There are lots and lots of companies showing their wares in reasonably modest booths, 15×15 feet, 20×20 feet, and then there are the real consumer electronics powerhouses, companies like Samsung, Sony, Intel and Sharp, they have spaces that are larger than your local store. The Sony booth itself was 30,000 square feet and took a year to design and create.

So what was worth seeing?

While journalists are always looking for The Next Big Thing, the reality of consumer electronics is that it’s marked more by incremental improvement than by dramatic leaps in technology. The super-thin OLED TVs? They were bigger this year than last. The iPhone cases? Do I even need to say that they’re basically the same as they were two years ago, just redesigned for the iPhone 4s?

Within all of this incremental improvement there were also some really interesting additions to the world of consumer electronics as embedded technology, global positioning systems, and always-available Internet become more pervasive. Still, things get smaller and cheaper, and tech championed by the costly research labs of large corporations trickle down until they’re being produced as low-budget commodities by companies whose names I can’t even pronounce.

When I go through the show — and I check out the products from every single vendor — I’m not so much looking for the amazing but instead the interesting, the thoughtful, the things that catch my attention. A 72″ HDTV that’s now available in an 84″ model? Not interesting. A TV that can help you find what you want to watch, however? That’s interesting.

WIth that in mind, there were definitely some things that caught my eye at CES 2012.

Cobra’s iRadar Crowdsourced Radar Detection System

Winner: Best Gadget

I own a radar detector but turn it on maybe once a year. In fact, the last few long drives I’ve taken I forgot to put it in the car, so it’s not like I’m some crazy driver who loves to go fast and is one point away from having my license suspended. That’s not what I find so darn cool about Cobra’s second generation iRadar device.

Last year, at the 2011 Consumer Electronics Show, Cobra unveiled the iRadar, a radar detector with no buttons, no indicator lights, a device that was completely reliant on you having a smartphone and used that to display speed, detected radar systems, maps, etc. Nice. This year, however, they upped the ante in a most fascinating manner: the iRadar software is now a shared community database of detected radar locations and types.

What does this mean? If you and I both use iRadar and I drive through an area where a radar gun “paints” my car as I zip past, I’ll get the warning as I would with any other radar detector. But then my iRadar app will automatically share the location and type of radar in use with the rest of the iRadar user community. Fifteen minutes later, when you drive through that same area, your smartphone will warn you that I’d just a few minutes earlier detected a radar in use.

Crowdsourcing at its best. Using the distributed nature of thousands of radar detectors traveling about to paint an accurate and ever-changing picture of where the police are trying to capture speeding vehicles using various technology. Smart.

Even better: You can grab the app itself for free and have instant access to the entire reporting database, though you aren’t really contributing to its success without the radar detector too. Links: iPhone version and Android version.

Now, is it legal? I suspect that somewhere down the road there’ll be some law it turns out that Cobra is breaking by having the shared radar database, but until then, it’s still extraordinarily interesting…

Lenovo “Yoga” Ultrabook

Winner: Best Hardware

As someone who owns both Mac and Windows-based laptops, it’s always struck me that the Windows PC systems are less elegant and slower. Boot time on a Mac can be 20-30 seconds, but on PCs I commonly hear of people who have 2-3 minute (or longer!) boot times. Yes, PC laptops are a lot cheaper, but they’re also less elegant and less attractive.

There’s also a distinct trend in computing that we’re all moving away from desktop systems to laptops and, for a lot of people, that migration continues with a leap from laptops to tablets, primarily the über-popular Apple iPad.

This year’s Consumer Electronics Show reflected this with the introduction of the Ultrabook line of PC laptops. All designed to be ultra-light and boot ultra-fast, they go a long way to addressing the primary obstacles I’ve always had with PCs. In fact, the best of these devices are now easily as sleek and sexy as the Apple MacBook Air.

Most interesting among these is the laptop, a device that, as you can see in the picture, lets you actually fold the screen all the way back so that you in essence create a tablet with the keyboard facing out on the back. It’s touch sensitive, so it’s an instant Win7 laptop.

I know that there have been previous generations of convertible laptops, and I even had a Gateway one for a while, but none of the vendors ever got the hinge right. Even HP’s convertible PC laptop (where the screen rotates 180-degrees and closes so that it covers the keyboard) had a poor hinge.

By contrast, Lenovo’s really nailed the complexity and required rigidity of the screen/keyboard hinge in its Yoga laptop, and everyone I saw who actually touched one got a gleam in their eye. Yes, it’s that cool. Coming soon…

RCA Symphonix / BluWave

Winner: Best Health Product

I can’t think of a more mundane product than a hearing aid. Yes, for old folk and those people who are starting to lose their hearing. Then again, with the amnipresence of iPods and heavy use of earbuds, I expect the next generation will have early onset hearing loss so these devices are going to be more common than you think.

The trick is to figure out how to create a hearing aid that lets you pretend it’s something else so that you aren’t embarrassed to wear it and therefore drive everyone crazy because you can’t actually hear them talking.

Enter the RCA Symphonix. It’s a hearing aid and Bluetooth cellphone headset in one.

Brilliant idea. Now people who need a bit of assistance with their hearing can leave this clipped to their ear and no-one will ever know that they have a hearing aid on. Less embarrassment = more use = a genuine help for people who need it. Smart.

Samsung’s Transparent Smart Window

Winner: Best Glimpse of the Future

This was a prototype that they were showing, a proof of concept if you will, but holy cow, what an amazing futuristic thing: an LCD computer screen that’s transparent. Imagine having it as your bedroom window. Tap on it (or access it remotely via an app or voice control system) and it instantly turns opaque. Tap it again, and it’s transparent. No blinds, no curtains, just a piece of glass with magical properties.

Far, far better, though, is that it can display anything you might put on your computer screen. The demo, as you can see in the embedded video, has a weather widget floating in the glass, along with a digital clock. Got an email from the boss? That could easily show up ready for you to quick review while shaving.

As with any other prototype, this isn’t available to buy, even if you’re part of the so-called 1%. It’s more an astonishing “look what we can do” and a sneak peak at some technology that will absolutely be available in ten years or so. Very cool.

And more…

There were lots of neat things to see, and I certainly came home with some cool goodies, including a Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 and a Sony Bloggie camera that lets me easily live stream events with the push of a button, but CES is about increments, about the migration of tech from prototype and demo to expensive to commodity, and whether you’re interested in smarter washing machines or a slick computer, it’s well worth going. If you can get in and find a room for less than $400/night, that is!

And me? I’ll be back next year…

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Dave’s Answer:

I have a brand new Kindle Fire too and it’s been an interesting experience trying to figure out how things work after spending a few years exclusively on the Apple iPad. There are a ton of differences in the user experience — and Amazon’s got a ways to go for the Kindle to be a useful general purpose Android tablet — but the FIre’s surprisingly capable once you figure out how to make it work properly.

The first thing to realize before you drop your own movies onto the device is that it doesn’t have much space. In fact, if they sold it by featuring the memory capacity, no-one would buy it, as there’s just a smidge over 5GB of available space and no way obvious to expand it with an additional SD Card or similar. Considering my iPad has 64GB of storage, that’s a huge difference.

Still, a typical two hour movie can be reduced down to about 800MB so that should theoretically give you space for 3-4 films if you don’t load it up with music and photos, since it all taps from the same space.

To convert an AVI movie for the Kindle Fire or any other Android Tablet, presumably, you’ll need to produce something that uses the H.264 format and is in MP4 format. The screen on the Kindle is a higher resolution, but it autoscales for 854 x 480 video so that’s the target we’ll use.

To accomplish the task, I’m going to use the terrific multi-platform utility Handbrake. Yep, you read that right. If you’re on a Windows system, you can use the same program with the same settings to get your movie working on the Kindle Fire too. Nice. I’ll use a Mac, however, so the UI itself is slightly different.

To start out, locate your AVI movie source and launch Handbrake. I’ll use my own rip of the terrific Pixar movie Cars 2, as you’ll see.

On the top bar you’ll want to click on “Source”:

Find and choose your AVI source file, then look on the right side of the same bar for the “Toggle Presets” button:

When you click on it, a small window slides out on the right with a long list of Apple devices you can use as the target format. No Kindle Fire, yet, but we can work around that!

Choose “iPad” under the “Apple” option, then look on the main window to see how all the defaults have changed for the output video format. There’s one setting that you must change for the resultant video to work on the Kindle Fire, and that’s “Large file size”:

If you read the pop-up closely, you’ll see that Handbrake warns you of incompatibility with this particular setting too. Just uncheck this box.

Now double-check the output directory and filename . It’s smart to know where it’s going to end up so you don’t have to hunt for the Kindle Fire-ready movie!

If you’re thinking I’ve done these sort of conversions in the past and then had to hunt for the output file, well, you’d be correct. ‘nuf said on that topic!

Everything looks good, so click on the “Add to Queue” button on the top bar, then the “Show Queue” button adjacent to it, and you’ll see something like this:

Press “Start”.

This conversion will take a while. In fact, each movie you convert generally takes about 50% of the running time of the film, based on my experience. Have patience and it’s a splendid time to go get a cup of coffee, do some laundry or pop by the gym for a quick run.

Eventually, though…

That’s the hard part done. Now, how do you get the movie onto your Kindle?

Copying A Movie Onto the Amazon Kindle Fire

Turns out that if you have a standard MicroUSB connector, you can plug your Kindle Fire directly into your computer and it shows up as an external drive. At least, once you turn it on (plugging it in isn’t sufficient to wake it up, one of the many usability differences between it and the iPad) and unlock it if you have a lock code.

On the Mac it’s “KINDLE” and there’s a lot of interesting stuff to see:

As I’m demonstrating in the image above, your newly converted m4v video file can simply be dragged and dropped into the “Videos” folder.

Once it’s done copying you can unplug the Kindle because the last few steps are all on the device, we’re done with the computer at this point.

First thing to realize — and it’s a weird design decision — is that the “Movies” app isn’t where you are going to find your own video content. That’s exclusive to content you buy from Amazon and there’s not even a link to “your own video library” or similar.

Instead you need to go to the “Apps” area and look closely. There’s a “Gallery” app for viewing photos and that’s where your video content will show up.

You can see the app dead center in this Kindle Fire screen shot:

Tap on it and you’ll see a stack of whatever pictures you’ve downloaded onto the device (I have 49) and whatever videos you’ve copied onto the device too:

Tap on the stack of video stills and you’ll see what movies are available:

Which is which? Who the heck knows. Another point where the Android user interface is completely underwhelming, particularly compared to the beautiful iPad display with its movie posters and preview information.

Still, it’s not that hard to tap on a video icon and find out it’s the wrong film. Just go back and tap on the other one, right?

In my case, the second video is Cars 2 and it looks great on the Fire:

That’s all there is to the process. A bit of work, but I always queue up a number of videos to be converted and let Handbrake work overnight. Then you can very easily copy everything in the background and your Kindle Fire’s ready to roll!

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The Forbes Debate On Whether Siri Is A Google Killer

Whether provocatively or by happenstance, Forbes raised the hype by publishing two conflicting commentaries on this.  Eric Jackson wrote a piece on why Siri is a Google killer.  Ten days later David Coursey countered with a piece on why Siri is not a Google killer. Both contributors are knowledgeable in the field so clearly this question is not easily resolved.

Eric Jackson Sheds More Light on The Google Mobile Team

Eric Jackson has written a most interesting post on the history of voice technology and described how some of the key players have been involved. He was involved in the voice technology sector and knows the players and their motivations. You might well think from that review that the present Google mobile team was well placed and very experienced to take the right strategic decision.

One item in that post is a video produced by Apple in 1987 as their vision of where this technology might go.  This is produced below.

An Apple Future Vision Becomes Reality

The first video here is Apple’s visionary view in 1987 of the Knowledge Navigator:

The second video is a demo of the new Siri application on the Apple iPhone 4s.

As you may notice, most of the functionalities envisaged in 1987 are now available almost a quarter of a century later.  It may have taken a long time to come together, but clearly this is a practical approach at this time.

Google May  Continue Its Present Mobile Strategy

Although Siri has done much more in the artificial intelligence field than Android has (as far as is public), Google could certainly put the resources in place to do their Android version of Siri, if it wished.  It certainly has some of the brightest people in voice technology.  However I believe there are reasons why, as an organization, they will be reluctant to do this.  That is why I wrote in Technorati that Siri will be a Google Mobile killer. The reasons I set out in the article were the following:

1. Google Is A Product-Driven Company
2. Google Thinks Apple Is Wrong
3. Google Is Proud
4. Smart Phones Should Use Voice Input Not Finger Swipes

The first reason is why Google will not acknowledge the importance of the fourth reason.

Apple Will Have A 2 Year Lead In The Mobile Internet

I am not alone in this line of thinking.  Gary Morgenthaler, a partner at Morgenthaler Ventures, recognized expert in artificial intelligence, and a Siri board member and investor argues that Apple now has at least a two-year advantage over Google in the war for best smartphone platform.

Apple is now offering through semantic analysis and artificial intelligence the opportunity to interact with your mobile device to home in on the right answer or complete the right task.  This is quite counter to the typical Google approach where they hope by understanding enough about you and your preferences, they will deliver exactly the answer you want in one pass.  That may be an additional reason why Google will reluctantly followed the Siri lead when the marketplace shows that it is inevitable.

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Dave’s Answer:

The first step is that you need to update both iTunes on your Mac OS X system and the iOS operating system on your Apple iPhone 4. The former can be easily accomplished by going to the “Software Update…” option on the Apple menu on your Mac. It checks against the master version server and should report that you have a new version of iTunes to download and install. When you do install it, you’ll need to quit your current version of iTunes first and I always quit all other running apps before applying any update since you never know what files might be shared behind the scenes…

Before you do so, however, it’s a great idea to do one more sync of your iPhone before all these updates. For good luck. Then when you update iTunes, do it again before you update your iPhone system (though it’s quite possible it’ll simply pop up a window saying that you have an update to iOS available and should apply it)

Now, if you’re here, you have iTunes 10.5 on your Mac and iOS 5 on your iPhone.

Ready?

Launch iTunes with your iPhone plugged into your computer and you’ll see the usual:

Pay attention to the “Version” box. Later you’ll see it changes. For now, however, scroll downward on the iTunes window…

Ooops! That’s interesting. iCloud. Coming soon. Keep scrolling down…

That’s the key option that you want to select: “Sync with this iPhone over Wi-Fi”. Check that, click on the “Apply” button on the lower right and unplug your phone from your computer.

Really.

Now check it out: it’s still shown in iTunes both on the left under “Devices” and as a specific device you can examine and tweak:

Notice what’s happened to the Version information too. It won’t let you update the operating system through Wi-Fi (though you can update your iPhone iOS software directly from the phone now, but that’s a separate article) so instead it says “Connect this iPhone using a USB cable in order to update or restore its software.”

What I found most curious about this addition of wifi sync is that when you unplug your iOS devices, they don’t vanish from iTunes any more. Check it out:

The “iPadewan” device is my iPad, and it’s not within wifi range which is why there’s an error symbol next to it. Still, it’s very cool to be able to leave your iPhone in your pocket or briefcase and with a click of the Sync button in iTunes have it get the latest version of iPhone apps, some new music and anything else you want to grab from / copy to the device. Very space age!

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“Basically, Singboard is where YouTube meets karaoke,” says Chan. “It is a much more improved experience of online karaoke…We will get all the latest and most popular music videos from YouTube, and we will overlay the lyrics on top of the videos, and the lyrics will provide a karaoke-like feature, so that you can sing along with it and enjoy a really good singing experience.”

Singboard’s technology streams different content at the same time, allowing you to turn off the vocals on a video and play just the music. You can choose from among the top 100 music videos on YouTube, and, because the service is on your computer as opposed to on a machine in a bar, you can stop, rewind and replay songs as often as you like. You can even record your own version of a song and share it with friends on Facebook or Twitter.

Singboard will likely be offered to users based on the freemium model, where you can play a certain number of songs for free but will have to pay a monthly subscription fee for unlimited access. The app is currently in private beta, but Chan says they are pleased with the initial response.

“So far the feedback is really positive,” says Chan. “People just want to have more songs so that they can find their favorite songs to sing.”

Are you a Karaoke junkie? Join our Google+ discussion to share your best stories.
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So what’s the service all about? Well, it is a web-based tool that a Google user can use to find out the flight most convenient for him, and can even book the same. Through this service you will get exposed to a wide range of airline search options with a high precision. Naturally it will be quite easy for you to conduct a focussed search and then identify the flight that is best for you.

As of now the service is available for some select cities in the USA, including Los Angeles, New York, Dallas, Chicago and Minneapolis. The airlines which are getting tracked include American, JetBlue, Delta and Continental.

No doubt Flight Search will come in handy equally for both regular fliers as well as the not so regular ones.

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But this VP told me that these patents are almost ALL for modern smartphones, while the Motorola patents included a lot of old stuff that isn’t relevant anymore. So, this patent portfolio could get a premium of, say, 2x what the Motorola patents did. That gets you up close to $3 billion.

And that’s JUST for the patents. They have a few other assets as well:

1. The team is still mostly intact (at least this weekend) and has many talented engineers who used to work on Apple’s iPhone (including the VP who was talking with me).

2. They have lots of UI expertise. webOS is still ahead of all the other smartphone UIs in terms of usability and multitasking ideas. My best friend, Luke Kilpatrick, who works on social media team at VMware, keeps showing me his Palm phone and making fun of my “old school” iPhone.

3. They were working on a 7-inch tablet, and a variety of other things.

So, in the war between Apple, Google, and Microsoft (really the others don’t matter too much to the future) how could the Palm teams reshape the mobile market?

Well, let’s assume Microsoft plonked down the $4 billion to buy this team and patents. They would rejuvenate their mobile team with fresh engineers, and give them even more patents to go after Google with.

What if Apple plonked down the cash? Same thing, only much of this team has already worked at Apple so knows the culture and could fit right in.

Google? Google could benefit the most because its UI is still the worst out of the three major players and it might benefit the most from the additional insurance of the patent portfolio.

One other thing, there was a report that said webOS ran twice as fast on an iPad than on HP’s own hardware.

He said that, while somewhat true, that was only a part of the OS and only some of the times. What they were looking at is the kinds of optimizations that Apple did to its graphics subsystems. He said that while working at Apple they did a ton of work on lots of small graphics areas, which is why the UI feels so “smooth” there. For instance, he said they spent a ton of time just getting a list to scroll at 60 frames per second. That was VERY hard to do, he said, and used it as an example of the kinds of optimizations that very few people outside of the engineers at these big companies understand and that even the press that reports things like “runs twice as fast” don’t understand.

It’s that kind of engineering that is about to be let loose on the world and the other companies know it.

“My phone has been ringing off the hook from recruiters,” he said, while saying that most of his buddies on the team will hang at HP until at least October to see what happens. He knows there’s still deep economic value in the patents and the people who are working on webOS and that if they band together they might get rewarded well.

But the clock is ticking and it’ll be interesting to see what the management does and how they shop around this team and patent portfolio.

One question: what if Facebook bought the team and Google bought the patents?

Now wouldn’t THAT be a hoot? Facebook needs more mobile engineers and could use a team of great UI and expert mobile engineers to build tablet and mobile apps.

We also talked about how the team could transform the TV business. “We were already thinking about that,” he told me. Seems the Google TV business would be rejuvenated by a bunch of new blood who knew how to make good UIs and fun hardware (even though they were always late to the market with the hardware there still is a lot of expertise on that team).

What do you think? Already there’s a crazy set of comments going on Google+.

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Then I saw 3D printing demonstrated in a video and in a way that instantly gave me the clear understanding of what it is and how it works.

(If you don’t see the video embedded above,  watch it on YouTube.)

It’s a very good demonstration and presenter Joe Titlow of  Z Corporation, manufacturer of the 3D printing equipment, knows his stuff and is able to explain it well in simple terms.

Look out for the “Holy cow!” moment by David Kaplan, the man who’s looking to have his wrench (that’s a spanner to us Brits) “printed.” He’s a  theoretical particle physicist and if he’s impressed by this technology, it must be something to pay attention to.

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1. Group Chat

Facebook noted 1/2 of users use Facebook chat, which led them to expand the service to have group chat capabilities.  Now users will have the ability to add multiple friends to a chat message, and if a friend is added to a chat when they are offline, that user will receive a summary of the dialog.

2. New Chat Design

Since the current chat design has always been slightly understated, Facebook has redesigned a new right-hand side bar (see below) that will scale with browser design to more prominently show you friends who are available and unavailable to chat.  This makes the chat functionality larger, but the chat design on first view seemed very similar to the old design just a little larger.

3. Video Calling with Skype

Last but not least, Facebook officially showcased the partnership with Skype.  This integration will allow users to navigate to profile pages and video call that particular person by activating a “Call” button.  In the presentation, Facebook highlighted the video chat as “One click”, although a plugin download is necessary before starting the call for the first time.

One problem I see in this initial demonstration is the obtrusive experience of the video chat itself.  Instead of allowing a person to multitask and enjoy the benefits of chatting with friends while still engaging on Facebook, the video demands your attention.  I’m hoping the actual user experience is a little bit different than this.

When asked when group chatting will be rolled out, both Zuckerberg and Bates looked a bit ruffled, and reminded that the partnership nature of Skype and Facebook will help roll more features out in the future, including mention of Premium Skype features.   However, now that Google Plus allows 10 people to video chat in hangouts, this new feature is already looking a bit outdated.

Conclusion

It’s clear from this announcement that Facebook is trying to differentiate itself against Google through new features, however it seemed a bit of a stretch.  These new features aren’t groundbreakers, and the folks at Facebook are smart enough to know it. In fact, throughout the presentation Zuckerberg took punches at unnamed “internet companies” that try to build social infrastructure rather than building on or complementing an existing one.  In the Q&A session, he even noted that one of the strongest drivers he sees in social media is the proliferation of apps as more companies and third-parties build social applications off of existing social infrastructures (in other words, Facebook).

One thing is certain:  Facebook is relying now on its sheer size and the reliance of third-parties integrating into the network to buy more time to roll out more impressive new features.

What are your thoughts on today’s announcements?  Were they as “awesome” as Zuckerberg promised?

Check out Ignite Social Media for more articles by Lisa Braziel

“Is that the new retina display?” I immediately asked him.

“No, it is not a higher resolution display.” My eyes were telling me otherwise.

“What the f*** is going on here then?” I asked him. He calmly explained what Nanosys did and why they own 400 patents on what they were showing me, which they call Quantum Dot Enhanced Film (QDEF™) . 400!

This technology is so important Economist magazine just wrote about it (and they don’t write about startups very often). Even better, it’s designed AND made in the USA! For once Silicon Valley is seeming like Silicon Valley again.

Unfortunately you can’t really see the difference in the screen very well. Why? Because you are watching this video on an old crappy Dell, or a Macintosh, or an old-style iPad.

When Nanosys starts shipping its screen technology later this year our lives will change forever.

Every screen in your life will look dull and lifeless compared to a screen with Nanosys technology in it.

Now, let’s go through the business advantages:

1. Does not take more battery life.
2. Does not increase cost.
3. Does not require a new display architecture to push out more pixels or a GPU that is four times as fast to support more pixels.
4. They can make craploads of it.
5. They have patents up the yingyang so are gonna be the only game in town for a while.

6. This company is real and funded by the best VCs in the business. They also just won best new display technology at the Society for Information Display conference a couple of weeks ago.

If you watch one video of mine, watch this one. It’s awesome tech and I can’t wait to have it in all my screens. Unfortunately we gotta wait for Steve Jobs to bet on it big time.

I can just see the iPad 3 launch. We all know Apple is going to put in a double-pixel display (my sources have been talking about that for months now) but when you see this technology you’ll know just why the next displays are so freaking good on colors, too.

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