Sept. 9 - 10, 2013 San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Bathed in the glow of neon light, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, a keynote speaker at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, delivered some golden rules for technology entrepreneurs.

Above all, he said, follow the example of the “prophets” of the industry, like Mark Zuckerberg and the late Steve Jobs, and “be disruptive.” He said that tech is a “continuum” that is getting cheaper and easier to use every year, and that startups better keep up.

He revealed that he had not attended CES since the age of 17. But this year, he arrived early to spend time greeting entrepreneurs, and demoing products on the showroom floor.

Related: Check out our coverage of Benioff’s keynote at Dreamforce.

For Benioff, it’s not enough to show off your gadget at a conference like CES. “Almost all of these products will be in a big landfill somewhere,” he said. To avoid this fate, and build a successful business with staying power, he advised the following:

Invest in community

Benioff recently met with executives from Coca-Cola to discuss marketing plans for a machine that lets you mix together 100 flavors to create a unique blend. The touchscreen soda fountain is known as “Coca-Cola Freestyle.”

Benioff said he advised the team to incorporate social elements, Facebook, Twitter, and so on, and encourage fans to share their favorites. At CES, he used this example to show how “community is critical and seminal” for any modern company.

“It should be a circle of love with your vendor,” he said. Oh, dear.

Be transparent. Loyalty is everything

Benioff said Salesforce was able to convince companies to shift away from legacy systems, and embrace the cloud, by being transparent.

“If trust isn’t your No. 1 value as a brand as an individual in this economy — it’s over,” he said. If your product has limitations, be honest about it, rather than attempting to cover up flaws with marketing speak.

Stay ahead of the curve

Benioff said he was enamored with technology, as it’s always changing. “It’s a new world, and we have to move forward,” he said. On the show floor, he noticed that every gadget leveraged touch, and that we are firmly moving away from “our PC past”.

“Technology at its heart, at its core, is transformational. I get excited when I see the advancements,” he said.

Benioff kept his speech short and sweet — albeit a little cheesy — at this year’s CES. Check out our coverage of Microsoft Steve Ballmer’s appearance, which brought some legitimacy to Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs’ insane keynote.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

At CES this week, MakerBot is giving center stage to its Replicator 2X 3D printer.

Announced alongside the Replicator 2 last September, the Replicator X is a more experimental, more expensive device aimed at “prosumers” (as if 3D printers weren’t all “prosumer” devices by this point).

“If you’ve taken apart a flamethrower and put together a trebuchet, the MakerBot Replicator 2X Experimental 3D Printer is for you,” MakerBot says.

At the core of the Replicator 2X’s experimentation lies in its specialization with Acrylonitrile Butadiene Styrene (ABS), a thermoplastic that MakerBot rightfully calls “inconsistent.” To smooth things out, MakerBot has given the Replicator 2X both a heated platform and a heat-trapping enclosure, which together enable the device to create ABS-printed objects that don’t warp once they’re printed out.

The Replicator 2X’s other big feature is its dual extruder system, which allows the device to print in multiple colors. MakerBot says it’s tweaked the extruders so that they’re more reliable and require less maintenance.

Shipping in mid-March, the Replicator 2X costs $2,800, making it $600 more expensive than the less experimental Replicator 2.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

YouTube is rolling out a new feature that will enables viewers to transform their mobile devices into a YouTube remote, the video site announced today.

With the new “send to TV” feature, you can find a video on your mobile device and push it to a larger screen. (If you’ve ever used the device-pairing functionality between an Android device and Google TV, you’re familiar with how it works.) YouTube’s new feature is based on the idea that people can navigate through content much more efficiently via a smartphone or tablet.

YouTube plans to show off the new “sent to TV” feature at this year’s CES event, along with the latest TV-optimized version of YouTube (shown above). Initially, the feature will work with a variety of televisions and set-top boxes, including those from Bang & Olufsen, LG, Panasonic, and Sony — with support for devices from Philips, Samsung, Sharp, Toshiba, Vizio, Western Digital, and others later in the year.

Check out the demo video embedded below, and let us know what you think in the comment section.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Connected TV was front and center at the Consumer Electronics Show earlier this month: Panasonic, LG, and Sharp all shone spotlights on Internet-enabled televisions, along with just about every other TV manufacturer. MySpace even decided to resurrect itself at CES as a social-TV experience. With all of the articles, press events, parties, celebrity sightings and sheer volume of tech TV news, the full picture of “connected TV” could be easy to miss.

But now, after the dust of CES has settled and the hangovers have worn off, it is clear that connected TV, while not a new phenomenon, is poised to make major headway as 2012 progresses. Here are five pieces of the puzzle that are worth keeping an eye on this year.

Do I know you?

Personalization is the future of “smart” media. It’s not just about hooking up TVs to the Internet. It’s about delivering the right content to the right screen at the right time. Expect to see content that understands who we are and where we are. If the “where” is a bus stop or a train headed to work, our devices will know that we don’t want to watch “The Godfather.” Based on our past viewing history, we’ll get served up sports highlights or a goofy YouTube clip to pass the commute time nicely. Dijit, for example, has started working on social content recommendations and integrating the viewing experience with personal social graphs. Expect smart video to learn who you are, what your routine is, and what you should be watching.

Size matters

We’re not talking about the size of the screen in your family room, either. Truly personalized video requires “big data” architecture and real-time analytics. Networks, broadcast channels, studios and cable providers will need tools that can mine through massive amounts of data and and translate that into actionable insights. Personalization is a growing trend across a number of sectors (even in law enforcement). Video publishers will gain accurate business intelligence from comprehensive analytics that go beyond market samples, charts and graphs to help maximize revenue and guide strategic ad placement.

The paradox of choice

All of the news from CES lends credibility to the obvious: We’re about to see a lot more content in many more places. And while unlimited choice across a myriad of devices sounds great in theory, it can overwhelm viewers to the point of paralysis. Personalized media knows what you like to watch and lets you know what you should be watching. Hulu handing viewers the power to choose which ads they want to watch is an early step in that direction. But the need for manual input is still very crude, not to mention extremely expensive for advertisers.

Let’s get our story straight

We’ll need to agree on some common terminology. Television over Internet Protocol has been referred to as “connected TV,” “smart TV,” even “cloud TV.” It shows a young, somewhat fragmented industry that has some maturing to do. And while developing a standard lexicon isn’t top priority, it is important that we figure out what connected TV really is — the enablement of great, TV-quality experience delivered over IP.

Connected TV is primed for prime time

Study after study shows that connected TV is no longer an early-adopter phenomenon. According to the 2011 Consumer Usage Report published by Nielsen, nearly a quarter of people indicated plans to purchase a connected TV, while 17 percent already own one. In fact, the term “online video” is headed toward extinction. Most can agree that in the future, most, if not all video content will be consumed over IP.

But that doesn’t mean they are willing to “rough it” online. Not surprisingly, our VideoMind Video Index Report found that people are viewing more long-form content on big screens. As more viewers access their favorite shows and movies online, expect more content to follow the eyeballs. With new offerings from established firms like Google and start-ups like Simple.TV, expect an online television landscape that looks a lot like TV as we know it today, only with a far greater emphasis on viewer choice, interactivity and social engagement.

Connected TV is not new, but the influx of investment — time, money, publicity and products — is pushing video toward a critical evolutionary stage. Most TVs sold today offer some means of connectivity. According to our Video Index Report, video played on connected TV devices and game consoles grew more than 200 percent in Q3 2011 alone. Advanced Television writes that 80 percent of all television units shipped in 2015 will be connected. Add BluRay players and gaming consoles to the mix and it’s clear that we’ve reached an inflection point that will see the real winners in the market decided over the next 12-24 months.

A co-founder of online video service provider Ooyala, Bismarck Lepe now drives the company’s product vision as president of products. As Ooyala’s founding CEO, Bismarck raised the company’s early funding and signed many of the company’s first media partnerships. Bismarck was previously a senior product manager for Google, where he managed the early growth of AdSense display and video advertising and launched more than 25 different Google AdSense products.

Top photo: LG’s booth at CES 2012. Photo by Dylan Tweney/VentureBeat.com

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Motorola’s Droid Razr Maxx, a powerful 4G Android phone with a long battery life, will be available on Verizon Wireless starting Jan. 26, Verizon announced today.

As our smartphones get smarter and we rely on them for everything from email to finding dates, their batteries often can’t make it through a day. But the Razr Maxx, which made our list of Top 10 products from CES 2012, challenges this norm with its massive 3300 mAh battery that claims 21.5 hours of continuous talk time, 15 hours of native video playback, 10 hours of GPS navigation, and 6 hours of HD streaming. The big battery will help keep the phone alive when using Verizon’s battery-sucking 4G LTE data.

Besides its amazing battery life, the Droid Razr Maxx also has some great specs that heavily mirror the previously announced Droid Razr. It features a 1.2-GHz dual-core processor, a 4.3-inch Super AMOLED screen with 540-by-960 resolution, 32GB of internal storage, an 8-megapixel camera with flash, a front-facing 1.3-megapixel camera for video chat, and 1080p HD video recording.

The phone ends up being a bit heavier that its sibling the Droid Razr, but the added heft might easily be worth it for those who never make it a day without having to plug in their phone. The only real downside to the phone is that it is running Android 2.3.5 Gingerbread, which looks much less sophisticated next to the Samsung Galaxy Nexus running Android Ice Cream Sandwich. But because Motorola is now literally in bed with Google, we fully expect the phone get the Ice Cream Sandwich update in 2012.

The Droid Razr Maxx will retail for $299 on 2-year contract with Verizon Wireless. Are you interested in picking one up?

Alan Wake was a high-potential game that didn’t sell as well as expected in 2010. Critics said that the story was great, but the game play of the psychological thriller title was mediocre. Amid rivals such as the spectacular western Red Dead Redemption, which came out at the same time, Alan Wake got a lukewarm reception. With a new downloadable game coming, the question at hand for Alan Wake is whether the franchise can make a comeback.

Other developers might have given up on it. But to its credit, developer Remedy Entertainment has stayed with Alan Wake and executed on its original episodic vision. It released two downloadable add-ons to the original Alan Wake game in 2010. And now the company is releasing a re-imagined game, Alan Wake’s American Nightmare, as a full-sized stand-alone game on Xbox Live Arcade. It is part of a new Microsoft Studios campaign, dubbed Xbox Live Arcade House Party, which starts on Feb. 15 and includes the launch of a new stand-alone game each week for a month. The Alan Wake game will debut Feb. 22 as a teen-rated title for 1,200 Microsoft points, or $15.

The game is much more ambitious than previous Alan Wake downloadable content (DLC) and that is the whole point of Xbox Live Arcade House Party. If these games prove to be popular, then they will be one more step toward the decline of retail stores and the rise of digital distribution of games. And Alan Wake’s American Nightmare is an attempt to show that the franchise still has a lot of life left in it.

The original story had a truly unique and artistic storyline. Famous novelist Alan Wake visited a small town of Bright Falls in the Northwest in an attempt to get over writers block. As he arrives there, his wife Alice is kidnapped. As he searches for her, he finds to his horror that events that he has written about in his fiction are coming to life. He finds pages from an unpublished novel he doesn’t remember writing and the novel’s fictional events become real. Creatures attack Wake in the darkness, who has to fight back with weapons that produce light, from flares to flashlights. The game had an innovative game style that revolves around manipulating the power of light against the forces of darkness. It was visually arresting and had an atmosphere that was as creepy as the Stephen King novels or horror movies that inspired it.

But the game’s enemies became predictable and unvarying in the way they attacked. Dispatching them became more of a chore, and a slow-motion sequence that played every time you got attacked became part of the monotony, according to those who rated the game the poorest. The average score on Metacritic was 83. The game sold more than a million copies, but given its long six-year gestation, Microsoft expected it to sell a lot more than that.

“People universally loved the story and the character in the first game,” said Oskari “Oz” Hakkinen (pictured right), head of franchise development at Remedy, in an interview at the recent Consumer Electronics Show. “One thing they asked for more of was an escalation of enemies and an escalation of weapons.”

The new game has an enticing story as well, set in the town of Night Springs in the desert of Arizona. This game features the villain Mr. Scratch, an alter ego of Alan Wake. Scratch, who was first introduced in the DLC, is a serial killer who is hunting after Wake’s missing wife. Scratch is the evil dark twin of Wake from Bright Falls, where the locals believe a novelist when crazy and killed his wife. Wake has to defeat Scratch and the minions of the night and rescue Alice. Wake now has a new advantage, as he realizes he can rewrite reality by creating the text that he wants to see happen. The game is about a four or five-hour experience, following Night Springs episodes that Wake doesn’t remember writing.

Hakkinen said that Remedy heard its fans and listened to their criticisms. It responded by coming up with a game that has a lot more action in it. There are new kinds of enemies — which are beings called The Taken that are animated with an evil spirit  — that are harder to dispatch, particularly when several of them are coming at you from all directions.

The game engine produces the same cool light and darkness visuals, but it’s more responsive. The technology has moved forward so the graphics look even more gorgeous against the red Arizona sky.

“We’ve improved a lot of things,” Hakkinen said. “In the story mode, the environments are more destructible.”

Among the cool parts of the new game is an Arcade mode where the object is to survive as long as you can amid a sea of enemies coming out of the darkness. This is the part of the game that the developers created first when they were tooling around with ideas. They created a survival game that they felt could become the heart of an Xbox Live Arcade game.They began development on it, but story wizard Sam Lake, creator of the original story, weighed in on the project and got the story mode into development, since Remedy is really known as a story-based game company. The new story is more like a pulp action-adventure. Whereas Alan Wake was more like a Stephen King horror novel — with influences from Twin Peaks and Alfred Hitchcock — this is more like Quentin Tarantino’s From Dusk ‘Til Dawn or Grindhouse, only on Route 66 in Arizona with a lot of cactus around.

The mode lets you “fight till dawn!,” a horde-mode-like game where the object is to survive for 10 minutes in a field where all sorts of enemies attacked Alan Wake at a faster and faster pace, up until the point where Wake has to pull out all of his tricks for survival to get a few more seconds of life. There are 10 different maps that are scattered with havens that store ammo and flashlight batteries. You can dash for a street light to escape those chasing you, but once you use such a shelter, it goes dark.

The Arcade mode highlights some of the new variety to the enemies. If you shine your light on one type of enemy, it will simply clone itself and produce another one that will attack you. You have to take these enemies out by shooting them in the dark. And while most of the enemies attack you, the Grenadier will hang in the background, lobbing grenades at you. When you chase after the Grenadier, it runs away and it will only cease throwing grenades once you catch it. Another enemy is armed with a chain saw and is pretty hard to kill.

“You’re rewarded for taking risks by getting multipliers when you score,” Hakkinen said.

The game starts off slow, giving you time to search for resources and collect them. Wake can find and use some interesting new weapons such as the “nail gun,” which shoots out a deadly spray of nails. They quickly dispatch enemies, but the nails run out.Other weapons include submachine guns, Uzis, and a crossbow. You can dodge enemies as they’re about to slash you.

Your health meter runs lower every time you get hit. As you find first-aid packs, you can use them to replenish your health, but only part of it. When all is hopeless and you are surrounded by multiple enemies, you can set off a flash bang grenade or a flare.

I watched Oz play a 10-minute round that was truly riveting. He had to move from haven to haven, conserve his ammo and save it for some big moments when he was about to get killed. We were counting the seconds down as he had to avoid pick axes, chain saws, scythes and grenades all it once. He tried to use the light havens and flares at the moment when he needed them the most. It was pretty breathtaking.

When you’re done, you can see your stats. Once you master the Arcade mode, you can move into the even harder Nightmare mode.

The tough thing for Remedy is that some gamers may not be willing to give Alan Wake’s American Nightmare a chance because they tried the game play of the original title and found that it was lacking. The message Remedy has to get across is that this game play is a lot more fun. But if this game takes off on Xbox Live, fans of the series just might be able to breathe easier about some day seeing Alan Wake 2, a true sequel, to the original game. The original trailer is below and here’s a link to a video of the arcade mode.

---

GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

---

As everything analog shifts to digital, we can collect a huge amount of data about ourselves. As I noted in our earlier story, the trend was spearheaded by researchers who wanted a “quantified self,” or self-knowledge through numbers that measure things such as how long we sleep or how many stairs we can climb in a day. Most people don’t have the patience to sift through all the data that they could collect about themselves. But a number of new devices are making it easier to do, bringing us the opportunity both to improve our lives, have more fun, and think more about privacy issues.

This shift to quantified self gadgets is also coming with a change in attitudes about privacy, or at least it seems that way. The technology is racing ahead, before we really decide whether we prefer personalization over privacy. Webcams, camera phones, and motion-sensing systems are just the beginning of this technological explosion. Used in conjunction with the cloud, or web-connected data centers, the quantified self movement promises to capture a huge amount of information about ourselves and contribute considerably to the Big Data infrastructure that enterprises are creating to safely store all of this information. In that sense, the Quantified Self really enlists just about every technology company imaginable in the service of recording our daily lives.

For the narcissists among us, this is like heaven. WordPress.com, which hosts our VentureBeat blog, reported that in 2011, I wrote 1,787 posts consisting of 1,097,692 words. Now I know my goal for this year is to do 1,788 posts with 1,097,692 words. However, it was worth noting that I was the least efficient writer at VentureBeat, with 614 words per post and the least traffic per post compared to my fellow writers, who were less wordy and had higher average traffic per post.

A lot of this trend started in video games, which have taken it to an extreme. In Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3, for instance, I know everything about my performance in multiplayer combat since the game launched on Nov. 8. I have played the game for 27 hours and 39 minutes and achieved a multiplayer rank of Lieutenant Colonel II, or 58. I’m about 72 percent of the way through the multiplayer ladder and have 80 wins and 120 losses. In the multiplayer combat matches, I have 1,375 kills and 3,213 deaths, for a 0.427 kill/death ratio. I’ve had 93 headshots and 366 assists with a 9 percent accuracy rate.

To my non-gaming friends, my dedication is impressive. Of course, other players know just how bad I am. My total score is 162,490, which places me at No. 5,518,786 in the overall Call of Duty multiplayer universe. On average, I score 826 points a match, which is kind of pathetic compared to my performance in Call of Duty Black Ops from last year. But that game had some much easier ways to kill, such as the remote-controlled exploding car, rewarded after I could get just two kills in a row.

In the virtual world of the game, it’s easy to record digital stats. But with the proliferation of new devices that measure non-computer activities, we can measure so much more. The history of this behavior goes as far back as 1955 to Jerry Davidson, who has obsessively recorded his life. Kevin Kelly blogs about The Quantified Self and all things related to self-surveillance.

“Unless something can be measured, it cannot be improved,” Kelly wrote. “So we are on a quest to collect as many personal tools that will assist us in quantifiable measurement of ourselves. We welcome tools that help us see and understand bodies and minds so that we can figure out what humans are here for.”

Alexandra Carmichael, co-founder of CureTogether, records 40 things about her daily life, including “sleep, morning weight, daily caloric intake, mealtimes, mood, day of menstrual cycle, sex, exercise, and other things.

Now I can move on to more important measurements such as how much activity I engage in during the day. The Striiv “personal trainer in my pocket” tells me I am walking an average of 9,968 steps in a day, or about 4.7 miles. I burn 1,053 calories in a day for about 106 minutes in the day. That earns me 40,425 points in a day which I can use to play the Striiv game and motivate myself. My personal best was 17,983 steps in a day, or 7.8 miles, walked at CES. I burned 1,806 calories that day. I can compete against other Striiv users through daily challenges, which “gamifies” the exercise activity by making it into a social competition.

You can get more information back from the Basis Band from Basis Science. Basis gives you a wrist band that tracks your heart rate, skin temperature, ambient temperature, and your galvanic skin response (GSR, or how much you are sweating). The sweat and the heart rate gives the added information about how stressed out you are. If you match this up to your Google Calendar, you could figure out which person stresses you out the most or how much your heart rate leaps when you are stuck in a traffic jam.

Basis also has a web site that you can use to see the results of your daily activities, such as calories burned, the number of steps you have taken, the hours of sleep, and the points you have earned. All of that data can be quantified and analyzed over time on the Basis web site. You get positive reinforcement in the form of points for your activities.

“There is a lot of interesting stuff happening in the quantified-self movement,” said Jeff Holove, chief executive of Basis Science, in an interview. “It is understanding ourselves better and measuring ourselves better and, in the case of health, using that data to inform our decisions on how we live our lives. We are gathering scientifically meaningful data and then translating it to a much broader audience than the people who have the knowledge and stamina to deal with lots of data.”

Basis boils the metrics down to things that can be easily understood, though “quantified selfers” can dig into the data further if they wish. Nike, FitBit, Jawbone and a number of other companies have similar devices. As far as self-measurement goes, Microsoft’s Kinect motion-sensing system is pretty good at capturing your whole body. Bodymetrics (pictured above) uses Kinect to understand your body shape so it can tell you where clothes will be tight or loose on your form as you go virtual shopping.

With sleep monitors like Gear4′s upcoming Sleep Clock (pictured left), you don’t even have to wear a wrist band to get more information about yourself. The Sleep Clock will use a Doppler radar to detect your breathing and movement during the night.

It can calculate the exact number of minutes you slept in a night, how many minutes it took to fall asleep, and when is the ideal time to wake you up. It can tell the difference between when you are in a deep sleep, when it isn’t good to wake you up, to a light sleep. After a year of such data, it will be much easier to wake up at exactly the lightest point in your sleep cycle.

There are downsides to knowing so much about ourselves. The problem is very similar to people “oversharing” information about themselves on social networks such as Facebook or Twitter. If the federal authorities got hold of your GSR data, they could figure out if you were lying during an interview, since GSR can be used in lie detector tests.

George Orwell, the author of 1984, the seminal novel about Big Brother watching you, couldn’t have planned a better way to capture everything that we do in a day. But because of the potential benefits, many people seem eager to be measured, as long as their privacy is protected. The space where you can operate privately is becoming more and more constrained.

If you want to fly, for instance, the Transportation Security Adminstration airport scanners can now collect extremely detailed imagery of what you look like under your clothes. The full-body scanner data is supposed to be used for safety purposes only, but it’s certainly spooky. But wouldn’t it be great if the TSA could tell you, “you’re thinner this time.”

Steve Jobs, the former chief of Apple, created some of the key technology for monitoring our lives with the iPhone and the iPad, which can measure our location, our movements, our cell phone usage, and other deeply personal kinds of data. Yet he railed against reporters who invaded his privacy by disclosing information about his deteriorating health.

Will Wright, the world famous game designer who created The Sims and SimCity, believes that all of the Big Data collected about our personal lives can be used to create new kinds of mobile-based games which he calls “personal gaming.” Personal gaming is a game that is customized for each individual player, taking into account real-life situations surrounding the player that make the game more interesting to that player.

“How can we make a system that understands enough about you and gives you situational awareness?” Wright said in a recent interview. “It could take into account what time of day it is, where you are, how much money is in your pocket. Imagine if you could open Google Maps and it shows you things that are interesting to you on the map.”

Although he realizes many people are guarded about privacy, he notes that the younger generation is more comfortable sharing information about themselves. And they will willingly share it if they could be virtually guaranteed a great deal of entertainment in return. If you entice people with enough game-oriented entertainment, they won’t mind sharing that information, he said. Wright has created a company called HiveMind to execute on this vision.

“It blurs entertainment, lifestyle, and personal tools,” Wright said. “With that data, the world and the opportunities for entertainment within it become more visible to you.”

“If we can learn enough about the player, we can create games about their real life,” Wright said. “How do we get you more engaged in reality rather than distract you from it?”

[body map image credit: thegood; TSA image credit: Palm Beach Post]

---

GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

---

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Synaptics showed off how touch controls will change in the next year at the recent Consumer Electronics Show. Synaptics has a big market share in touch application hardware and it showed off its latest products at the show.

In the picture at right, you can see that upcoming touchpads for laptops will be able to handle the simultaneous input from more than just two fingers. The image at the right shows how you can use five fingers on a touchpad at the same time. This enables apps like multi-finger painting or more complex gesture commands using your fingers. You can scroll with two fingers or flick an image from one part of the screen to another with four fingers.

With Ultrabooks, which are thin laptops akin to Apple’s MacBook Air, another wave of change is coming. With more than 70 models on the way, the Ultrabooks will use touch both in the touchpad for the cursor control as well as a touchscreen. The touchpads for the Ultrabooks could become much larger than is typical, particularly with Windows 8 coming out later in the year. You can use one or two fingers to move the Metro user interface (pictured left) with lots of block-oriented buttons you can click on.

Synaptics has technologies that it calls a TouchPad, or a touch-sensitive surface such as a laptop touchpad; a ClickPad, which can be used for scrolling and pointing just like a TouchPad but can also be used to replace physical buttons; a ClearPad, a touchscreen solution; and InterTouch, for multi-finger and multi-gesture support on touchpads, used in combination with TouchPads or ClickPads.

Right now, ClickPads are shipping in Ultrabooks such as the Lenovo U300s, HP Folio 13, and the Acer Aspire S3. The InterTouch uses a faster connection within the computer to transfer more data at the same time. That’s why it allows for multiple-finger touches at the same time. It’s very responsive. In the touch painting, you can see little halos on the screen so you can see where your fingers are.

With Microsoft’s Windows 8 operating system, Microsoft wants computer makers to use larger touchpads. Synaptics is recommending that computer makers use a large image-sensing ClickPad with a high-speed connection to get an optimal result. Synaptics is working as an engineering partner with Microsoft so that it can enable computer makers to design the bigger touchpads (at least 4.9-inch diagonal) into the limited space in the thinner laptops. The experience is intended to be the same as working with a smaller touchpad, so users don’t get confused when they move to Windows 8.

“It means the days of the little touchstick are long gone,” said Rick Bergman (pictured right), chief executive of Synaptics, in an interview. “We’re absolutely in a very cool space.”

Intel believes that Ultrabooks will have touchscreens, though some people believe that’s not going to work so well. Synaptics is covered on both options, as it has touchscreen and touchpad technologies, Bergman said. Definitely, though, some machines will have both. Convertible laptops, for instance, will be used with touchpads when they are in a regular laptop mode. But they can be used as touchscreens when you twist the screen around and use them as tablets.

Some of the desktop computers are also have built-in touchpads so that you don’t have to attach a mouse to the computer.

Touch controls are also spreading throughout the digital home. TVs, set-top boxes, and internet-enabled media centers or Blu-ray players will likely make navigation more complicated as they take on more functions. To deal with that, companies such as Panasonic are creating remote controls with built-in touch surfaces (pictured left). With button-based remotes, it’s harder to surf through a bunch of media selections. But as the second video below shows, it’s much easier to use a small touchpad embedded within a remote to move a cursor across a screen.

Philips has a dual remote where you can use buttons or a touchpad. It is shipping with Iomega TVs in Europe. Synaptics also has screens that can respond to both touch and pen input.

Here are two videos where Jacqui from Synaptics shows us the variety of touch-oriented technologies that the company is working on touch concepts for the coming year.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

App maker SkyGrid has a plan to bring TV to your iPad. It’s also landed a promising partnership with huge Korean electronics maker LG to integrate its app technology into tens of millions of televisions.

We spent some time on the floor of CES last week talking with SkyGrid chief executive and founder Kevin Pomplun about his app and the new LG deal. (Watch our short, two-minute video interview below.)

“All you have to do is touch any channel, and it plays the best shows and programs you’re interested in,” Pomplun said of his app.

SkyGrid has won lots of praise for its information aggregation app, called SkyGrid, which uses data about what your friends are sharing on Facebook and Twitter to deliver tailored news to your small screen. Apple named SkyGrid one of the best news apps of the year for 2011. Now the company is turning its attention to television, with an app called Touchtv, for watching TV on your iPad. The app delivers video content and channels to you based on your interests and what your friends are watching.

“Touchtv was very natural. We just focused on the TV experience. … This is the SkyGrid experience, custom tailored for a pure and clean and very simple TV design,” Pomplun said.

The small company also got lucky by striking a deal with LG to integrate similar technology into its televisions. When you search for internet content on an LG smart television set, SkyGrid’s Touchtv technology will power recommendations shown on the screen. Touchtv will be integrated into LG televisions starting this quarter.

More and more people are watching TV while holding a tablet or smartphone in their lap. As TV makers wake up to this growing trend, they’re desperately trying to figure out how to make their TVs more like tablets, cramming apps and social features into them. It’s interesting to see companies on the other end of the spectrum, app makers, tackling the problem in their own way — and, in this case, meeting the TV makers on their own ground.

In addition to having an interesting technology, SkyGrid has been an unusually fortunate company. Its first app was one of the few apps Apple highlighted on the day it launched the iPad, a fact that gave the company’s employees a pleasant shock when they walked into the Apple Store to buy one of the first iPads — they had no idea that Apple had selected their app for special treatment. Later, SkyGrid became one of the featured apps in the Android Market. The two events helped bring the company and its tech to the attention of LG.

SkyGrid has raised $15 million in venture capital in two rounds, with investments from RRE Ventures, Bezos Expeditions, BlackRock, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, and DFJ Frontier.  Other key investors include Esther Dyson, Michael F. Price, and Rakesh Mathur. We last covered SkyGrid when it released SkyGrid Groups; we also covered SkyGrid’s second round of funding in 2008.

Click here to see more VentureBeat coverage of CES 2012.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

The International Consumer Electronics Show is a huge festival of gadgetry, but there’s no better place to get a bead on where technology is going in the coming year.

Among the 153,000 attendees at the show in Las Vegas last week were five VentureBeat staffers who were sniffing out the big trends. This story is our list of the most evident trends among the rows and rows of gadgets at CES.

The convention is like a step into the future, with many companies showing off the TVs, smartphones, computers and tablets that they will be bringing to market in the coming months. When you see the same kind of product over and over again, that’s a good sign that it will be dominating the tech headlines in the near future.

This story was written by Dean Takahashi, Dylan Tweney, Sean Ludwig, and Devindra Hardawar. Also check out the 10 most promising products of the coming year. For fun, here’s the link to last year’s top trends from CES 2011.

1. Connected TVs hook up with smartphones and tablets

Manufacturers have finally realized that the majority of us don’t just sit and watch TV: We usually have a phone, a laptop or a tablet in our lap whenever we tune in. That presents some interesting opportunities to the company that can figure out how to tie multiple screens together in an interesting way. For instance, everyone from Sony to Samsung is playing with ways of “swiping” a TV show from a touchscreen tablet onto your TV with a flick of the wrist. Gestures like this point to a day when you no longer need universal remotes, because the touchscreens you already own are a far better way to browse video content, whether it comes from cable, satellite, broadcast or internet sources like Hulu and YouTube.

More interesting, perhaps, is the possibilities that a “two-screen” experience opens up for connecting your TV-watching with your social networks and the internet at large. You could be watching the NFL game on the big screen while you look up stats on your little screen. You could be chatting with friends or sharing highlights via Twitter while watching the latest episode of Downton Abbey. Panasonic’s embrace of a reimagined MySpace might be the most prominent example of this aspiration, but other manufacturers, like LG and Sony, are working on it as well. And of course Google has been attempting this for several years, though we saw very little evidence at CES that Google TV has much traction among manufacturers or customers.

The big challenge: There are no broad standards to facilitate connecting TVs and tablets, and in the absence of that, every manufacturer is trying to own the whole burrito. If someone can figure out how to create a truly cross-platform TV and mobile device system, they’ll have a good shot at capturing a huge slice of consumer attention. –Dylan Tweney

2. Ultrabooks breathe new life into laptops

Who ever thought a new shape of laptop would be one of the most interesting aspects of CES?

Intel pushed Ultrabooks — its new name for thin and light ultraportable laptops — hard at the trade show. This year alone there will be more than 75 Ultrabook models on the market, and Intel has said that it’s gearing up its biggest marketing push since the Centrino lineup for the new machines. HP had one with Gorilla Glass on its cover, while Dell had one that was made out of carbon fiber.

So what’s the big deal? Ultrabooks promise to be lighter than typical laptops, weighing in around 3 pounds for the most part, allowing them to practically disappear in your laptop bag. They’ll sport solid-state drives (SSDs), instead of traditional hard drives, which will make them extra-thin and fast. (Expect startup times under 10 seconds and practically instant resume from standby speeds.) And thanks to Intel’s next-generation Core processors, Ultrabooks will be peppy under the hood and even capable of decent 3D graphics performance.

Ultrabooks are basically everything I’ve ever wanted in a computer — except priced to be more approachable than Apple’s MacBook Air. For more on Ultrabooks, check out our recent feature: More than just hype, Ultrabooks are the future of laptop computing. –Devindra Hardawar

3. OLED offers brighter and bigger TV screens

It may be a bit early to call OLED TVs a trend, what with only two models on display this year from LG and Samsung, but after being teased with OLED technology for years now, we feel it’s time to finally get excited for these displays, which represent the next-generation of HDTVs.

Why the hype? Since the OLED displays don’t require a backlight, they’re impossibly thin (LG’s display is only 4 millimeters deep with a 1mm bezel). They’re also capable of a richer color palette, dark-as-night blacks, and brightness beyond the capabilities of LCD sets. OLED also features fast response times (it doesn’t have the fast motion issues that LCD does), as well as extremely wide viewing angles.

The 55-inch OLED displays from LG and Samsung, which are expected to be released some time this year, are the closest the technology has gotten yet to dominating consumer living rooms. Expect even more OLED displays at CES next year, and most importantly, expect their initially exorbitant prices to fall within the next few years. –Devindra Hardawar

Pages: 1 2 3

The print head of the MakerBot creates plastic objects, like this green thing, layer by layer.

Is there anything more American than a robot that can create anything you want out of a spool of plastic and some electricity?

It’s only a slight exaggeration to say that 3D printers offer levels of Jeffersonian self-reliance that our founding fathers only dreamed of.

“We have a consumer product that’s anti-consumerist,” MakerBot Industries founder Bre Pettis told me at CES 2012, where I captured the short video below. “When you get a MakerBot, you have an alternative to buying things. You can download them … or you can design something and make it custom yourself.”

The new MakerBot Replicator is a $1,750 box that can print three-dimensional objects by melting and fusing bits of plastic line, layer by minuscule layer. A version that prints objects in two colors costs $2,000. It’s one of several new, affordable 3D printers that are hitting the market this year.

If you can dream it, and if you can create a 3D representation of it in an STL file, a desktop 3D printer can create it in a few hours. Provided it’s small enough, that is: The Replicator can only create objects smaller than 300 cubic inches, or about the size of a loaf of bread. Not quite big enough to assemble a cotton gin or a replacement plough blade, but certainly large enough to make toys, chess pieces, gears, artwork, cups, bowls, and a lot of other things.

“This is kind of magic, because there was nothing there, and now there’s something,” said Pettis.

Also, unlike the Star Trek Enterprise’s replicator, MakerBot can only create things in inedible ABS plastic or biodegradable PLA, so it won’t be able to make you a cup of tea — Earl Grey, hot. Sorry.

Still, 3D printers are making a whole new field of creativity accessible to computer geeks. In the same way that laser printers enabled people with computers to become publishing experts in two dimensions, these printers are opening the doors to creative, computational expression in three dimensions.

I’ve been fascinated with the “do-it-yourself” movement since I went to my first Maker Faire. Subsequently I investigated the growing world of hackerspaces, where people gather to work on code, learn how to solder, teach crocheting classes, borrow a welder, slice things into strips with a bandsaw, use a drill press, or work on projects that involve all of the above skills. The MakerBot emerges from this world, as Pettis was one of the telegenic evangelists of the DIY ethic and is a cofounder of NYC Resistor, one of the earliest U.S. hackerspaces.

I’m convinced that the people who have embraced the DIY movement have tapped into the core of what makes the United States great: Self-reliance, experimentation, innovation and a non-dogmatic reverence for facts. Over the decades, innovators tinkering in metaphorical (or literal) garages have played important roles in the development of electricity, radio, computers and, now, the internet economy.

DIY, or at least a willingness to take initiative for doing things on one’s own, outside the usual structures, has also played a role in political life, with grassroots organizations like MoveOn.org and loosely organized movements like the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street drawing much of their strength from people’s iconoclasm and sense of self-sufficiency.

But one thing that hasn’t emerged from the DIY movement — until MakerBot — is a major venture-backed business. MakerBot Industries might change that, as the company has now raised more than $11 million in investment capital and employs 75 people in its Brooklyn headquarters. Not only that, Pettis told me the company has openings to hire another 30 people. He didn’t say whether the company is making money now, but he did point out that Makerbot did about $8 million in revenue on its seed round investment alone, which was only about $75,000, so the business has promising roots.

What about competitors?

One of the biggest players in the 3D printing space to date has been Shapeways, which VentureBeat has covered previously. Shapeways lets designers print objects not only in plastic, but in ceramic and metals as well, and it allows you to print larger objects than you can with the MakerBot printer. But you can’t buy a Shapeways printer; you upload your design to the company’s site, and it ships you the finished product. Shapeways, by the way, counters my assertion that DIY product-printing is an American phenomenon — the company was founded in the Netherlands. But its $5.1M funding came partly from New York’s Union Square Ventures (the rest came from Index Ventures in London), and the company has now moved its headquarters to New York.

Another ship-to-your-door 3D printing company is Sculpteo, which I also ran into at CES. Sculpteo prints in ceramic.

But when it comes to consumer 3D printers you can have at home, MakerBot’s main competitor seems to be 3D printing pioneer 3D Systems. I spent some time at CES ogling the company’s Cubify Cube printer. Cubify prints plastic objects in different colors, and has a more clean, iPod-like industrial aesthetic compared to MakerBot’s hacker-y, DIY aesthetic. The Cube is also cheaper, at just $1,300. (Check out our video of the Cubify below.)

Pettis’s response to the competition was cheeky geek macho.

“Our machine makes things that are twice as big as their machine,” Pettis said.

And that’s another really American thing: Competition. Let’s hope it helps make 3D printers cheaper every year, until everyone has one of these strangely anti-consumerist consumer devices in their own kitchens, right next to the breadmakers.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

More than any other time in the history of the Consumer Electronics Show, car manufacturers showed up in full force to last week’s show in Las Vegas — a major sign that cars are going high tech this year.

While CES used to be filled with tech companies showing off car stereos, car manufacturers themselves are now taking up space on the floor to show off all the cool things their vehicles can do. And app vendors are going car heavy too — companies that showed off cool smartphone apps over the last couple of years are now hyping their apps for a car dashboard instead. If the dashboard doesn’t run apps directly, the console will find some sort of crazy way to interact with your apps using the driver’s voice.

For example, Mercedes-Benz head Dieter Zetsche debuted the Mbrace2 console, which connects the dashboard to the cloud for over-the-air software updates and gives the owner access to Facebook, Google, news highlights, and more from the dashboard. The Mbrace2 solution will also have 3G Internet access, but it’s unclear if you’d need to purchase a data plan to use it. The connected system will also include “remote access capabilities” such as remote vehicle health diagnostics, a driving journal, and speed alerts.

Ford, which has keynoted CES the last few years, showed off the latest of its Sync technology. Sync now has more apps for AppLink, a program in the console that interacts directly with iPhone and Android apps when the phone is connected via Bluetooth or USB. AppLink already lets you voice control apps like Pandora, Slacker, iHeartRadio and Stitcher, and now it works with a new NPR app that lets you create on-demand listening of your favorite NPR programs. Sync is installed in 4 million cars in the U.S., and Ford expects 9 million cars worldwide will have Sync installed by the end of 2015.

Chip-maker Nvidia had a tent just outside of the Las Vegas Convention Center at CES to show its own car integration. The company had two cars on display in the tent: a beautiful white Lamborghini Aventador (pictured above), which features an infotainment system with real-time Google Maps data. The other car was a stunning blue Audi A7, with Google-Earth-based 3D maps and night-vision cameras to help you not hit pedestrians. Nvidia also helps power the awesome-looking Tesla Model S sedan, which has a 17-inch touchscreen that controls the media, sunroof, door locks and navigation. All three cars have Nvida Tegra chips inside boosting capabilities.

Streaming media inside cars also took a nice leap forward with Harmon’s Aha console, which will now be available in select models from Subaru and Honda. Streaming services MOG and Rhapsody will work on Aha and provide on-demand music from their extensive catalogs so you’re never disconnected from your favorite songs. The streaming radio service Pandora also used CES to announce that it has partnered with a whopping 23 auto companies to make sure its music can play in their cars.

VentureBeat contributor Rocky Agrawal correctly points out that car and phone interegration has a lot of road for improvement, but we believe these car manufacturers are headed in the right direction.

You can view a gallery of all the cool car tech we saw at CES below:

Photos by Sean Ludwig, Dean Takahashi and Devindra Hardawar

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, everybody wanted to talk. And when they talked on their mobile phones, they put a great deal of stress on the mobile phone carriers. We tried to figure out who handled the load the best.

CES is the biggest technology convention in the US. This year it once again broke attendance records with 153,000 analysts, exhibitors, and journalists. Regardless of your place in the industry, having mobile service in Sin City during the week-long extravaganza is the single-most important thing everyone must have.

To do the testing, I brought along four phones (plus my personal phone), one on each carrier. Here are the phones I used for testing:

• Verizon: Samsung Galaxy Nexus
• AT&T: HTC Vivid
• Sprint: Samsung Epic 4G Touch
• T-Mobile: T-Mobile myTouch
• Additional phone: iPhone 4S

All four tested devices work on 4G networks, and both the Galaxy Nexus and Vivid have access to LTE networks. Because I, along with Venturebeat staffers, also covered the show, testing on which cell provider worked best during CES was not purely scientific. It was all real-world testing using data and telephony when there was a need to use the phones. Of course, at CES, that was constantly.

The best overall coverage came from, in a word, Verizon.

Nearly every carrier provided similar call coverage and quality, but data speed and coverage varied wildly. Verizon was the only provider that consistently had solid performance, both over LTE and 3G. All three other cell carriers were in a constant state of flux, but for one specific reason: there was no upstream bandwidth. Sprint had waves of data coverage, where data speeds would fluctuate between 0-300kbps. AT&T and T-Mobile almost consistently had little to no upstream bandwidth.

Testing data speeds with Ookla’s Speedtest.net app, both on and off the show floor, AT&T and T-Mobile’s networks struggled to find any bandwidth. Download speeds ranged from 100-12,000kbps, but it almost never mattered because there was no upstream bandwidth. Suffice it to say, both GSM carriers’ tubes were clogged.

Verizon was the only carrier who almost never dropped a data signal and always had enough bandwidth to download new emails, upload photos and documents, and do so consistently. Sprint regularly received emails and push data faster than Verizon. For hotspot use Verizon had the most stable network, though transfer speeds even over LTE were fairly slow because of the high volume of users. It was enough for mobile and even minimal laptop use.

On the strip, my findings were the same. AT&T, which recently began providing LTE in Las Vegas, was mostly unusable because of so little upstream bandwidth. In tall hotels data speeds were significantly slower, and LTE and even 3G networks were completely dropped the higher up I went. This is an unfortunate problem, especially since most hotels do not have free Wi-Fi. Further off the strip data speeds increased, but not during the main show days.

While Sprint proved to be second best for data, because data fluctuated so much using GPS navigation was surprisingly difficult. Strangely AT&T and T-Mobile didn’t have this problem, and the tested Epic 4G Touch has no problems with the GPS in Los Angeles. Verizon proved to be the best for navigation.

Call quality, as mentioned earlier, was similar across all networks, likely because most communication was done over data during the show. I made calls across all carriers and dropped or could not connect only in poor connection areas, such as hotel parking lots or underground.

In short, here is how each cell provider fared:

• Verizon: the best overall quality. Data was consistently fast enough for work, and was at times better than available Wi-Fi networks. Best hotspot functionality.
• Sprint: poor GPS quality. Regularly had the fastest push notification. Data download and upload speeds were sporadic, but usable.
• AT&T: Fastest potential data transfer, but no upstream bandwidth available the majority of the time. Push notifications work, but use as a hotspot during the show was impossible.
• T-Mobile: Weakest overall quality. Regularly poor data both down and up. Hotspot was consistently too slow for use.

Because most of us enjoy, or attempt to take advantage of the best local cell provider, my recommendation for future attendees or at other conventions is to use a company Mi-Fi card from Verizon.

It’s an unfortunate truth: if you want a phone that will last all day, get a dumbphone. Smartphones aren’t designed to last all day, and as the features and uses increase incrementally, the battery life has stayed a consistent not long enough. Business and power users know this all too well – it’s one of two reasons why too many of us carry around two phones at all times.

Motorola may have just solved that problem. The award-winning Droid Razr (and one of Venturebeat’s most interesting phones of 2011), the thinnest Android smartphone available today, will now come in two models, standard and Maxx. The Maxx variant is much thicker than the 7.1mm at 9mm (for comparison, the iPhone 4/4S is 9.3mm thick), and the giant 3300mAh battery fills that extra 1.9mm of space. The largest competing smartphone battery found at CES was in the Samsung Galaxy Note, a 5.3″ phone tablet, with a 2500mAh battery.

The Droid Razr atop the Droid Razr Maxx

The repercussions of such a device are far reaching. Motorola claims exceptional battery life, with 21.5 hours of continuous talk time, 15 hours of native video playback, 10 hours of GPS navigation, and 6 hours of HD streaming over Verizon’s LTE network. That is nearly double what competing high-end smartphones can achieve. With the 3pm charging session now in question, there’s no doubt that the Droid Razr Maxx may be the most important handset for business and power users this year. It may set them free to carry one phone around, perhaps for good.

If the Razr Maxx sells well – and I expect it will because everyone has a black hatred for constantly charging their phones – it may provide the kick for companies like Samsung and Apple to stress battery life on phones for true full-day use. Everyday consumers may not require extended batteries, and some handset makers like Apple have whole businesses which revolve around accessorizing their phones with battery cases, additional chargers and batteries, etc. The Razr Maxx will give Motorola a competitive edge in this way, eliminating a number of hidden costs for consumers while simultaneously providing today’s top of the line phone hardware.

At CES I had some time to play with the Razr Maxx, and in the hand it feels bulky and thick, but still comfortable. The kevlar back is only slightly different from the Droid Razr, and thickness is the only real difference. Instead of the phone thin everywhere but the camera, it has uniform thickness. And because the Razr Maxx is identical in every other way to the Droid Razr, it is practically the same phone. Other upcoming phones, like the Nokia Lumia 900 and Sony Xperia S, can only boast 7 and 8.5 hours of talk time, respectively. Compared to 21.5 from the Razr Maxx. For any phone competing on battery life, the Razr Maxx wins, no contest. The Razr Maxx does look and feel bloated and lacks the sleek design of the Droid Razr, but I’ll take battery life over look and feel any day of the week. Do keep in mind that even at 9mm of thickness the Razr Maxx is still very, very thin.

There is only one major setback, and that is the Maxx shipping sans Android 4.0. No date has currently been given for the update, and the Maxx will ship with Android 2.3.5. The announcement of the Droid Razr Maxx also comes with a lower price for the Droid Razr, which will ship for $199 instead of the current $299 with contract. The Droid Razr Maxx will release in the next few weeks, pending Verizon’s release schedule, for $299 plus 2-year service contract.

CSR, the leading maker of navigation chips, showed how you can use its upcoming platform to find your way inside large buildings such as the giant Las Vegas Convention Center. Now a combination of several new technologies makes it possible to navigate with map-based directions inside large buildings, giving you even fewer reasons to get lost or be late for an appointment.

At the Consumer Electronics Show last week, CSR showed a demo of its SiRFstarV global positioning system (GPS) chip, which is coming out later this year. The preproduction chip showed how you could use a map of the convention floor from Micello, Navteq and VisioGlobe to navigate across the floor of the giant hall.

J. Blake Bullock, senior product line manager at CSR, said in an interview that SiRFstarV fuses various radio signals, sensor inputs, and other location data to provide reliable and accurate positioning inside buildings. Using a cloud-based back-end service dubbed SiRFusion, the technology pulls together the various inputs to figure out where you are and where you are moving.

“We’ve been working on this problem for the last couple of years,” Bullock said. “The result is good positioning indoors.”

The smart thing about this is that none of the signals by themselves is perfect. GPS uses satellites that need a line-of-site to the handheld device. WiFi radios are also useful for triangulation. Your phone can detect a variety of WiFi networks, and it can calculate which hot spot you are nearest. So that can also help fix your position. But WiFi networks aren’t ubiquitous and sometimes you’re out of range. The system also relies on gyroscopes, compasses, and accelerometers — which detect motion — to determine the speed and direction you are moving. That method is called “MEMS positioning dead reckoning,” and it determines your step patterns. Separately, each system has flaws. But together, they can fix your position with reasonable accuracy.

Bullock showed me how he could use an application with a Micello map that showed the walking route from the CSR booth to the Nokia booth. The device came up with a reasonably accurate turn-by-turn path through the network of booths to show me where I was supposed to walk. It tells you, for instance, to walk to the BlackBerry booth and then turn right.

Nearby, there were 255 WiFi access points that could be used to triangulate our position with pinpoint accuracy. CSR’s technology can use a barometer in the chip to determine your elevation, so it can tell which floor you’re on. If you walk down the stairs, the sensors will tell the device that you have gone down one level.

Now what has to happen is that companies need to create indoor maps. Google said in November that it will add indoor information to Google Maps, using a crowdsourced model. Navteq has indoor navigation and routing, but Google doesn’t have that yet. Once those things are in place, CSR’s technology could be great for airports, train stations, shopping malls, convention centers, and casinos. The map and application companies are working on creating accurate indoor maps, based on building blueprints.

The SiRFstarV family of chips will go into production later this year, and devices using it could debut sometime in 2012. CSR is a big chip maker that has grown bigger with the mergers of Sirf and Zoran.

Bullock showed me how he could use an app to search for a booth at CES in the South Hall of the convention center — a cavernous place. The map showed all of the major booths inside the hall and green arrows (see picture) pointed out which way to walk. You could judge your progress by looking at major booths along the way on the map trail.

Now there is no escape, and no excuse for getting lost. Unless you lose your phone.

Now that we’ve returned from Vegas, pounded enough Emergen-C cocktails to get us back into a semblance of health, and compared notes, we’ve settled on this list of the show’s top products.

Read on to see the most promising hardware that will be hitting store shelves in the coming months.

10. Samsung Galaxy Note

Samsung Galaxy Note

Less a technological breakthrough than a form-factor experiment, the Galaxy Note is notable primarily because, well, it actually works.

Up to now, phone and tablet manufacturers have been careful to separate their lines: Phones have 4-inch screens or smaller, while tablets have 7-inch screens or larger. The embarrassing failure of Dell’s 5-inch Streak confirmed the wisdom of that approach.

But in truth, there’s little difference between a tablet and a smartphone, other than size, and for those of us who habitually use 3×5 cards or similar-sized pocket notebooks, a 5-inch diagonal screen is actually just about perfect for holding in one hand while jotting notes with the other. By adding a stylus and some note-taking and handwriting recognition software to the Android OS, that’s exactly the use that Samsung has in mind for the Galaxy Note.

And yes, it’s too big for a pants pocket. It might be more attractive to female customers, who can stash it in a purse, or to more stylishly dressed men, who could put it in a jacket pocket. We spent some time with the Note on the CES show floor and came away favorably impressed.

One downside: It’s running a sadly outdated version of Android (2.3, aka Gingerbread).

It will be coming to AT&T Wireless later this year, and should be a strong contender of AT&T and Samsung give it a decent price and find the right audience for their marketing message, which is basically that writing and drawing are still fun. –Dylan Tweney

9. Gear4 Sleep Clock

Gear4 Sleep Clock

If you sometimes wake up feeling drained, the Gear4 Sleep Clock may help you. The clock uses an iPhone app, a dock and Doppler radar to sense your sleep pattern and wake you up at the lightest point in your sleep cycle.

The radar senses your movements and determines exactly when you fall asleep. It also senses if you wake up during the night and detects your breathing so that it can figure out if you are in a deep sleep or not. When you wake up the next day, you can see the results on your iPhone app. It will tell you exactly how many hours and minutes you slept. And it will say how long it took to fall asleep and how many times you woke up. After you use it for a while, it will come up with averages and recommendations so you can get better sleep. You don’t have to wear anything on your wrist, as you do with rival solutions from Basis Science or Jawbone. The Gear4 device will go on sale soon for $199. –Dean Takahashi

8. HP Envy 14 Spectre Ultrabook

HP Envy 14

The distinctive feature of this Ultrabook is its cover. It is made out of black Gorilla Glass, a damage-resistant glass from Corning that is normally used for screens. It certainly makes this laptop design stand out amid a sea of Ultrabooks at CES. The machine carries the Envy brand established by Voodoo PC, which HP acquired. It has a high-definition HP Radiance display (1600 x 900) with 300 Nits of brightness. It has nine hours of battery life and a row of connection slots. It also has an HD webcam and HP’s Beats Audio technology. The Spectre also has an analogy roller control for changing the sound volume and it has a mute button on the side for when you have to stop the music fast. It comes with 128 gigabytes of flash memory and Intel’s Rapid Start technology. The height is 20 millimeters and it weighs 3.79 pounds. It will cost $1,399 and will start selling on Feb. 8. –Dean Takahashi

7. OLPC XO 3.0 tablet

OLPC XO 3.0

This tablet has been in the works for a long time and its true cost remains to be seen. But One Laptop per Child has done a good job of researching what children in developing countries need and then tailoring it for them. It’s not just an iPad with a different label slapped on it. It has a dust and waterproof cover. It has its own Linux operating system (and it can also run Android) and its Sugar user interface has been adapted for touchscreen use. You can charge it with a wall outlet, a solar panel, or a hand crank. And the screws for the cover line up as power pins when you are getting power from the solar panel. And it has an eight-inch display that works inside or outside in bright sunlight. That’s a lot of innovation in a small tablet whose target cost is around the $100 mark. Overall, the OLPC XO 3.0 has an appealing design that promises to reach a wider market than previous OLPC XO laptops. –Dean Takahashi

Click here to see products 6 through 4.

Pages: 1 2 3

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Basis Science is a Silicon Valley company that wants to inspire you to be more healthy and make it easier to track your health.

The company showed off its Basis B1 Band (pictured right) and its accompanying web application at the Consumer Electronics Show last week in Las Vegas. The device is one of many startups dedicated to the Quantified Self, which is all about understanding ourselves through data we’ve collected about ourselves. Rivals include Striiv, Jawbone, and FitBit.

Basis tracks your heart rate, your movement, skin temperature and the ambient temperature, and your galvanic skin response (GSR, or how much you’re sweating). The sweat tells you how strenuous your activity is and how stressed out you are. All of the data gets uploaded to the cloud and Basis analyzes it. You wear the device 24 hours a day. The device knows whether you are asleep or awake.

“The breakthrough is that we track heart rate continuously,” said Jeff Holove, chief executive of Basis Science. “Our view is that heart rate is a core indicator of your overall wellness.”

The GSR data can be used for a lie detector test, but that’s not why Basis measures it. It’s part of all of the metrics that it uses to figure out your basics.

The Basis device doubles as a wrist watch. But it also has little icons that tell you things about yourself. It tells you how many calories you’re burning, how much sleep you’re getting, and how many points you’ve gained as a result. Normally, you’d have to have a chest strap to get the same kind of information about your body.

When you log into the Basis web site, you can see your personal dashboard, including graphs that track your progress over time. All you have to do is wear the band 24 hours a day. The dashboard gives you intuitive information about your health and wellness in a snapshot. It measures your activity and the number of calories you burn in a day vs. how many you should be burning. The system can classify this data into meaningful events, like walking the dog, jogging, or sleeping.

“The dashboard gives a lot more information about your health than you normally have access to,” Holove said.

The Basis Band has multiple sensors around an optical engine that tracks heart rate by directing light into the skin to “see” your blood flow. Additional sensors gather information such as your movement.

Basis raised $9 million from Norwest Venture Partners and Doll Capital Management. Prior to that, it was angel funded. Price is to be announced.

Check out the video below.

The game play of I Am Alive, a title developed by Ubisoft’s Shanghai studio, is unconventional. Instead of a plethora of weapons and ammo, you’ll often find that you have very few resources for fighting. It’s a big problem if you run into three mean strangers and you’ve only got one bullet.

But that’s part of the experiment behind this downloadable game for Xbox Live, according to Stan Mettra, creative director on I Am Alive. It’s nice to know that an innovative idea can still find a way into the risk-averse game market.

We saw a hands-on demo of the game at the Consumer Electronics Show. It takes place in a post-disaster world where survival is the entire object. Mettra told us the story is about a man who comes back to his home city after a mysterious disaster known as “The Event” hits the planet. It’s a third-person action adventure focused on survival, but it doesn’t have monsters or zombies.

Instead, you have to deal with human enemies who are unpredictable. You wander the city and stumble across other survivors. Some need help. Some are friendly. And some are confrontational. When you run into the latter type, you might find that they start circling you. If you pull out a gun, they may back off. You might have to bluff if you’re out of bullets. You can force them to step back or retreat entirely. This bluffing and intimidation tactic is something new for a major video game. You have to guess if your enemies are bluffing you, and you have to decide whether to fight or run away. Each encounter is a kind of duel of wits.

You also have to pay attention to your energy, or stamina. If you keep climbing forever, you’ll get tired. If you take medicine, it may not be the right kind. The dust is dangerous enough to kill you, so you have to try to climb above it now and then in order to breathe fresh air. And the dust can obscure areas of the city, so you’ll need a map to get around. In this sense, the game puts you in a hazy gray environment which, even without the human enemies, is dangerous to you.

Sometimes you’ll find things you don’t need, but you can barter them.

The game is going to be released on Xbox Live Arcade. That’s a story in itself. The console disk-based games are a shrinking market where blockbusters rule. A new intellectual property like I Am Alive is a little too risky to release as a major release on retail platforms. The Ubisoft title was originally envisioned as a console title but was rebooted midstream and redirected as a digital release. Since digital games aren’t as expensive to distribute, releasing the game on Xbox Live became a much better option.

Mettra said the game is one of the biggest titles ever to be released via the digital distribution platform of Xbox Live. The game will be available as a Microsoft House Party downloadable title in February.

Check out our interview with Mettra and his colleague Aurelien Palasse.

---

GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

---

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Jawbone is one of the new entrants into the market for quantifying your life. Its Up movement and sleep-tracking health wristband is aimed at people who want to keep track of and improve their health.

The product had a good launched in November, but Jawbone decided to put sales on hold because it got complaints that the Up units died suddenly within the first week of use. Jawbone offered to replace the failed Ups for free. Sales have not yet restarted.

Even so, Travis Bogard, vice president of product management and strategy at San Francisco-based Jawbone, was promoting the product at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last week.

You wear the Up band 24 hours a day. It will measure your movements, including your steps. It will record how much sleep you get. You can snap pictures of the food you’ve eaten, and it will reward you points for food intake. You can challenge a friend to see who can take more steps. Overall, it’s one more product that helps you find a healthy lifestyle.

A free companion app for the Up band tells you how you’re doing throughout the day — if you’re getting enough sleep, eating the right foods, moving enough. After you start using it for a while, you can see how much you’re exceeding or missing your targets.You can pull the band apart and plug it into your iPhone to synchronize it.

The app measures your sleep and wakes you at the ideal time, using a silent “smart alarm” which vibrates on your wrist. It can detect whether you are in a deep or a light sleep and assess the overall quality of your sleep. It also reminds you when you’ve been idle for too long. And after you eat, it asks you how you feel.

You can share your information with friends on a social network and compete or get positive reinforcement.

Here’s a video of Bogard talking about Up.

The show drew 3,100 exhibitors across 1.861 million square feet of space. The show drew more than 34,000 international attendees and 20,000 product launches.

The show attracted executives from business, government, entertainment, automotive, consumer electronics and every major industry. And so it should, as it is the biggest trade show for the $1 trillion electronics industry.

The organization behind the show, the Consumer Electronics Association, headed by chief executive Gary Shapiro (pictured right), is now reviewing requests for 2013 CES keynotes. The group has to replace Microsoft’s opening keynote speaker slot, as the company is giving it up after this year.

The CEA said that 95,000 square feet of exhibit space in the iLounge Pavilion (for Apple products) has already sold for next year. Among those committed to floor space are car makers Mazda, BMW, Ford, Kia and Hyundai.

Hot trends at this year’s show included Ultrabooks, OLED TVs, Android 4.0 tablets, next-generation smartphones and 3D printers. Celebrities who attended included Eliza Dushku, Justin Timberlake, Justin Bieber, Ludacris, 50 Cent, Wil.i.am, Wayne Brady, Jillian Michaels, LL Cool J, Ryan Seacrest, Will Smith and Kelly Clarkson. For the geeks among us, that means technology is cool.

Technology innovations generated excitement across the 2012 CES showfloor. Dozens of ultrabooks, OLED TVs, Android 4.0 tablets, next generation smartphones and 3D printers were launched. Reporters wrote thousands of articles about the products.

Among the dignitaries who visited were FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, Nevada Governor Brian Sandoval, Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), Senator Dean Heller (R-NV), Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-VA), Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), Rep. John Shimkus (R-IL), Rep. Cliff Stearns (R-FL), Rep. Lee Terry (R-NE) and FCC Commissioners Mignon Clyburn and Robert M. McDowell. Government officials from Canada, Columbia, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Korea, Lebanon and Oman also attended.

Next year, the show will be Jan. 8-11, 2013, in Las Vegas. Audited figures will be out this spring. Microsoft won’t be on the show floor, but you can bet it’s going to be crowded again. In an interview last week with VentureBeat, Shapiro said, “The show is doing phenomenally well. We’re at or near our record in attendance and footprint. We have been approached by all sorts of companies that want to do the opening keynote. We will decide in time.”

“There is no questions that the speed of the introduction of electronics has changed,” Shapiro said. “But a show forces companies to meet a deadline. We give people a reason to get things done. The show is also a five-senses experience, where you can see and hear everything. And face to face meetings still work the best. These are reasons why more than 150,000 people still come to the show.

They also took a lot of photographs. Here are some of our favorite images and finds from the CES 2012 floor, including an Atari controller for the iPad, exciting in-car computers, and the hottest new laptops and mobile phones. For even more images, check out the VentureBeat Flickr photostream.

You can find in-depth articles about these products and events in our collection of CES 2012 coverage, including hands-ons and videos.

Photos by Dean Takahashi, Devindra Hardawar, Dylan Tweney, and Sean Ludwig.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Contour is a fast-growing video camera company that lets you capture your favorite outdoor activities — like skiing down a momentum — at the moment of maximum fun.

The company announced a partnership with Cerevo that allows you to stream your video live to your friends via Ustream, so your friends can see the view from your helmet or your surf board. Contour made the announcement at the Consumer Electronics Show.

Marc Barros, chief executive of the company, says that the video camera market has been shrinking, but sports cameras are on the rise as people realize they can capture some of the most spectacular moments in life. Contour has been making cameras since 2003 (formerly known as VHoldR) and it has been growing every year.

“You can see speed, elevation, distance etc.,” Barros said in an interview. “We’re leading the way in putting video and data together. There’s a proliferation of sensors and video is becoming easier and easier.”

In the past, helmet-mounted cameras were hard to control because it was difficult to see if they were aimed in the right direction. But, thanks to technology from chip makers Ambarella and Qualcomm Atheros, you will be able to use a Bluetooth connection to point the camera with your iPhone or other smartphone. The Contour Connect App will be free and available in April. Now you’ll always have the right POV (point of view).

“With hands-free, we started this eight years ago so we could record video while we skied,” Barros said. “It’s got to be simple. People are used to Apple products. So we focus on ease of use. Now the traditional video companies are trying to come into this space. We focus on the experiences you can film.”

For livestreaming, Contour partnered with Japanese networking company Cerevo, which provides a LiveShell for $299. You connect your Contour+ camera to LiveShell via a HDMI cable. Then LiveShell takes the camera video feed and allows people to share it via the smartphone in real-time on Ustream. The video is recorded in high-definition 1080p format at 25 to 30 frames per second or at 720p resolution at 25 to 30 or 50 to 60 frames per second.

These new features can be used with the company’s flagship product, the Contour+. Contour also makes the $199 ContourROAM camera, a one-button, easy-to-use waterproof camera. The cameras have built-in navigation and mobile connectivity and can be mounted on any surface.

“It’s all about sharing with your friends,” Barros said. “You want them to be there at that moment. You can tell really rich stories, whether you are a professional broadcaster or not.”

With Cerevo LiveShell and Contour+, the maximum resolution is 480p. You can stream to Ustream via WiFi or 3G connections. With LiveShell, Contour+ has more than two hours of battery life. Cerevo Liveshell will be available on Feb. 1 from Contour’s online store, while the Contour+ is available now. Rivals include GoPro.

Check out our video with Barros below.

There’s a good chance that your next laptop will be thinner and lighter than you can possibly imagine.

This week at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Intel unveiled its grand plan to make Ultrabooks — its snazzy name for ultraportable MacBook Air-like laptops — the next big thing in computing. This year alone there will be more than 75 Ultrabook models on the market, and Intel has said that it’s gearing up its biggest marketing push since the Centrino lineup for the new machines.

Ultrabooks are poised to replace boring old Windows laptops for good in the next few years, and that’s a good thing.

While Apple’s MacBook Air is the obvious inspiration for Ultrabook PCs, the move towards impossibly thin laptops has been in progress for decades — from ultraportable IBM ThinkPads in the 90s, to netbooks, to the razor-thin Ultrabooks. Initial ultraportables were always too expensive, and netbooks generally weren’t powerful enough to serve as primary computers. It’s just now that the hardware to make Ultrabooks powerful and useful is actually affordable.

So what’s the big deal? Ultrabooks promise to be lighter than typical laptops, weighing in around 3 pounds for the most part, allowing them to practically disappear in your laptop bag. They’ll sport solid-state drives (SSDs), instead of traditional hard drives, which will make them extra-thin and fast. (Expect startup times under 10 seconds and practically instant resume from standby speeds.) And thanks to Intel’s next-generation Core processors, Ultrabooks will be peppy under the hood and even capable of decent 3D graphics performance.

You could get the same benefits from Apple’s most recent MacBook Air model, but as is typical of PCs versus Macs, Ultrabooks promise to be cheaper. (Technically, the MacBook Air is an Ultrabook, though it’s unlikely Apple will make any effort to get it labeled as such by Intel.) Apple’s 11-inch MacBook Air starts at a reasonable $999, but the larger (and preferable for doing work, in this reporter’s opinion) 13-inch model will run you $1,299. Most 13-inch Ultrabooks, on the other hand, are aiming for a price well below $1,000.

Ultimately, the proliferation of cheap ultraportables means consumers will no longer have to decide between buying a boxy laptop and saving money, or aiming for something thin and light. With Ultrabooks, ultraportability will become the new standard consumers who want a new laptop. Boxy laptop designs will stick around on the very low-end, and desktops will become even more endangered among general consumers.

Ultrabooks will be particularly useful for students and professionals — basically, anyone who needs to carry their computer for most of the day. And given that they’re so light, Ultrabooks will completely erase the need for a tablet for many. Intel has also said that PC makers are working on bringing touchscreen capabilities to future models (in addition to voice and motion controls), blurring the line even further between Ultrabooks and tablets.

Having used a MacBook Air for almost a year now, there’s honestly no way I could go back to anything thicker, or anything not running a SSD.

Aside from the extreme portability, what I love most about the MacBook Air is the way it completely gets out of the way to let you be productive. I can turn it on and begin working from a cold boot within 15 seconds. Or, if it’s in standby mode, I can flip open the lid and begin working almost immediately. That’s mostly thanks to the fast SSD and graphics capabilities — and it’s something that Windows-based Ultrabooks will share.

Speed. Simplicity. Portability. I realized fairly quickly that this is how I’ve always wanted my computers to fit into my daily life. With Ultrabooks, soon everyone will learn this is the way computers were meant to be.

The Roanoke, Va.-based company showed off the technology at the Consumer Electronics Show this week in Las Vegas, where it announced the national availability of the product for the first time.

It’s a clever use of technology to address a problem that millions of people have: they could use bifocals, but consider them inconvenient.

Bifocals are built with two lenses, but the problem is the reading portion of the glasses is always there, whether you need them or not. If you are not reading and you look down through the bottom part of the lens, you see distortion.

With PixelOptics’ emPower, you tap the side of the glasses when you want to read something. That turns on or off the liquid crystals embedded in the lens. And when you want to look at things that are farther away, you can tap the glasses again. You can also set the glasses to do this automatically. The glasses have built-in accelerometers that can sense when you are looking down at something such as a book, and can switch the lenses.

The glasses have no moving parts, and users can change the prescription in the glasses at the blink of an eye. PixelOptics has more than 300 patents.

The company has been making the lens technology for 10 years and launched in August 2011. Now, 1,500 retailers are selling them for about $1,200. In the second quarter, the company will launch in Europe. PixelOptics has trained more than 4,000 eye care professionals on how to sell emPower.

Check out our video interview with Mark from PixelOptics below, filmed at the Digital Experience Party.

For more news out of this week’s Consumer Electronics Show, be sure to check out VentureBeat’s live coverage from CES 2012.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Camera startup Lytro has won the Last Gadget Standing competition at the Consumer Electronics Show for its “revolutionary” light-field camera.

Lytro debuted its camera in mid-October to considerable buzz, thanks to its engaging technology that changes how you can take pictures. The light field camera lets you take a photo once and go back later to change the focus point. Lytro’s light field tech also lets you display pictures in 3D.

The Last Gadget Standing competition at CES featured other upcoming gadgets including the Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga, the PlayStation Vita handheld console and the Samsung Galaxy Note tablet/phone.

Lytro’s cameras can be pre-ordered now and the units are expected to ship in the next few months. The company will sell the 8-gigabyte version of its camera for $399 and the 16-gigabyte version will run for $499.

For more gadget news, be sure to check out VentureBeat’s live coverage from CES 2012.

If it works, it could enhance the experience of shopping for clothing online, which has become at $30 billion market. At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the London-based company showed how it lets you scan your body at home using a 3D capture camera from PrimeSense.

That gives the system — a computer or, in the future, an Xbox 360 game console — an exact image of what you look like. Then you can try on clothes in a virtual way, standing in front of your web-connected TV set and using hand gesetures to look at different selections. When you try on an outfit, you can view a heat map that shows additional data you can’t get through ordinary online shopping. For instance, you can see a heat map that shows areas where the clothing would fit your body loosely or where it would be too tight.

“You can see if an outfits fits you or not or is too tight or is a perfect fit,” said Suran Goonatilake, chairman and co-founder of Bodymetrics, in an interview.

It takes about a minute to be scanned into a PrimeSense camera, which maps a 3D space, including your body, and is the technology used in Kinect, which has sold 18 million units for games on the Xbox 360. Bodymetrics is a new application of the same technology in a different market. Bodymetrics has added information about clothing about fabric and how it stretches across certain body types. When it comes to size, preference accounts for a couple of sizes, Goonatilake said.

“Some people like to wear clothes tighter than others,” he said.

Only one in ten people shop online because they are unsure whether the clothes the buy online will fit them or not. Bodymetrics can help the whole industry grow if it solves that problem.

Bodymetrics can also help physical retailers.

“About 30 percent to 40 percent of clothing bought is returned to retailers. The No. 1 reason is fit,” said Goonatilake. “That’s the fundamental problem we are solving here,”We can reduce the number of returns they have.”

Goonatilake said the company has tested it with retailers for a few years and is now ready to roll it out with PrimeSense in the U.S.

Check out our video interview with Lainey Sheridan-Young, head of fashion at Bodymetrics, below.

---

GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

---

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Major electronics manufacturer Philips debuted a new line of headphones and earbuds targeted at Android phone owners at the Consumer Electronics Show this week.

The company makes some of the best-sounding, affordable earbuds on the market, and now it is extending its focus to Android, which has the largest market share for smartphones in the world. While you can use any pair of standard headphones with an Android phone, these models are specifically designed to work with the Philips MyHeadset Android app that helps make music sound better.

There are four models in the lineup, with three earbud editions and one traditional headband headset. Each model has a microphone for hands-free use, and call management features to answer/end a call, reject a call, voice dial and redial the last number.

One other thing that makes the Android headphone lineup interesting is that if you go to a consumer electronics store, the number of iPhone-focused products heavily outnumbers that of Android products. Whether it’s the mobile section of Best Buy, Target or Walmart, the iPhone and iPod touch accessories always get more love. But as Android’s dominance grows and continues, we’ll likely begin to see more Android-specific offerings.

The Philips Android headphone line will go io sale in the second quarter of 2012. The models range from $30 for the least-expensive earbuds to $100 for the headband headset.

More photos from the upcoming Android line can be viewed below:

For more news out of this week’s Consumer Electronics Show, be sure to check out VentureBeat’s live coverage from CES 2012.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

The head of ARM Holdings isn’t sweating Intel’s foray into the mobile chip market, where ARM’s chip designs have dominated over the past few years.

“It’s inevitable Intel will get a few smartphone design wins — we regard Intel as a serious competitor,” ARM CEO Warren East told Reuters at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week. “Are they ever going to be the leaders in power efficiency? No, of course not. But they have a lot more to offer.”

At CES, Intel unveiled its long-awaited Medfield mobile processor, now called the Atom Z2460, which is low power and meant for use in smartphones and tablets. The company also announced that Motorola and Lenovo will be the first to make Android devices using the Medfield chip.

But Intel faces an uphill battle with the Atom Z2460 since it’s coming to the market so late, and it’s also fundamentally incompatible with ARM’s designs since it’s x86-based. That means a vast majority of the more than 400,000 Android apps on the market won’t run on Intel’s processor without being recompiled. The company has hinted it has some solution in the works to run ARM-based apps, but that will likely come at some sort of performance cost.

East said Intel’s chip was “good enough,” but ultimately not competitive with ARM’s chip designs.

“They (Intel) have taken some designs that were never meant for mobile phones and they’ve literally wrenched those designs and put them into a power-performance space which is roughly good enough for mobile phones,” he said.

After playing around with Intel’s reference Android phone, which was running a surprisingly ugly version of Android, I’d have to side with East for now. The phone performed decently, but it was a bit thicker than most high-end Android phones now, and there didn’t seem to be anything very compelling about it.

Perhaps the final models will show the real value in Intel’s new mobile platform, but for now it seems like the Atom Z2460 is too little, too late.

For more news out of this week’s Consumer Electronics Show, be sure to check out VentureBeat’s live coverage from CES 2012.

Hello! I just found a handful of wonderful technology in Las Vegas, an oasis in the desert, at CES, the country’s biggest electronics show.

There are over 100,000 people here to see roughly 20,000 gadgets brought to the light of day in less time than it takes for a rattlesnake to shed its skin.

Without hype, these are the gadgets that will be worth knowing about in 2012. I found about 9, with the help of my friends.

(Below these, I’ve listed a few dozen that were lauded, but I believe are not very important, interesting, or relevant.)

A HOBO PHONE: The most important phone at CES is the SpareOne, a simple phone that can run off of an AA battery—perfect for stashing as an emergency phone along with a prepaid SIM card.

ART CAMERA: This is the only gadget at the show that melts my heart every time I think about it. Fuji has a new interchangable lens camera called the XPro-1 that follows up their adored X100 street camera, which even regular people lusted after. Why? The X100 looks like a rangefinder/leica, manual controls when you needed them, and took great photos with its fast, fixed lens. X1-Pro camera is the followup that will have changeable lenses and potentially be able to use Leica M mount lenses with an adapter, said Fuji. It will also have an awesome lens collection of three primes: a wide, 50mm equivalent and a modest zoom macro. These are the kinds of fast lenses that can give your photos those romantic out of focus backgrounds that make every place look like Paris. The body alone is $1700, which is DSLR priced, but the images should keep up with DSLRs of the same price. I want this more than anything else I’ve seen at the show, and I think I might get one over the also amazing Sony NEX-7 Camera, which is technically astounding but has a mediocre lens selection that is not worthy of a $1300 camera. If you want to know a LOT about this camera, check out DP Review’s awesome preview.

That’s all I care about in cameras at CES. But wow, I care about this camera a LOT.

A DRONE FOR THE REST OF US: The Parrot AR DRONE 2.0 is an update to the ipad-controlled quadcopter toy that makes it a bit more serious and a lot cheaper as a tool for aerial photography. The new one is better at staying in place (it has an air pressure sensor that lets it maintain altitude more steadily) and an HD wireless video camera. When I saw it running, the drone was loitering in place, occasionally flipping over in mid air. It is also cheaper than the last model than at $300. I want one. My dream is to fly one over the beach and film the ocean from above.

BIG TV: The real action in TVs is, as always, not with the mega high end concept televisions but the Panasonic and Samsung plasma TVs that are the ones people will end up owning.

Samsung’s amazing D7000 plasma HDTV was one of the best TVs of last year, and its follow up in the PNE8000, will also be great as a TV. It will have gesture and voice commands, which are a useful way to control the TV when the remote is on safari. Considering how hard it was for Microsoft to master Xbox’s Kinect and its voice and motion controls, it could suck.

Samsung is also going to be dropping 2 to 4 sets of 3d glasses in the box of every new 3D tv. These generally cost over $100 each, so this is more than an afterthought–it’s serious charity that everyone else will have to follow.

Vizio, the king of cheap TVs, had a rough year in 2011 winning few awards. This year, they’ve also got a super widescreen HDTV called the cinemawide that is super cool. No, really–it’s wide as a hollywood movie at 21:9 (2560 x 1080) instead of the more standard 16:9 and much wider than all other TVs you can buy now in the US. If you’re a movie buff, this could make watching films super cool as long as the sets perform well. It’s 58-inches. At the very least, it will look amazing in a livingroom. I want.

That’s everything you need to know about TVs in the coming year.

THIN COMPUTERS: Everyone’s talking about ultrabooks! I don’t even know what an Ultrabook technically is, but they all seem to be Macbook Air like, thin and powerful. That is a good thing.

But a real head turner at the show is the Dell XPS 13, which is lighter and smaller than a Macbook Air but with better screen resolution. It has some cloud connect thingy that lets it check your email and get it ready for you to read, among other tasks, while its in sleep mode so you can get back to work as soon as you open the lid. It has a backlit keyboard, and is aluminum and carbon fiber. Mark from Laptop Mag has a solid hands on here. The kicker? This pup starts at just under $1000. The thing that makes it inferior to the Air is its screen is lower resolution.

There’s one laptop I liked with better resolution and slightly more power potential than the Air, although at a larger price and footprint: HP’s Specter 14. It has a gorilla glass lid and a $1400 price tag. (The reason it’s not the primary laptop of choice here is because most agree the XPS has it by wow factor.)

But here’s the bottom line: Sometimes this year, Intel’s faster chipset called Ivy Bridge as well as Windows 8 are coming out. Wait for them to get a PC.

That’s all I care about in computers. (If you want to know about computer components, check out Anandtech.com)

WIRELESS SOUND: I trust Bang & Olufsen to make good, expensive gear, and so I have a good bit of faith the Beolit 12 wireless speaker will be wonderful. Some Jambox wireless speaker competitors have tried and failed to take the throne, but this B&O airplay speaker is high powered at 120 watts, so it kind of opens up a new category out of nowhere: Wireless airplay speakers that can make you deaf.

MATERIAL MATTERS: Gorilla glass, the miracle glass that is strong enough to put on gadget faces like the iphone or even TVs, is now 20% stronger in version 2.0. This means it can be implemented in a thinner manifestation on future gadgets to improve touchscreen responsiveness, weight and thinness. It’s amazing to think about Gorilla Glass as a lost technology that Corning couldn’t monetize until Steve Jobs pushed them to convert a factory to start making it again, in 6 months. I can’t recall exactly, but in Walter Isaacson’s bio, I think the tech was decades old.

ANNOUNCING THE BEST GADGET OF CES: An expensive fridge by LG that can take a can of beer from warm to cold in 5 minutes. Here’s a video by my friend, John Mahoney, for Pop Science:
http://bcove.me/q4z2nhu7

APPENDIX: LOVED OR UNLOVED STUFF THAT DID NOT CAPTURE MY INTEREST

Onkyo is doing this thing called Instaprevue, which lets us see thumbnails previes of the video inputs on a receiver. It’s neat and useful, but not worth upgrading a receiver for.

Buffalo is showing off an 802.11AC router. The AC spec is faster than G or N. This won’t matter for awhile because the standard needs to settle and N wireless has been keeping up with media streaming pretty ok these days. Plus, your laptop and phone won’t work with it.

Netgear has a wireless extender that works with dual band routers.

Intel’s refocusing on smartphone processors. This is good news because competition for ARM is good news. Or, it will be once gets into things we can buy.

The Nokia Lumia 900 is the first Windows Phone to come to the US–it’s basically the older phone with a bigger screen, on AT&T. I am appreciative but dispassionately unaffected by Android. Windows Phone, on the other hand, makes me crazy. It’s got a slick interface and wonderful Nokia hardware. Too bad the apps are atrocious. I am carrying a Windows Phone now, next to my iPhone. And if you know me, that is a crazy thing in and of itself. I reluctantly say Windows does not matter, but I want it to matter a lot.

Eton Solar Speakers. I’m embarrassed I want this, but I do. Probably because I live in a van in the desert sometimes.

Android phones of note are a Droid 4, which is supposedly to be one of the best with a keyboard and a Droid RAZR Maxx that is the RAZR from last year with an extended battery, which kind of defeats the purpose because the RAZR was intended to be thinner than everything. I’d prefer a Windows Phone.

Samsung and LG made TVs using OLED technology. Samsung’s OLED TVs are supposed to be 40% more color accurate and 1000x more responsive than LCD. Sony has a concept TV where 6 million LEDs light up a TV instead of using traditional methods . LG is showing off a 4k (basically ultra-hd) 84-inch TV, Sony’s got a 4K projector, and JVC has a camera to get this content. These future techs are amazing, but wildly expensive. I’d guess 4 times more expensive than a plasma. If you can afford a yacht, maybe one of these sets is right for you in the near future–when there’s actually content worthy of it. One day, maybe they’ll be more than museum pieces. But not today. Today they are as useful as sand. I won’t file any of this stuff as junk, though, because 10 years ago, LCD TVs couldn’t touch tube TV prices, either. I’ll call it wonderfully irrelevant in an Epcot world of tomorrow way.

Panasonic is Samsung’s major competition in TVs and they’ve followed up their top line VT30 and budget ST30 HDTVs with the VT50 and ST50s. They’ll be solid, as are Panasonic’s TVs every year. But Samsung’s been catching up and is less expensive these days, so who knows what the reviewers will pick. I heard Panasonic is building MySpace into its TVs, which is obviously ridiculous. Don’t hold it against them. But this could be the year that Panasonic falls to Samsung. Who knows.

I like Sony TVs and commend them for reducing their product lines from 6 to 3. Clarity is wonderful! But based on LCD tech, these TVs are always wildly expensive for the size. Pass.

Tablets–Unlike phones, where Android has made quite a few people happy, I still feel like Android Tablets are generally uninteresting because the app selection is next to nothing. Vizio has one of the best of the show from a pure hardware perspective, while Viewsonic has one of the cheapest.

Samsung has tablets of 3 different sizes under the Galaxy Brand. But the tablets at the show were not interesting to me. I prefer the iPad and Kindle Fire over these, for app selection and media buying infrastructure, at those two prices. Also, as Wilson Rothman from MSNBC said to me, “I am shocked to hear how many are shipping with Honeycomb 3.2, with promised upgrade to Ice Cream Sandwich later.” (Ice Cream Sandwich is the new version of Android.)

In chatting with Mark from Laptop Mag and Joanna from The Verge, I’ve come away with admiration for both like the Lenovo U310 and Samsung Series 9 which are strong followups to last year’s favorite Ultrabooks. They’re both updates to older models from last year, and can’t be considered brand new, but these well-tested machines are still worth knowing about.

Oh, some people like the Vizio laptops, but I’ll wait and see. Nah, I’ll just get a Dell XPS or a Macbook Air.

Canon has a megapowered point and shoot called the GX-1. You can ignore it. It’s got a sensor that is bigger than most point and shoots but smaller than the sensors in the best , interchangeable lens cameras that are small, high quality and that I am in love with as an idea and category. The Canon is a non starter at $800 because it has a slow f/2.8 zoom lens and for the money you can get a better camera at the price in a DSLR or interchangeable lens cam.

Garmin realizes it can’t beat the smartphone so they’re linking their GPS to Android handsets to give it gas, weather and traffic data in their new flagship. (It’s called the 3590LMT and it’s $400.) They’re charging $20 for traffic data and $10 for traffic cameras and $10 for fuel prices and $5 for weather, per year. I still prefer a smartphone and a GPS app. At these prices, you should, too. At least they’ve got a golf course GPS that will be useful.

Polaroid has a point and shoot that runs android and doesn’t print photos. It’s bad.

Camcorders–I should know more about this. I don’t because I’m into digital cameras that shoot video rather than standalone camcorders. However, they’re still important because a good camcorder can shoot quality video that keeps up with a high end DSLR for less than $1000.

Sony has a camcorder with a projector built into it. I can’t decide if this is stupid or genius. Let’s go with go with “ehhhhhh fine.”

Camcorder Info says they’re excited to test the Panasonic flagship, the HC-X900M and Panny is claiming “near pro” level performance from this $900 camera. They’re also interested in the JVC GZ-GX1 because it follows up a camera that had too many bells and whistles. This one is more simple, and $900.

Pico Projectors–New, better mini projectors. But they are still one or two generations away from being anything but piss poor. The high end ones usually hit at the CEDIA show later in the year.

Car Audio–Pioneer has an update to its App radio that works with Android and has a bigger screen. The concept is useless because it depends on specially written apps to display themselves in a special mode on the screen of the radio. Duh, just use the phone’s screen and an iPod cable with a regular car stereo.

Solar powered Kindle cover. It has a reading light and they claim the cover provides three hours of reading for every one hour of sunlight, but at $80, this thing makes no sense. A Kindle needs so little power to operate that you could charge it for a few minutes by USB and have a lot of reading time. And if you’re in the desert of some place without power, you should get a general purpose solar panel with battery, like the Orange Joos.

Here’s an obscene portable PC gaming machine from Razor. This is weird. But people who used it said it’s a solid way to play PC games, if you’re into that sort of thing.

Limke is a little dongle that charts your pulse and charts your oxygen levels and compares them to your friends online. Cute app, but if I wanted this kind of information, I’d live in a hospital full time. Heart rate and oxygen levels are symptomatic and it would be more constructive to track walking with something like a fit bit. I’m a little bit over health tracking at the moment. I find it a distraction to actually taking care of your health. Exercise, get a juicer, sleep well.

The Lenovo Yoga is a concept for a laptop that turns into a tablet but it is ultimately flawed because laptops and tablets have different power and battery life profiles. Ignore.

Cable and satellite are screwed. This is probably the most desperate gadget of the show. Dish is making a mega-DVR that can play video in many rooms and capture every prime time show from every major network with one click. They’re also previewing their satellite channel lineup for free for 24 hours–through the internet. All of this seems like a desperate try to stave off the inevitable march towards watching internet streamed TV on tablets while we bathe, cook, lay in bed, and sit on the can. Good for old fashioned mansion-ites who love live television.

The OLPC 3.0 Tablet is a tablet for poor kids designed by rich people. $100. Solar charged. Not junk, per say, but not relevant to most of us. I really appreciate it for its attempt to computerize the rest of the world.

More BS: Haier made a see through TV. Sharp is making 17 different LCD panels that are bigger than 60 inches, but that’s useless because LCDs are too expensive at those sizes. Friends at Televisioninfo.com believe it’s a way for Sharp to earn business partners by showing their manufacturing might. I buy that. They’re also making battery powered TVs up to 60 inches. This is simply dumb.

Lenovo is making a TV with Android built in. It’s not built on Google TV, though, which is Google’s interface for TVs? This is a clusterfuck. For Lenovo and for Google. Focus!

Also, too many people are making waterproof computers and tablets. Stop it.

META: For Writers At CES

The first thing I notice every year when I settle into a hotel at CES is that no matter how fancy the hotel, the tap water smells like eggs. They say the memory of smell is powerful although elusive and I use the memory of the smell of the tap water to wake me up when my eyes start glossing over at CES.

Eggs.

CES can buckle a strong man’s knees. The quantity of data and visceral noise on the show floor causes many junior reporters to whine and go cross-eyed and sometimes catch a cold from all the hubbub, hand shaking, and fondling of dirty gadgets. This is my 10th year visiting the show. I’ve learned the key is to wash your hands every 120 minutes and to avoid touching your eyes and nose. Also, to take the monorail, not the cab line. Get a trailer to write from if you can.

Another key to being at CES as a writer is to avoid worrying about CES’s terrible signal to noise ratio and instead, do something about it. Ignore the bullshit, shoot down the overhyped, and focus on the most interesting. If a writer complains about CES and writes 40 posts about it, it’s a little hypocritical, no?

The last key is to enjoy Las Vegas with people you only get to see once a year and get into a healthy amount of trouble. Living a fun life and escaping the news machine will give any reporter the time and perspective to think a bit more about what’s real in all the manufactured news, in a manufactured show, in a manufactured town filled with mirage. If a writer can do that, they can avoid being part of the problem and get the space to think and write at the pace of a human, not at the pace of a robot.

Quiet is cool.