Remember the Instamatic? It's still dead, but Kodak isn't
It was a scene from a dystopian future where the machines have won: walking, talking and dancing robots; flying and riding drones; human beings lost in virtual-reality headsets
And that was just one hall of the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas last week. In a hall called Eureka Park, more than 500 start-ups and tech newcomers launched anything from smart hairbrushes to laundry-folding machines. Another hall came close to resembling a parking lot for cars of the future. When 3,500 exhibitors and 20,000 new products compete for attention, it's easy to be caught up in the fever to find the next big thing. As a result, you could be forgiven for not noticing comebacks by old brands that had been left for dead. However, it was not for want of trying by the brands. Names like BlackBerry, Kodak, Nokia and Polaroid were prominent. The most surprising recovery came from Kodak, which became a case study of companies disrupted by new technologies when it filed for bankruptcy protection in 2012 - killed off by the very digital photography technology it had invented. A year later, it had been restructured and repositioned as a technology company focused on i...
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