starlight Resort" was a combination of CMX, and Small Cell capabilities in the hotel resort environment.

The team showed how the future of customer engagement if evolving, from automatically waking up the app upon entering the venue, offering targeted highly customized and contextual messages to the consumer, to the device seamlessly roaming from cellular to wifi to small cell demanding on its location.

The demo showed the ability to integrate various customer service capabilities using location and contextual information so the customer can always get the best service with the least effort.

While the venue owner can get access to a wide array of very insightful and valuable analytics to assist with their business operations, planning and monitoring the effectiveness of various initiatives.

Mobile Advertising Trends:

Some interesting things, particularly in relation to Mobile and advertising  are emerging.  Increasingly, CES is a key event for advertising executives -where they make deals and almost more importantly figure out how the latest technology will transform the advertising business. Rumours are that CES is now among the most important events for determining how more than$100 billion gets spent every year on TV, Internet and mobile advertising.

Reports from 2014 suggest that over 10,000 ad industry executives visited CES, including the CEOs of every advertising agency and conglomerate, plus the chief marketing officers of every major brand, from Procter & Gamble and Unilever, to General Electric,American Express, and Samsung, plus all the major automakers.

Clearly the ad world is seeing the importance of the mobile revolutions that is becoming more and more evident at these events.

Cisco's  CMX solution continues to expand and evolve to enable real business value in this emerging marketplace, and there is much more to come.

I'll be blogging from NRF next week! Come over and learn some more about Cisco's solution for adapting to the location-based services trend in retail at Booth 1954.

For more information on CMX visit: www.cisco.com/go/cmx.