Even smaller than nanoparticles, quantum dots may represent the next frontier in ultra-miniature electronics. Now they’re actually finding their way into commercial products, starting with a new line of Bravia televisions from Sony.

Sony announced the new line of TVs at CES 2013 earlier this month, touting the quantum dots’ capability to display a far wider color gamut than other LCD televisions. That means the TVs’ pixels can render a wider range of the spectrum, delivering richer greens, reds, and other colors.

The quantum dots are part of a component called Color IQ, made by QD Vision, a quantum technology company. It’s the first appearance of quantum dots, which were only discovered in 1981, in consumer electronics. Color IQ is a polymer film that contains quantum dots that help change the colors of light waves passing through them.

Quantum dots are very tiny semiconducting crystals, about 10 nanometers in diameter. They are so tiny that their size actually affects their electrical characteristics, giving them some unusual properties. In this case, dots within the Color IQ film transform blue light (from a blue backlight) into red light and green light.

Using a blue backlight and the quantum dot film gives purer pixel colors for red, blue, and green than ordinary LCDs, which use white backlights. The result is a wider range of colors.

Science journal Nature has an interesting article on the properties of quantum dots for electronics, solar cells, and other applications.

QD Vision is based in Lexington, Mass., and has raised more than $55 million from North Bridge Venture Partners, Highland Capital Partners, DTE Energy Ventures, In-Q-Tel, Passport Capital, Novus Energy Partners, and Capricorn Investment Group.

It competes with Palo Alto, Calif.-based Nanosys, which VentureBeat last covered in November, when it raised a $15 million sixth round of funding from unnamed sources.

Source: Dean Takahashi/VentureBeat

Judy Chen showed how your phone can be wired into your car display, which can mirror the image on the phone.

A lot of mobile apps could be useful in your car, but most vehicles don’t have the equipment to deliver them to you safely and easily. But the MHL consortium has begun a push to embed the proper wiring in cars so you can connect your Android smartphone or tablet to the display in your car.

The new adapters in cars are part of a trend to make your vehicle into an electronic haven.

Hyundai, JVC-Kenwood, and Pioneer showed off working versions of the connectors at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Hyundai showed how an Android smartphone could connect via a micro-USB connector on a phone to a HDMI port in a new Hyundai automobile (pictured right). That enabled a driver to access mobile apps on the touchscreen display in the car.

With a larger display, it becomes a lot easier to control an app, such as a navigation program. You can also operate the app at high speed and with outstanding visual quality, as MHL supports 1080p video transfer and eight channels of digital audio. You can also charge your phone through the connector. The car display functions as a second screen for the mobile device. What is cool is that you can control the smart device by touching the car display, which sends commands back to the smart device instantaneously.

The MHL technology fit right in with the 2014 model of the Hyundai Genesis sedan, which has a fancy car infotainment system with Bluetooth 3.0, a full set of digital audio services (Gracenote, Pandora, Sirius XM radio, and HD radio). It has a 9.2-inch screen and uses face-recognition technology to identify you when you get into the driver’s seat. It has a BlueLink system that allows you to hook the MHL-enabled device into the car’s display.

“We have a lot of momentum in the automotive market,” said Judy Chen (pictured), the president of the MHL consortium, as we walked around the automotive section of the CES show floor. “It makes sense because your smartphone will have a lot more computing power than the computer in the car, which you won’t be replacing every year.”

The car maker filters programs through Hyundai’s certified app, which uses “driver assist” technology. That means it will not allow you to view certain kinds of apps, like movies or games, while the car is driving. You can, however, access those apps while the car transmission is in park. This adapter technology will allow you to use many more apps than simply the ones that a car maker might build into a navigation unit.

“You can’t just run any app because of safety issues,” Chen said. “And you can’t have any lag. If you are driving a car and you’re having trouble reading your screen or touching your screen, then you have a real safety problem. This is nice because it is instantaneous. You can use voice commands as well.”

Silicon Image created the original cable, which has now been broadly adopted. Sunnyvale, Calif.-based MHL was founded in 2010 by Nokia, Samsung, Silicon Image, Sony, and Toshiba. Their aim was to create a standard for audio and video connectivity for mobile devices. You can use MHL to plug your smartphone into a big-screen TV so you can watch your mobile content on a big display and charge your phone at the same time. The MHL connector has five pins, with five separate wires, that allow it to deliver data without delays. It can provide 900 milliamps of power back to the mobile device.

Hyundai plans to introduce the MHL (which stands for Mobile High-Definition Link) capability in upcoming models of cars. JVC-Kenwood and Pioneer showed MHL working with aftermarket stereo equipment at CES. BMW has also adopted MHL, but it hasn’t described what it will do with it yet.

MHL is gathering momentum, Chen said. The installed base to date is more than 220 million products and 180 participating companies. In the past year, the industry released the first MHL-enabled digital video recorders, Blu-ray players, laptop docks, PC monitors and projectors.

“Next-generation infotainment is extremely important to Hyundai, and MHL technology’s high-performance solution paves the road to integrate tomorrow’s mobile technologies into today’s cars,” said Michael O’Brien, vice president of product and corporate planning at Hyundai Motor America.

Some of the high-profile MHL-enabled products include the Samsung Galaxy S3, The Samsung Galaxy Note, HTC One X, Sony Xperia T, Pioneer AppRadio 2, Roku media streaming stick, and the ClamBook.

For now, those devices will simply mirror their screens on the car screen. But over time, MHL will like head in the direction of enabling other applications, such as embedding a mobile screen within a sector of the larger screen.

Sensors were the backbone of so many products at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. You could argue, then, that making them smaller, cheaper, and better are lynchpins for the consumer-electronics ecosystem. And PrimeSense hopes to lead the way by making 3D sensing devices that are more efficient, affordable, and smaller.

PrimeSense made the 3D-depth camera sensor chips in Microsoft’s Kinect motion-sensing system for the Xbox 360 in 2010. That became a huge hit, but now PrimeSense’s next-generation 3D sensors, dubbed Capri, can fit into devices that are 10 times smaller than the current generation of 3D-sensor devices. Capri is so tiny that the finished board is smaller than a stick of chewing gum (pictured left).

“It’s the world’s smallest 3D sensing device,” said Inon Beracha (pictured), chief executive of Tel Aviv-based PrimeSense, in an interview with VentureBeat. “Our second-generation product is going to be embedded in many more devices, from TVs to monitors.”

The new sensor works like the previous one, sensing both depth and color in a three-dimensional space. It can identify people and their body properties, movements, and gestures. It can distinguish objects such as furniture and sense the location of the walls and floor. It uses near-infrared light, which is invisible to the human eye. It sends the light out and then uses an image sensor to read the light that returns from the 3D space to the camera.

With Capri, PrimeSense used more advanced manufacturing technology to make the chip smaller, and it improved its algorithms, which include multi-modal 3D sensing. The middleware, or the software that interprets the 3D sensing data, used to run on a powerful computer or game console. Now the processing takes place on the tiny ARM-based processor on the Capri board.

“It’s going to be much easier to embed machine vision in everyday consumer devices,” Beracha said.

The new generation will work at both short ranges or long ranges, as needed. PrimeSense will take that chip, mount it on a small board and sell it for applications in consumer electronics devices such as PCs, all–in-one PCs, tablets, laptops, mobile phones, TVs, consumer robotics, and more. Samples will be ready by mid-2013. The sensing performance of the device is as accurate as Kinect’s is in controlling 3D games.

Beracha showed off a few applications at CES. In a retail application from Shop Perception, the 3D sensors worked inside store shelves (pictured right). The cameras sensed what objects shoppers reached for on the shelves, how long they inspected them, and whether or not they put them in their shopping carts. Such data generates a lot more analytics information for retailers about a store display and whether it is working or not, Beracha said.

“It makes the shopping experience more interactive and the retailer understands the dynamics of the shelf better,” he said. “It’s much more intelligent than what happens today.”

Another cool application, pictured left, is Matterport. In beta testing, Matterport uses a 3D-scanner camera to sense the dimensions of a room. You can then upload the images to the cloud. Matterport’s software then visually recreates a digital model of the interior space of your home. You can explore, measure, and share your space using a Web viewer.

“You can bring something into your home, and see what it looks like before you buy it,” he said. “You can remodel your home, and see what it looks like before you really do it.”

Beracha also showed how shopping malls could use 3D sensors in mall directories. You can swipe your hand to change an image on a screen and then engage with it as a touchscreen. He also showed an application (pictured right) from Ayotle, which is making an interactive video projector. You can insert your own image into a two-dimensional projected image and play around with it, as a kind of a work of art.

For sure, some of these might be stretching the use of 3D sensors beyond practicality. But they’re imaginative. And, Beracha says, they’re increasingly affordable.

In between the miles of booths at the Consumer Electronics Show, we stopped at the Gaming Summit to listen to a Q&A between Rick Thompson, the gaming investor who co-founded Playdom, and Michael Vorhaus, the managing director of Frank N. Magid Associates research firm. Thompson has had great successes as a tech investor, most recently selling Playdom to Disney for up to $763.2 million in 2010.

He left Playdom in August, 2011. Since that time, Thompson has funded the next generation of game companies, including mobile-gaming firm Funzio, which Gree bought last year for $210 million. He has also invested in Wild Needle (acquired by Zynga for $3.8 million), Idle Games, Red Robot Labs, Grand Cru, Rumble Entertainment, Project Slice, Fun+, Airy Labs, Noise Toys, Viki, Social Shield, Udemy, Triangulate, AdChina, and Iddiction. That probably makes him one of the most active investors in games to date. He serves on the advisory board and is a general partner of Signia Venture Partners.

In his interview with Vorhaus, Thompson wasn’t shy. He said that Mark Pincus, the chief executive of Zynga, should give up his supervoting rights that give him control of the social-gaming company. If Pincus does so, said Thompson, Zynga’s stock price would double overnight. Thompson has had the luck of being at the right place at the right time. At Playdom, his team built Mobsters with six people in a week. Within a month, the game was generating $4 million a month.

Here’s an edited transcript of the interview between Vorhaus and Thompson.

Mike Vorhaus: Rick has been spectacularly successful, the founder of many companies with total exits well in excess of $5 billion. Flycast a lot of us remember from the 2000 period, $2 billion dollars there. One of the earliest engineers at Octel, a $2 billion dollar exit. Playdom, which we all know about. Adify, which some of you know about, a statistical ad network. Funzio is Rick’s most recent well-acknowledged success.

I will tell you that Rick does find time for other hobbies. Sometimes for a stand-up paddle board, which reflects the excellent shape Rick is in. He’s a remarkable poker player. Do not play poker against Rick Thompson. So, Rick, how the hell did you get into this whole world? How does a University of California Santa Cruz guy become the founder and entrepreneur of $5 billion worth of companies?

Rick Thompson: How did I get into investing? I remember my first investment. I was 10-years-old. Space was a new thing, the new frontier. I invested in a company called Rocket Research. I saw it double in the course of about six months, and I was hooked.

I’ve always had an interest in the markets and the idea of investing. To me, it has some of the same properties of gambling if you will. Making smart bets. But I didn’t get into investing in private companies until I was an early employee at a successful startup. Even though I was employee number three, I didn’t get a lot of options. I started buying options from departing employees and ended up doing fairly well acquiring secondary shares. Obviously, I didn’t have a lot of capital to work with.

My career path was as an entrepreneur. I identified a new platform — a growing market — online advertising, in 1995. Started a company there. Had an exit and had some capital to work with. I started doing some social investing, I would say, investing alongside some friends angel-style. But I still considered myself an entrepreneur. I started up another company, Adify, in 2005. It was at that point I realized that I liked the early-stage startup process. If I spent my time around fundraising and investing, I could also bring capital to the table. Adify was an instance where it was self-financed by the founders. We got follow-on financing.

As a man approaching the middle 50s with a four-year vest, I wasn’t going to get that many new startup opportunities if I did it serially. I started working with really good teams, investing in them. Sometimes bringing the ideas, sometimes investing in their ideas. Helping with capital formation as a founder but not having an investing schedule. That led to a model that we’re now calling the founder-investor model, where we’ll take oftentimes a percentage of the common, provide some debt financing to the company, and be part of that early stage.

Vorhaus: Founder-funder, I’ve heard you say.

Thompson: Yeah. We’re struggling a bit with the name, but we’ve actually settled on founder-investor.

Vorhaus: Are you a super angel?

Thompson: No, not a super angel. Super angels are super because they do lots of deals — very high velocity — putting in fairly small check sizes. $100,000 to $250,000 dollars in maybe 50 or 60 companies a year.

Vorhaus: Why games? Adify was an ad network. Flycast was advertising infrastructure. But you’ve been in quite a few game companies – six or seven in your portfolio.

Thompson: I didn’t intentionally start out as a games investor. I found myself as one. I invested in a company that was doing applications on the Facebook platform. It was a young, pragmatic team. We looked around and saw what was working. It was pretty clear that there was a big opportunity in games. We had 200 million free users. They wanted games.

We spent one week building a game called Mobsters with six people. We were earning $4 million a month within a week of launch. I found myself in the games business. I gained some insights. My background was online advertising, so I understood customer acquisition, which was a big advantage on Facebook in 2008. As a founder-investor, I didn’t have an investing schedule. I was chairman of the company, but I was also free to invest in other gaming companies.

Vorhaus: Are you a gamer at all? Do you play any games yourself?

Thompson: I play chess. I play poker. My partner Dan Fiden taught me how to play craps last night. I like board games a lot.

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Intel posted better-than-expected earnings for the fourth quarter ended Dec. 31, as PC sales weren’t as weak as forecast and server chip sales were strong.

Analysts were expecting a consensus of 45 cents a share in the fourth quarter, down 30 percent from 64 cents a share a year ago. Those analysts expected revenue to fall 0.9 percent year-over-year to $13.76 billion for the quarter, compared to $13.89 billion a year ago. Intel posted earnings per share of 48 cents a share and revenues of $13.5 billion. So the earnings were better while revenues matched expectations.

Intel’s earnings are closely watched as a bellwether for the computer industry’s health as well as the overall tech industry. But like Microsoft, Intel is heavily weighted on chips for PCs, even as market demand shifts to smartphones and tablets. While those latter sectors are growing, PCs are believed to have fallen 5 percent in unit sales in the fourth quarter, according to market research firm Gartner. In after hours trading, Intel’s stock is up slightly 0.18 percent at $22.70 a share.

“The fourth quarter played out largely as expected as we continued to execute through a challenging environment,” said Intel president and chief executive Paul Otellini in a statement. “We made tremendous progress across the business in 2012 as we entered the market for smartphones and tablets, worked with our partners to reinvent the PC, and drove continued innovation and growth in the data center. As we enter 2013, our strong product pipeline has us well positioned to bring a new wave of Intel innovations across the spectrum of computing.”

Intel’s PC Client Group had revenue of $8.5 billion, down 1.5 percent from the previous quarter and down 6 percent from a year ago. Data Center Group revenue was $2.8 billion, up 7 percent sequentially and up 4 percent from a year ago. Other revenue was $1 billion, down 14 percent sequentially and down 7 percent from a year ago. Research and development and general sales and marketing spending was $4.6 billion, in line with the expectation of $4.5 billion. Gross margin percentage was 58 percent, 1 percentage point above the expectation of 57 percent.

“This is a good sign that didn’t slide backward in a very challenging market,” said Patrick Moorhead, an analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy. “Enterprise made up for most of the shortfall of PCs. Intel had a good quarter.”

In the first quarter, Intel predicts revenue of $12.7 billion, 58 percent gross margins, and R&D and MG&A spending of $4.6 billion.

For the full year, Intel’s PC Client Group revenue was $34.3 billion, down 3 percent. Data Center Group revenue was $10.7 billion, up 6 percent. Other revenue was $4.4 billion, down 13 percent.

For the full year, Intel expects low single-digit revenue increases. Gross margin percentage is expected to be 60 percent, plus or minus a few points. R&D and MG&A is expected to be $18.9 billion, plus or minus $200 million. Capita spending for 2013 is expected to be $13 billion, plus or minus $500 million.

Intel is shifting to meet mobile device demand. It has created laptop chips that dissipate as little as 7 watts, and its code-named Haswell processor coming mid-year is expected to be even better at power consumption. At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Intel said it was working with seven major vendors of smartphones who have launched Intel-based smartphones in 25 countries. But the revenue from those deals is a drop in the bucket compared to the revenues Intel gets from the PC chip business.

Having looked at designs in the works, Otellini said, “I’m genuinely excited about the new form factors.”

In the past four quarters, Intel’s revenue has been mixed. It fell 5.5 percent in the third quarter, rose 3.6 percent in the second quarter, was flat at 0.5 percent in the first quarter and soared 21.2 percent in the fourth quarter a year ago. Net income fell in each of the last three quarters. In third quarter, net income fell 14.3 percent from the year earlier. Second quarter net income was down 4.3 percent, and first quarter earnings were down 13.4 percent.

The wireless and wired future won’t happen without Broadcom. The company ships more than a billion chips a year for connecting devices in homes and businesses. Its chips are making cars ready for Internet access. They’re enabling faster Wi-Fi. And they’re part of a new home gateway that will allow you to receive 4K Ultra HD video into your home and share it on various screens and devices.

We caught up with Broadcom’s co-founder Henry Samueli, the former engineering professor who is now chief technical officer, at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last week. He told us about new technologies coming down the pipe, such as a compression algorithm dubbed High-Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC), that will allow home networks to transfer 4K video without being overwhelmed with data.

He’s also excited about the transition to faster wireless computer networks, or 5G Wi-Fi, which should allow you to transfer video in the home without crashing your wireless network. But he warns that we’re going to have to pay more for our wireless data services.

Samueli walked the floor and told us what was real and what was still a pipe dream. Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.

VentureBeat: What’s on your agenda here at CES?

Henry Samueli: Well, it’s a big show for Broadcom. This is probably the key trade show we attend every year. Primarily we’re highlighting our broadband products. The company’s split into three groups: broadband, networking, and mobile and wireless. For mobile and wireless, the Mobile World Congress, which is next month, is the main show. Networking is Interop and others. Broadband is our focus at CES.

If you look at the key things going on at the show — and you’ve probably seen a lot of this on the floor besides Broadcom — it’s the whole UltraHD phenomenon. Broadcom just today introduced our BCM7445 (in TV pictured at top), which is a big step forward in set-top box technology. We’re just introducing it now, sampling it. It probably won’t hit the consumer production level until the middle of next year. I’ve walked around the show floor to get a feeling for some of these UltraHD displays, and they’re pretty remarkable.

VB: And the problem is that they generate about four times as much data, I guess?

Samueli: That’s the key. The big advancement in our BCM7445 home gateway chip is that it uses the next-generation compression technology called HEVC — High-Efficiency Video Coding. That cuts the bitrate in half for the same quality. You’ll see it side by side. Even though the bitrate of the 4K by 2K goes up, when you cut that in half, you’re still at a very reasonable bitrate for the carriers.

VB: So it’s about two times, if I get my math right.

Samueli: Right. Exactly.

VB: There’s still the problem of trying to handle twice as much data as they would normally…

Samueli: You’re not going to see a wholesale switch over to all 4K by 2K. It will start with one, two, three, four channels, just like high definition (HD) when it was first introduced. Then there will be more and more. Now, today, most channels are HD. I think it’ll take maybe 10 years before you see a wholesale switch over to UltraHD, but it will happen over time.

The network capacities are expanding. I’m not worried about that. I think you’ll see a nice, gradual shift into UltraHD, especially once the sets come down in price. Today they’re $20,000 dollars or whatever, but as they come down over the next five to 10 years to the same cost as standard full HD today…

VB: Out of curiosity, what will people do when 8K comes along and it’s 16 times as much data? 

Samueli: Same thing. [laughs]

VB: Sharp just introduced one of those.

Samueli: Did you see it?

VB: Not yet, no.

Samueli: Oh, you have to go see it. It’s remarkable. You can stand three inches in front of the screen and still not see the pixels. They’re so tiny. It’ll come along, five years or whatever down the road.

Anyway, probably the hottest thing at the show is the whole UltraHD phenomenon. TV sets are first, but without content, you have nothing. That’s all made-up content you’re seeing on these TVs. The next step is getting the carriers to deliver it, and therefore they need set-top boxes to decode it. That’s where step two comes in. We’re starting to work with the carriers. You’ll probably see the satellite carriers, because they’re more constrained by bandwidth… They want the additional bandwidth reduction of the HEVC. They may even use it on high definition, just to get a lower bitrate.

VB: Is the transition reasonably paced, as far as you can see? Is it going to happen naturally? 

Samueli: Yes. I don’t think it’s unnatural…

VB: When HD came along it was a decades-long process, right?

Samueli: Same thing is going to happen with 4K. It’s really price-driven in the end. The consumer, given the choice of spending $1,000 dollars for a full HD screen or $10,000 dollars for a UltraHD screen, is going to buy the full HD screen. It’ll be five to 10 years before the prices hit those levels. Price regulates the demand and adoption of new technology.

VB: So the 4K technology ecosystem has time to grow up.

Samueli: Exactly. In the 2015 time frame, you’ll probably see more mainstream adoption of set-top box technology using UltraHD. We’ll start shipping it in 2014, but the volume will take off in probably 2015. It’s a slow, natural evolution. There’s no major rush for it. But it’s an exciting transition because it’s a major shift.

We had the hype for 3D TV, which didn’t do too well. I was never a fan. The glasses phenomenon just doesn’t work for me. This is a whole different thing, though. It doesn’t require any glasses. It’s just a better screen. As long as the price is there, people will adopt it.

Another thread that we’re really excited about is the proliferation of wireless everywhere. 5G Wi-Fi in particular. The whole new push to the next generation of Wi-Fi has really opened up new opportunities for media sharing in the house. Older generations of Wi-Fi weren’t quite robust enough to deliver video in the home without breaking up and losing packets and so forth. 5G Wi-Fi gives you extended reach, extended data rates, and more robust coverage. The carriers are now willing to accept Wi-Fi in the set-top box with the 5G Wi-Fi. We’re getting designed in all over the place.

VB: How does 5G Wi-Fi do with 4K video transfer?

Samueli: It should be fine. Again, with double the speed, you’re still okay. If you have a data rate of 10 to 20 megabits per second, you can easily handle that with a 5G Wi-Fi network. It’s not going to be an issue to upgrade video distribution to 5G Wi-Fi. But the devices now are all adopting the software protocols to allow that, like Miracast, which is the Wi-Fi protocol that lets you have peer-to-peer from your phone direct to your TV. You can plug in a little USB dongle to your TV set with a Wi-Fi chip on it that’s enabled with the Miracast software. Then, if your phone has Miracast — which all the latest-generation phones will — you could be watching YouTube on the phone, you hit the button, and boom, it’s showing on your TV set. Media sharing in the house is going to be a big thing going forward for the next few years. We’re proliferating our Wi-Fi technology everywhere. It’s going into thermostats, home appliances, you name it.

VB: For a while, it seems like we’ve had a wireless logjam. Not only in the house with Wi-Fi, but also with mobile data networks. Are you optimistic that these things are going away, that we’re going to be able to do these things as fast as we can on the wired internet? 

Samueli: I think it’s getting pretty close to wired internet speeds. If you look in your home today, gigabit is the maximum speed you could expect to get. With 5G Wi-Fi you can get to gigabit speeds. We just introduced new MoCA technology, which is home networking over the coax cable that already connects up your TVs. We have a demo here of a gigabit MoCA. So we have gigabit Wi-Fi, gigabit MoCA, gigabit ethernet. Powerline is getting close to a gigabit.

VB: And then everybody uploads some 4K video to YouTube and clogs it all up again. 

Samueli: Right. [laughs] Once you have the bandwidth, people will find something. The quality of the streaming will go up. Right now YouTube is fairly low resolution, but as you start watching it on a 60-inch TV instead of your phone, you’re going to want higher resolution and you’ll need a higher-bitrate YouTube. You’ll need the 5G Wi-Fi technology to handle that.

It’s an endless cycle. You get more bandwidth in the home. You get more quality video, which demands more bandwidth, which demands more quality. It never ends. But I think that with gigabit home networking, you’ve got enough bandwidth to handle pretty much all the needs you want for a family all watching independent HD video streams, or even UltraHD quality.

VB: I have to carry around a MiFi now. I’m not happy that a larger percentage of my household income is going towards getting bandwidth in some way. [laughs]

Samueli: That’s the other issue, the economics of it. People are going to start demanding gigabit services from their carriers, and that’s not free. They’re going to charge you for more bandwidth. That may be the regulating phenomenon. Just like how the cost of the flatscreen regulates how many people adopt it, the cost of bandwidth to your house could regulate how much you’re willing to use.

VB: What trend do you think will win out there? Is bandwidth going to get more expensive, or thanks to folks like Google, is it going to be free?

Samueli: No. Fundamentally, bandwidth is not cheap. You have to install a lot of infrastructure. It’s not obvious that the Google model will scale nationally. They can wire up a city to test it, but to wire up a country is expensive. It’s not clear that you can give away the service for free and build a business model out of that. We’ll see. Maybe they can.

VB: If we do a lot more Google searches…

Samueli: [laughs] Exactly. If you can get enough advertising in there, you might be able to do it. At least in the short-term, the mainstream carriers will likely have to charge more for more bandwidth.

VB: Is all of your mathematics done, or do you have other challenges ahead? 

Samueli: There are always challenges. Every technology has a next generation, even on the mobile side. You have LTE (Long-Term Evolution), but there are five different flavors of LTE going forward. The first generation of LTE was introduced with 75 megabits per second. It was called Category 3. Then Category 4 is now 150 megabits per second, which I think is in the iPhone 5. Then you go to Category 6 with 300 megabits. Then you’ll have a 600 megabit LTE. LTE is going to keep increasing in data rates, which means you have to have more sophisticated chips inside the phones to process the signals. Then the cable modem speeds are going to continue to go up. It’s endless. Our guys are always inventing new algorithms and new signal processing techniques to figure out how to get more bandwidth through the same airwaves and the same wires. There’s still more mathematics to be evolved before we’re done, if we’re ever done. I don’t know if we’ll ever be done.

VB: [OnLive founder] Steve Perlman had an interesting talk about DIDO — Distributed In, Distributed Out. It was a way to get around the limitations of Shannon’s Law by basically figuring out where somebody was and directing wireless signals to them, so that they could — in a given cell site area — get the full bandwidth available in that area. Rather than splitting it up with 100 other people, you all get 25 megabits a second. 

Samueli: Yeah, yeah. That goes by many names. MIMO is a more common name for it, but it’s basically the same thing, where you have multiple antennas in both your handset and especially in the base station. You could put a whole array of antennas in the base station and steer the beam to a very narrow target, right to the person you want it to go to. If 10 people are around, you have 10 independent beams being steered, each with its own dedicated bandwidth.

That technology, or at least the systems algorithms, is worked out and well known. It’ll eventually get into the cellular network. It’s probably going to take a decade or so, but I think we’ll get there. Even in our access points today, we do some beam steering technology. Our 3×3 11AC access points have beam forming technology where you can steer the beam towards the client and increase throughput. It’s very sophisticated technology.

VB: Why might that take a decade, that part?

Samueli: You have to upgrade all of the cellular infrastructure to accommodate that. New base stations. That’s a slow process. People know how to do it, but it’s a matter of deploying it. That’s not easily done.

The nostalgia factor is a great way to market technology, now that many people who grew up in the computer age are getting older. That might be the thinking behind the “antique phonograph” LS-RO2 that Zhonghao Digital showed off in its booth at last week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

This device has a real LP turntable and is crafted with real wood. But it can play multiple kinds of media, including vinyl records, AM/FM radio, compact discs, and music stored on a USB flash drive. The company’s brochure says, “excellent musical notes make your heart relax.” It goes on, “touching melody, abundant tone, strong flavour of romantic, all can bring you the completely fresh experience, and make the heart clean.”

We didn’t make that up. On the flip side of the brochure, it says, “Indulge in the old memory, follow up the music to rearch [sic] the passing feeling, evoking the moment from your deep spirit with music!”

Arriving this March, Tomb Raider is a huge reboot of the Lara Croft franchise coming from Square Enix’s Eidos Montreal division. So far, it looks like a monumental single-player narrative, told from the perspective of the young Lara Croft before she became a “tomb raider.” But until now, we’ve heard very little about the multiplayer side of the game. And this multiplayer won’t be like Call of Duty by any means. It will be something that fits the world of Tomb Raider.

Joe Khoury, the producer on the multiplayer version of Tomb Raider from Eidos Montreal, told GamesBeat that for a time, nobody was convinced that the game should have multiplayer. After all, we can’t all be Lara at the same time. But Khoury’s team dissected the challenge and found it was doable.

The game takes place on an island. The survivors of Lara’s shipwreck include a bunch of friends, and they enter into the conflict with scavengers and other bad guys. That became the foundation of the two opposing teams in multiplayer battles. On top of that, the environment of the island itself is dangerous, adding complexity to battles. It would serve as a great arena, said Khoury.

“We wanted to do multiplayer and do it well,” he said. “As fans, what we saw in Tomb Raider had so much heart in it that we had to do something we believed in. As we played single-player, we saw a lot of elements that contributed to multiplayer. With these pillars, we found we could build something that made sense.”

Darrell Gallagher, the head of the studio at Crystal Dynamics, which made the single-player game, said that multiplayer modes were developed with survival in mind. That makes it a good complement to the campaign, where Lara’s survival is key to the development of the story. The modes can pit four Lara friends against four survivors. With such a small number of players, the team-based combat resembles Gears of War multiplayer.

Each map has what Khoury calls a “game changer,” or an event that can be triggered by players. The result is so big that it can change the course of a multiplayer match. In the “Chasm” map that I played, for instance, one side could trigger a sandstorm that could hurt the other side. The team that triggers the storm can still see the outlines of enemies and friends, but the other team will be blinded as the sand sweeps through the arena. As many as four players can square off against another four players in multiplayer.

Tomb Raider debuts on March 5 for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and Microsoft Windows. It will be rated mature. (We’ll have our own hands-on report on multiplayer gameplay later).

Here’s a video interview with Khoury and Gallagher that we shot after playing a round of multiplayer combat.

It’s easy to touch the wrong part of a tablet, particularly when the device’s glass goes all the way to the tablet’s edge. So Synaptics, the touch-feedback sensor company, has created a technology called Sensa that deals with that.

The Sensa technology embeds a touchscreen in the back of a tablet so that it can detect which hand you are using to grip the tablet. Then if your grip hand’s thumb touches the other side of the tablet on the glass, Sensa won’t count that as an intentional thumb touch. That enables you to hold a tablet without making its controls go haywire. You can then tap the screen with your other hand to start intentional commands.

Sensa also does something that is pretty smart. If your thumb is pressed against the glass, it senses that. It then wraps text for an eBook around your thumb so that you can still see the text in question. Sensa is a way that devices with edge-to-edge glass should become more usable.

Synaptics’ Andrew Hsu told us that this proof-of-concept is still very early point in its development, as you can see from the video below. Hsu gave us a demo at the Digital Experience party at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last week, and he expects bezels on tablets will shrink more in the future.

Check out our demo from Hsu in the video below.

If you’re lucky and know where to look, you can see the future in Las Vegas in January. Every year, hundreds of thousands of people clog Las Vegas for an annual orgy of electronic gadgets known as the Consumer Electronics Show. It’s crowded, noisy, and so flooded with TV screens, B-list celebrities, and sparkly cellphone cases that it’s hard to find any real innovation.

But one thing the show is good for is showing the patterns of the tech world over time. A trend begins at one show, and it becomes stronger at the next. Or it fizzles out. This year, LG said more than 70 percent of its TVs connect to the Internet, compared to about 50 percent last year.

You could say that such patterns make CES a cavalcade of copycats who can’t teach you anything. But part of the definition of innovation is building on what others have done before you. CES can help you figure out what’s cool enough to be worth copying. Google’s Project Glass, for example, isn’t a trend yet because nobody is copying the web-connected eyewear, which debuts next year.

If anything, CES gives you perspective on what is working. More than 3,250 exhibitors showed products across a record 1.92 million square feet of exhibits. Looking at those exhibits gives you a glimpse of the future and what should go on sale in the coming months.

We took a couple of stabs at this last year, for CES 2012, once before the show, and once after. We didn’t do so great with a prediction that ultrabooks would breathe new life into laptops. But the two-screen experience materialized in a big way in 2012 as companies linked smartphones, tablets and smart TVs.

And for an even longer perspective, you can go back two years to read our top trends of CES 2011.

Here’s our list of the top 10 trends of CES 2013. Please vote for your favorite in the poll at the bottom.

The mobile generation has become the biggest target audience

When Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer gave up the opening keynote to Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs, it was the changing of the guard. Jacobs had a memorable keynote because it was ridiculed so much, but his theme of “born mobile” was genuine enough. A whole generation of kids are growing up untethered from computers and hooked to their mobile phones instead. They are embracing not just one platform but many. As clumsy and laughable as Qualcomm’s keynote was, it got the basic trend right.

After all, Qualcomm has sold more than 11 billion chips for mobile devices over 27 years. And mobile is leading the way. U.S. homes now have 1.4 tablets per household, compared to 1.2 a year ago. We spend 130 minutes a day with smartphones and tablets, compared to 170 minutes a day watching TV. Expect that to flip. In the U.S., about 44 percent of homes have tablets, up from 1 percent in July 2010. Smartphones are in about 55 percent of homes, compared to 36 percent in July 2010. Jacobs said that 84 percent of people worldwide can’t go a day without using a mobile device. We look at our phones 150 times a day.

Shawn Dubravac, a senior analyst at the Consumer Electronics Association, refers to consumers as “digital omnivores.” This generation isn’t picky. It loves anything tech that works and gets the job done. If you target this mobile market, you have a potential audience of billions, several times larger than the PC audience. This year, larger numbers of companies came to the show knowing that. Next year, they’ll call it the Mobile Consumer Electronics Show. – Dean Takahashi

Fitness and health tech get real

In the cavernous South Hall of the Las Vegas Convention Center, three exhibitor regions were clustered together: the Fitness Tech Zone, the Digital Health Zone, and Gaming. Some companies belonged in all three. The show space in Digital Health was up 25 percent from a year ago.

Last year, the realm of fitness counters was the domain of startups. But bigger companies are getting in on the act. The health insurance giant United Healthcare had a “fitness gaming” exhibit where people played Dance Dance Revolution. Clearly, if people are more fit, the health insurance company’s costs go down. Companies with new offerings in fitness gadgets included Fitbit, Withings, BodyMedia, Basis Science, and Hapilabs (maker of the goofy but intriguing Hapi Fork). They were joined by the likes of Bosch, Nike, and others. HealthSpot introduced an interesting Telehealth Kiosk, which takes your vital signs and then allows you to consult with a doctor via remote consultation.

Ariana Huffington, the creator of the Huffington Post, moderated a session with Reed Tuckson of United Healthcare on “The Human Body: The Next Digital Revolution.” That must be a sign that digital health and fitness tech are revving up a hype cycle that could come crashing down. But we’ll bet that the square footage around these trends will be bigger at next year’s show. My own Striiv step-counting app showed I walked about 31 miles at CES across five days. – Dean Takahashi

The user interface is you

CEA analyst Shawn Dubravac also predicted before the show that gesture and voice will join touch as new ways to control devices. New technologies based on gestures and voice are coming from the likes of General Motors, Texas Instruments, Intel, and Nuance. Those controls will be useful in cars, and it is no accident that there are more car makers than ever coming to CES, Dubravac said.

“Over the next 36 months, we will see fundamental changes in voice control and gestures as well,” Dubravac said.

At Intel’s press event, Tobii showed off its “eye recognition” technology, where it would detect whether you spotted Waldo in a Where’s Waldo puzzle image. Meanwhile, Samsung included voice recognition in its smart TVs. And PrimeSense, the maker of the depth camera technology used in Microsoft’s Kinect (the motion-sensing system for the Xbox 360), demonstrated further uses of 3D sensing technology, including sensing what objects consumers inspect on grocery store shelves. Movea, in a demo pictured above, showed how sensors on a dancer could be translated into an entertaining digital animation in real time.

Intel calls this trend “perceptual computing,” and it wants to mash-up all of the input technologies into computers to improve things such as device security. Microsoft’s slogan for Kinect, “You are the controller,” is looking better every day. – Dean Takahashi

3D glasses are undead

LG had perhaps the prettiest booth with scores of big-screen 3D TVs chained together in a giant screen. And Nvidia had showed off its 3DVision goggles for gaming. But all mention of 3D was curiously absent from the lips of the many executives who touted it in years past. Some companies are still working on glasses-free 3D TVs. But the computing power required to produce a separate image for every viewing angle is a huge obstacle to doing glasses-free 3D right. That computing power is better used producing better images. That’s why 4K Ultra HD TVs were hot this year.

3D was a fad aimed at stopping movie piracy or pumping up the box office receipts. 3D made an appearance as a zombie trend, or something that just won’t die, for a few years. TV makers may include it for free in a last-ditch attempt to keep it alive.  But market penetration of 3D TVs topped out at maybe 20 percent or 30 percent. Judging from CES 2013, that market share is going to drop dramatically this year. – Dean Takahashi

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You’ve seen what we loved at CES last week, as well as some of the weirdest news out of the event. Now here’s a choice selection of the very worst of CES 2013.

Huawei’s Ascend Mate destroys all logic

In the quest to make smartphones ever-bigger, Huawei now reigns supreme. That’s not exactly a good thing. The Chinese company debuted the 6.1-inch Ascend Mate at the show, putting it firmly between Samsung’s already big Galaxy Note line and 7-inch tablets.

The impracticality of the Ascend Mate trumps the slight convenience of a bigger screen: It’s too big to fit in most pockets, almost impossible to use one-handed, and it looks completely ridiculous when you actually try to use it as a phone. There’s a point where we have to say “no more!” when it comes to increasingly larger smartphones, and I believe the Huawei Ascend Mate is it. – Devindra Hardawar

The big players hold back

This was a surprisingly weak year for major device announcements from big companies like Microsoft and Sony. Most companies now hold their own events for smartphone and tablet launches, since it allows them to control the news, instead of fighting for attention at CES. Many are also waiting until Mobile World Congress next month to show off their new mobile gadgets. It could be that we’re also seeing a drought of new devices after the tablet and smartphone gold rush of the past few years.

Whatever the reason, the door seems wide open for smaller companies to make a splash at CES in the future. Just look how much of an impact Nvidia and Qualcomm were able to make at the show. — Devindra Hardawar

Sony and Microsoft had nothing to say on the console front, as they’re waiting for E3 in June to make a splash with the game audience. On top of that, Microsoft had very little to say about where the Windows 8 ecosystem is going after its underwhelming launch in the fall. This foot-dragging by industry leaders is giving opportunity to startups and usurpers. But those companies won’t have the muscle to push aside their rivals. For consumers, that means they’ll have to wait longer for innovation. — Dean Takahashi

Source: Hyper Drive's Instagram

Hyper Drive proudly posted pics of its booth babes on Instagram.

The booth babes

It’s 2013 and we’re still dealing with companies showing off scantily clad ladies to hype their wares. You could say it’s just Vegas, but of course that would be a lie. “Booth babes” are a staple of pretty much every major tradeshow, especially when they involve tech like games and cars. But it seems more than a little anachronistic today when we’re having serious and important discussions about gender equality in the tech industry.

The storage company Hyper Drive was one of the worst offenders. Its booth featured women wearing practically nothing except underwear and body paint, with all the agency of a statue. Sexual objectification ahoy!

Just look at the storm VentureBeat’s Jolie O’Dell whipped up when she (rightly) lambasted a sexist CES ad campaign. That post ended up sparking the #notbuyingit hashtag, which sadly applied to quite a few companies at CES. — Devindra Hardawar

4K Ultra HD TVs swing … and miss

4K Ultra HD TVs were introduced by nearly every major consumer electronics vendor at the show. But the innovations were all too similar. Each vendor had similar (huge) screen sizes, since they source their screens from many of the same vendors. Nobody spoke about price tags, but $10,000 for a 55-inch 4K screen sounds like a typical figure.

The big problem is that the 4K ecosystem is very weak. Hollywood-style support in the form of movies is going to be slow in coming. That lack of content support is similar to the debacle around 3D TVs and the 3D glasses needed to watch them, when consumer electronics manufacturers tried to push a technology that consumers didn’t want. There isn’t a great way to get 4K video content into the home and distributed around the house. 4K looks better than the usual HDTV, for sure, but the manufacturers better bring down the prices and make the systems more useful and differentiated. – Dean Takahashi

As a movie lover, I’m enamored with the idea of getting an even bigger TV with a crazy-high resolution. But Dean’s point still stands — right now we’re just seeing nice TVs, not the content ecosystem to support it. There’s no new disc-based format on the horizon to support huge 4K files, and we’ll need to see major advances in streaming compression (not to mention home Internet speeds) to see a 4K version of Netflix’s streaming.

The practicality of 4K TVs is also a problem. You’ll need at least an 80-inch set to see the difference between 4K and today’s 1080p HD, which makes the format all but useless for people who can’t fit giant screens or a projector into their home.– Devindra Hardawar

PowerA made its appearance at the Consumer Electronics Show to prove that even I can hit targets with its new Moga Pro game controller for mobile devices.

The device is one of many that will enable you to enjoy free-to-play Android games with a traditional console-style controller, rather than the touchscreen on your smartphone or tablet. Thus, it is one of the many new devices that will aid smartphones and tablets in their attempt to dethrone dedicated game consoles and portable game controllers. Controllers were once simple devices, but now they are pawns in the larger war among Google, Apple, and the traditional console makers Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony.

The Woodinville, Wash.-based company launched its Moga controller for mobile-gaming devices last fall in 7,000 stores at a price of $50. Now, it has come up with a controller that resembles a traditional gamepad. We got a hands-on demo with JJ Richards, divisional vice president at PowerA.

“I’m having a console experience wherever I go,” said Richards, as he played the Android zombie-shooting title Dead Trigger.

The original Moga was smaller than a typical console controller and featured a much different look because PowerA designed it for pocket portability. But the new controller looks just like one for an Xbox 360 system. The original version had compromises, such as no shoulder buttons, no D-pad, and low-profile sticks. It worked with AA batteries.

“The next generation has no compromises,” Richards said. “It gives you comfort and familiarity, making it feel like a console.”

With a Moga Pro, you can play a mobile release on an Android device using a Bluetooth connection to the smartphone or tablet. The Moga Pro has full-sized console-style grips, precision dual analog sticks, four action buttons, a directional pad, two shoulder buttons, two shoulder triggers, and a tablet stand. You can size the phone stand (attached to the middle of the controller) or the tablet stand to fit any screen. If you play with a tablet, you definitely want to put it on a stand.

Moga Pro will be available in the spring. Pricing details are forthcoming. Gameloft, Rockstar, SkyVu Entertainment, Madfinger Games, Namco Bandai, Sega, Arb Studios, Vector Unit, and others have developed titles that make use of the first Moga controller. The Moga system supports Android 2.3 and higher. It has an HDMI port that allows you to display games on a TV.

Moga Pro will compete with Nvidia’s Project Shield, which combines a traditional controller with a 5-inch touchscreen portable gaming device. But Richards said, “It’s not like there will only be one device or one way of doing things. More energy for this space is cool.” Other rivals include the GameSmart devices coming from Mad Catz Interactive.

Check out the Moga Pro video below.

Motion sickness is the curse of virtual reality. When you wear a virtual-reality headset and the screen’s doesn’t match your body’s movement, it can make you feel sick — to the point of throwing up. But Oculus VR, a virtual-reality headset maker founded by Palmer Luckey, is launching a new headset sometime soon that it promises will make VR into an immersive and entertaining experience.

We tried out the latest Oculus Rift VR headset at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Our time with the device impressed us, and we didn’t leave any green goo on the ballroom floor of the Digital Experience party at the MGM Grand Hotel. Brendan Iribe (pictured), chief executive of Oculus VR, showed me a demo of the headset, which received funding via a $2.4 million Kickstarter crowdfunding project. The headset we used is a prototype and, after a few months delay, the final headset should ship in March.

“This is day zero of VR gaming,” Iribe said. “For the first time, it’s good enough so that you won’t want to kill yourself when you’re wearing it.”

This one already works great. The bulky goggles felt light on my head, and the images covering my eyes immersed me inside a gaming world. When I moved my head, the images changed rapidly enough to match what I would see if I turned my head in normal life. I walked around inside the Citadel demo, which depicts a medieval village built with Epic Games’ Unreal Engine. I experienced no lag between my movements and the changing imagery, so I didn’t get motion sickness. It was full stereo 3D, covering both of my eyes.

I could turn my head any direction I wanted, with a field of view of 110 degrees diagonal and 90 degrees horizontal. The resolution is 1280 x 800 (or 640 x 800 per eye), which is good but not spectacular. The Unreal Engine 3 graphics were good but flawed. The snowflakes had real shape to them, but they looked kind of fake as I could see through them. So it will take considerably better 3D graphics to convince you that what you’re seeing is real life.

But the interaction was great. I could shoot a little green spark at objects in the scenery, and it was instantaneous and accurate. If I turned my head too fast, I could see a blur in the environment. Future improvements will fix the effect, Iribe said. The screen itself added 15 milliseconds of delay. The motion sensor has a 2 millisecond latency, or delay between interactions.

“In a future version, for consumers, we could do a higher resolution,” Iribe said. “This is just head tracking, but in the future, people should be able to integrate hand tracking. The final version will come when there is enough content and the developers of the world say this is consumer ready. We’re not there yet.”

Still, it is a very good achievement to make something that won’t annoy the gamer. Oculus VR has a very small margin of error in delivering a good experience. Some famous game developers such as id Software’s John Carmack and Valve’s Mike Abrash have expressed interest in virtual reality as a way to advance gaming. They’re encouraged by Oculus VR’s progress. Carmack even promoted the Oculus Rift at last year’s E3 trade show.

“Latency is fundamental,” Abrash wrote. “If you don’t have low enough latency, it’s impossible to deliver good experiences, by which I mean virtual objects that your eyes and brain accept as real.”

Iribe said the CES demo has a new motion sensor that reduced latency and improved the experience. I controlled everything with an Xbox 360 controller. But you can use a keyboard and mouse, and future user interfaces could work as well, like a faux sword or wand.

“Controllers of the future won’t be simple gamepads,” he said.

If it gets support from developers, Oculus Rift might present a really compelling shift to gameplay. For instance, you might hold a controller in your hand, but if you look down inside the game, you’ll see that you’re holding a sword. That adds to the illusion. You can control your movement with the controller, which is so intuitive for players that they can do it without looking at their hands. This is one small step on the way to the virtual reality of the Star Trek Holodeck, where you can’t tell what’s real and what’s not.

Pricing hasn’t been set yet. Oculus VR is currently manufacturing developer kits that will ship in March. Those developers will then modify their PC games so they are “Oculus ready.” The company will announce availability for consumers at a later date. Two games that will be Oculus ready are Doom 3: BFG Edition and Meteor Entertainment’s Hawken. The Oculus Rift works with Unreal Engine 3 and Unity. It supports DVI, HDMI, and USB inputs.

Luckey founded the company a few years ago. In August, the company launched a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign. It raised millions and received support from 10,000 game developers and fans.

Movea showed off a way to use a phone’s existing sensors to calculate your position indoors, a beast of a problem for mobile devices. Typical global-positioning system (GPS) satellite data works outdoors, with a line of sight to satellites in space. Wi-Fi triangulation helps improve accuracy. These technologies aren’t as useful inside buildings where signals don’t reach.

But Movea demonstrated accurate indoor navigation at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last week. Movea’s indoor navigation systems uses signals from an accelerometer, magnetometer, gyroscope, pressure sensor, Wi-Fi, GPS, and matching against known maps. The first thing Movea’s mobile app does is ask you for your height. From that, it can estimate your step length. When you move, the accelerometer in your phone registers the step, and the app then figures out that you’ve moved. The magnetometer, used for a compass, determines which way you are facing.

Movea takes into account the difference in step length when you are moving faster or slower. Over time, it figures out your trajectory and then uses it for your location.

At the Las Vegas Hotel, David Rothenberg, director of marketing and partner alliances at Movea, showed how his company created software that could calculate a route through the middle of the hotel, up the elevators to the sixth floor, and to the right room.

“It’s very early days for indoor navigation, so you’ll see occasional artifacts,” he said as we walked through the halls of the hotel. “Once inside, we use no Wi-Fi, no GPS, and no cellular network data.”

One thing that improves accuracy is “map matching.” It picked up accurate blueprints for the inside of the hotel from the owner. It uses those to match your location. If you’re walking down a hallway, it will correct the location if you suddenly seem to be walking through room walls, based on faulty step calculations or faulty sensor signals. The system is context aware. If you are in an elevator, it knows that. If it senses a change in the pressure, it will figure out that you are going up the elevator. The pressure change was measured by a pressure sensor, which is present in the Samsung Galaxy III smartphone that Rothenberg used.

Rothenberg’s smartphone screen showed the path the whole way, though it had to halt a couple of times to fix its bearings. As we rose in the elevator, Movea’s software figured out which floor we were on, and it prompted us to get off when we hit the sixth floor. Movea put its logo in the hallway on the sixth floor. Rothenberg pointed the phone’s camera (using augmented reality) at the logo to reset the map to the sixth floor blueprints. From there, he walked to the Movea suite.

This kind of calculation won’t work in uncontrolled environments yet, particularly if the company doesn’t have indoor blueprints for a building. But indoor location isn’t so crazy an idea as phones become equipped with more and more sensors.

One of the challenges is getting blueprints for the indoor landmarks within every building on the planet. That’s going to take some time to do. Mapping companies such as Google have embarked on that task, and Movea will be happy to help them calculate location accurately once they did out that data.

Smart guns aren’t exactly a popular topic in consumer electronics. But TrackingPoint made an appearance at last week’s Consumer Electronics Show with a Wi-Fi networked sniper scope that can lock on targets from afar and track them while they move. Targeted at hunters, it promises them “precision-guided accuracy” when taking long-distance shots that shifting winds, jitter, recoil, and range miscalculation can throw off.

With its XactSystem, TrackingPoint sells a complete rifle, scope, ammo, and a guided trigger. The scope can give hunters a “lock and launch” experience that is similar to fighter pilots who paint enemy fighters and then launch guided missiles at them. As the video shows below, you can target a deer by tapping a red button next to the gun trigger. That button marks the spot on the deer you want to hit with a red dot, which remains visible while you are tracking the deer in your scope. That makes it much easier to target the deer with the gun sight as you line up the shot. The gun sight also helps to automatically compensate for range, temperature, barometric pressure, spin drift, wind, cant, inclination and more.

The weapon seems like something out of the futuristic Call of Duty: Black Ops II. But it’s a very real combination of a deadly gun and technology. It’s sure to be controversial. Some hunters may feel they shouldn’t have the extra help that technology gives them, while others may want to take advantage of it to the fullest. And the antigun lobby certainly doesn’t want weapons to become any more accurate, particularly in the wake of the tragic shootings at Newtown, Conn.

This gun also helps you recover quickly from the recoil and line up a second shot. TrackingPoint says it delivers “five times the first shot success rate of traditional systems at targets up to 1,200 yards.” The red dot tag stays on the deer as you or it move.

The scope also has a Wi-Fi network that can transfer the view from the scope to a spotter or a nearby observer with a tablet or smartphone. The Wi-Fi network can stream video of the heads-up display within the scope. The app also records each shot sequence from tagging until 10 seconds after the shot. It also captures still frames which can be shared over Facebook, Twitter and email.  That means a father training a son can show him how to hunt, or a trainer can oversee a recruit’s exact view while shooting.

The scope itself has a 110 millimeter telephoto lens and 14 megapixel image sensor. It streams video at 54 frames per second. The scope tracks moving targets using computer vision, which recognizes a target and then monitors it as it moves.

The XactSystem has a ballistic computer at its heart which has been modeled virtually using applied mathematics and tested with thousands of rounds of ammunition. Austin, Texas-based TrackingPoint is debuting the product at the Shot Show this month.

Here’s a video of Tracking Point’s networked scope in action.

FAKE GRIMLOCK, everyone’s favorite tech-enthused, all-caps, startup-advising robot dinosaur, walked the CES floor this year and took in the sights. FG didn’t eat any humans this time around, but he’s still willing to take a bite out of startups and companies that aren’t innovative.

While FG blogged about some of his CES experiences for DNS and enterprise email delivery startup Dyn, he also took time to answer some questions we had about his time at CES.

Let’s do this.

VentureBeat: Is CES still important?

FAKE GRIMLOCK: CES LIKE EVERY BIG EVENT. IT IMPORTANT BECAUSE GET RIGHT PERSONS IN SAME PLACE. EVERYTHING ELSE ABOUT IT JUST EXCUSE TO CONVINCE BOSS LET YOU GO.

THIS YEAR STARTUP PEOPLE INFECT CES. THAT ONLY THING SAVE IT FROM DRAGGED DOWN BY OBSOLETE MEMBERS OF OLD WORLD.

VB: What was the best product or service you saw at CES?

FG: MUSE. MOTION CONTROL STUFF CUTTING EDGE. BRAIN CONTROL? THAT FUTURE HAPPENING NOW.

VB: What was the dumbest product you saw?

FG: ROBOT THAT SHOOT MUSIC FROM WEENER.

THAT EXAMPLE OF EVERYTHING WRONG WITH CES. BIG, EXPENSIVE BOOTH FOR TOY ROBOT NO ONE WANT WITH SPEAKER IN PELVIS.

THAT NOT FUTURE. THAT PAST WAKE UP WITH HANGOVER AND VOMIT DUMB IDEAS ONTO PRESENT.

VB: What was the straight-up worst thing you saw at CES, product or otherwise?

FG: ME ACCIDENTALLY SAW QUALCOMM KEYNOTE. THAT PART OF BRAIN NEVER USABLE AGAIN.

VB: What was the biggest trend you saw?

FG: COLONIZATION BY STARTUP WORLD. THIS HARDWARE’S LAMP MOMENT. SOFTWARE EXPLODE WHEN BUILD WORLD-BEATING WEBSITE IN GARAGE BECOME REALITY.

NOW BUILD WORLD-BEATING HARDWARE IN GARAGE REALITY.

THAT WHERE FUTURE BEING MADE. IN SMALL, HARD TO FIND BOOTHS THAT SPEND MONEY ON GETTING THINGS DONE INSTEAD OF PLASTIC WOMEN AND FAKE EXCITEMENT.

VB: Are 4K TVs, one of the biggest “trends” of the show, awesome or overrated?

FG: COMPLETELY BORING. ONLY PEOPLE BUY IT ARE SAME ONES THAT WOULD BUY WHATEVER NEWEST TV IS. IDIOTS WITH MONEY VIABLE DEMOGRAPHIC, BUT IT NOT CHANGE WORLD.

VB: Do you buy into the idea that CES is increasingly becoming a place for startups to get noticed because the big dogs like Apple and Microsoft aren’t there?

FG: ME AGREE WITH IDEA. FUTURE OF CES IS SMALL, CROWD-FUNDED STARTUPS INNOVATE PAST BIG, DUMB COMPANIES. ONLY THING OLD COMPANIES HAVE IS MONEY. CES GOOD PLACE FOR THEM TO GIVE IT TO LITTLE COMPANIES.

VB: Is Samsung hands-down the most important player at CES now?

FG: ONLY BECAUSE THEM WRITE BIG CHECK, AND SHOW LIKE CES NEED SOMEONE STUPID ENOUGH TO WASTE THAT MUCH MONEY TO PRETEND THEM INNOVATIVE.

VB: Who had the best keynote or panel performance? (If you saw any)

FG: ALL OF THEM PRETTY BORING. GUY FROM NEST SAY SOME SMART THINGS ON WHATEVER PANEL HIM WAS ON.

VB: Who had the best booth?

FG: ME LIKED MUSE MAGIC BUBBLE. IT OBVIOUS THEM SECRETLY THE TOMORROW PEOPLE.

Photo illustration via Sean Ludwig/VentureBeat
Photos via FAKE GRIMLOCK/Twitter

Goldy Bardin is a creative director at Organic, Inc.

CES 2013 was full of innovators—all the big names in technology you would expect, plus a host of surprising startups. Their bright minds and smart designs didn’t disappoint, for the most part.

But as I walked the floors, two brands stood out to me: Fujifilm and Polaroid. Both are once-great analog brands that have have had to make the leap to digital. Over the years, both have expanded their core product lines with various consumer electronics, but both brands have declined substantially since their glory days.

So I took a closer look to see how these tried and true brands are keeping pace with the amazing innovation that’s happening in 2013.

Polaroid

I started with Polaroid. As a marketer, I was curious about how they were differentiating themselves from innovative brands like Sony and LG. As I explored their booth, I was intrigued by the archival displays from their past. They truly are a nostalgia brand. I still remember my first Polaroid camera and how fun it was to instantly see the photo I had taken. Edwin Land, Polaroid’s founder and inventor of the instant camera, really understood the value of instant gratification.

At first I was impressed by their new iM1836 Interchangeable Lens connected camera with Android 4.1 “Jelly Bean.” A great idea. But as soon as I picked up the camera it felt, well, cheap. It took a while to start up and getting from screen to screen was glitchy and slow. There was no “instant” anything. And it wasn’t gratifying.

Granted, this was a display model that had been handled by thousands of attendees, but it was a far cry from the Samsung Galaxy Android-enabled camera, which was pleasing to the eye, incredibly fast, and also featured great apps like Best Face. That said, why would I pay for an extra data plan for any connected camera when I could just deck out my phone with the sleek i.am.plus foto.socho?

I also checked out another new device—the Polaroid Kids Tablet. I used to market Leapfrog products, which are really kid-friendly and intuitive, so I was excited to check it out. The design was cute, but definitely skewed toward younger pre-school aged children. It runs on Android Ice Cream Sandwich, so the interface is somewhat intuitive, with icons that kids who can’t read yet can most likely interpret. However, the navigation buttons were small and butted up next to the beveled chassis, so they were hard to reach, even for smaller fingers.  The main features seemed to be indestructability and parental controls. A pretty good idea, but the overall design was a disappointment.

Polaroid has been making quite a few announcements lately, including a new retail strategy that includes Fotobar storefronts where you can print your digital photos. However, as a Creative Director, and someone with affinity for their brand, I wish they would innovate products and develop a marketing strategy that embraced the notion of instant gratification. The iM1836 camera and Kids Tablet seemed like attempts to fill perceived gaps in the market, but didn’t really deliver on the strength of the brand heritage. Success of the Fotobar storefronts remains to be seen.

Fujifilm

As I wandered in the Fujifilm booth, I immediately raised an eyebrow at their Instax line of instant cameras. Super cute, Hello Kitty-like cameras that print instant photos in multi-colored Polaroid-esque frames. I would love to have seen a product like this from Polaroid, but they’ve only recently (and timidly) re-embraced instant cameras with prompting from enthusiasts like The Impossible Project.

I was really interested in how Fujifilm was faring in the transition from film to digital, especially given the recent demise of Kodak. I thought back to my first digital camera—the Fujifilm FinePix 6800Zoom, designed by F.A. Porsche. It’s gorgeous. In fact, although it stopped working many years ago, I’ve still held onto it as a piece of art.

What I found was that Fujifilm really understands their customer and is savvy enough to deliver innovative products that satisfy photography enthusiasts and brand loyalists. Their X100S camera design is reminiscent of a 1960s-era Pentax and when I picked it up, it had some heft to it. But within the retro exterior is some really cool innovation in digital photography, including settings that allow the user to simulate the color of their favorite traditional Fujifilm (e.g., Velvia, Astia, Monochrome, etc.).

Fujifilm knows their customers love the quality of color they get from using their traditional film, so year after year they innovate to capture that Fujifilm-like color in their digital products.

(Random sidenote: Even though I don’t use traditional film cameras anymore, I still save the canisters. Fujifilm canisters are the best for making Alkaseltzer rockets.)

To quote Peter Drucker, “Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs.” Polaroid is doing some interesting marketing, but is falling short on innovation. Fujifilm, meanwhile, is quietly innovating but hasn’t done anything noteworthy in terms of consumer marketing (at least in the US).

It will be interesting to follow these two iconic brands in 2013 and see how they navigate the waters of the digital era.

Goldy Bardin is a Creative Director specializing in consumer goods and technology at Organic, Inc.

3M showed off an 84-inch touchscreen table that can handle 40 finger touches at the same time.

The table uses projected capacitive technology to render images with a resolution of 4K (3,840 x 2,160). A year ago, the Minnesota conglomerate had a 46-inch touchscreen table that could handle only 20 fingers at the same time. That’s progress, and the company hopes to ship tables by the end of the year. 3M showed the table at the Consumer Electronics Show this week in Las Vegas.

With this kind of technology, you can leave a water bottle on the table or lean on it, and it won’t interrupt someone else from opening a window on the display. The company may try to sell the tables to museums and schools.

The goal is to ship a version with more than 100 touches. I tried it out, and it’s fast. You can open a screen and toss it over to someone across the table. It would be great for playing table-top games. I just wish I had more hands.

Check out our video.

3M’s giant touchscreen table from VentureBeat on Vimeo.

Every year, the Consumer Electronics Show is bursting full of color. It is always a visual delight, an attack on your senses. It takes an image gallery to convey what it’s like to those who didn’t make it to the show. Here are the memorable images from CES 2013. Pictured above is Gary Shapiro, chief executive of the Consumer Electronics Association. He started out the show, saying it had more than 3,300 exhibitors across 1.9 million square feet of space. We’ll find out soon exactly how many attended, but the show was busier than ever. We wouldn’t be surprised if it beat last year’s record of 156,000 attendees.

[Image credits: Dean Takahashi, Devindra Hardawar and Sean Ludwig]

While this week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas was filled with straightforward news and elegant gadgets, there were also a few strange things that stood out.

Check out five of the oddest things we saw on the show floor and a bonus from a keynote below.

The Hapilabs “Hapifork”

Yes, there is now a fork that tracks what you eat. Lots of companies are coming up with health-tracking devices that measure your physical activity, but the Hapifork from Hapilabs can track how many bites of food you have taken and the frequency with which you take bites. It also records your eating schedule. We’re definitely intrigued. – Sean Ludwig

Re-Timer glasses that correct your sleep cycle

Re-Timer’s glasses can make you look really goofy. But that’s not the only thing they do — the glasses can also help you adjust your sleep cycle. Based on 25 years of research from Flinders University in Australia, the glasses emit a particular type of green light, and you use them with instructions to accomplish various goals. For example, if have trouble sleeping at night, you wear the glasses in the morning when you first wake up for 50 minutes four days in a row. – Sean Ludwig

Muse brain-sensing headband

While walking the floor, I came across the brain-sensing headband from Muse. The headband measures the EEG levels in your brain and displays your focus and relaxation levels. As I sat in front of the screen, I did different things such as converse with people and count, but I found out that my best “focus levels” registered when I closed my eyes and listened to conversations around me.

Ideally, the headband and software that goes with it could help your train your brain to focus or relax better. The company has raised $287,472 on Indiegogo on the strength of its premise. – Sean Ludwig

Phonograph from Zhonghao Digital takes us to the past

The retro crowd might like the antique phonograph that Zhonghao Digital showed off in its booth. The device can play multiple kinds of media, including vinyl records, AM/FM radio, compact discs, and music stored on a USB flash drive. The company’s brochure says, “excellent musical notes make your heart relax.” – Dean Takahashi

Samsung’s somewhat ridiculous smart refrigerator

While Samsung debuted several gadgets at CES, the product that turned our heads the most was the company’s newest smart refrigerator. The new fridge comes with a 10-inch display that can run apps. You simply touch the icons to watch news, leave notes for family members, or run apps like Evernote. The note-capturing app allows you to write a grocery list and save it. Once you do that, your list will instantly appear on the phone of another family member who is out shopping already. It makes for faster communication, and with this at home, you’re less likely to run out of milk. – Dean Takahashi

Bonus: Big Bird and his helper during Qualcomm’s keynote

Qualcomm’s big keynote at CES was one of the most talked about events at the show because it was an absolute trainwreck. Out of the many strange parts of the keynote, the moment when Big Bird and a developer came out on stage to talk about an app was particularly weird and slightly politically incorrect, with its talk of “outsourcing to owls.” – Sean Ludwig

Check out video from Big Bird and his helper at Qualcomm’s keynote below:

Photos and videos via Sean Ludwig, Dean Takahashi, and Devindra Hardawar/VentureBeat

Sony is showing that it’s got the “touch” — at least with its new One Touch tech.

Sony showed off its One Touch technology at the Consumer Electronics Show. It’s based on near-field communications (NFC). With One Touch, you tap your phone to another device and automatically establish a connection. Once you do that, you can begin a data transfer. If you tap your phone’s NFC chip to the same spot on an audio player, the audio player will start playing the song on your mobile device. If you tap the phone to a TV remote, you can transfer a photo from your smartphone to the TV screen. The same happens with a video.

NFC has a short range of just a few centimeters. Once you establish the connection, the devices complete the data transfer using either Bluetooth or Wi-Fi Direct, depending on what is built into your consumer electronics gear. The transfer of one screen to another is known as remote mirroring, and it was a very popular trend at CES. The trend should really help people who want to show YouTube videos or family pictures on a big-screen TV. The Sony One Touch feature will also work with a backup device. And with One Touch, you will no longer have to manually pair an audio headset or ear piece. You just pair them via One Touch.

Of course, it only works with Sony devices, not across a bunch of manufacturers. When the day comes when you can use NFC across manufacturers, it will truly be useful.

Here’s a video demo below.

The Consumer Electronics Show topped 150,000 in attendees, close to last year’s record of 156,153, according to the group that puts on the event. If you felt squeezed in the cavernous Las Vegas Convention Center, you weren’t imagining things.

The largest U.S. tech trade show was the biggest in its 45-year history in terms of square footage, with more than 1.92 million square feet of exhibit space, compared to 1.86 million a year ago. More than 3,250 exhibitors showed off 20,000 new products at the show. The attendee list included 35,000 from overseas, with people from more than 170 countries outside the U.S. coming.

“Innovation abounded at the 2013 CES and executives from every major industry that touches technology were here this week,” said Gary Shapiro, president and CEO of the Consumer Electronics Association, in a statement.

The number of attendees still has to be audited later this spring. But the figure is expected to be on par with what Shapiro told us in an interview before the show.

Among the celebrity appearances: Adam Levine and two members of Maroon 5 (catch the  R-rated version of their hit song Payphone in the video below) sang at Qualcomm’s keynote speech. Alicia Keys played at Monster Cable’s awards show. And prominent visitors included Julius Genachowski, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission.

VentureBeat has emerged triumphant from CES 2013, with only one writer stricken with a mysterious convention illness. The past week went by like a whirlwind, but now that we have some time (and distance) away from Las Vegas, we can finally sit back and take a look at what worked best at this year’s show.

Fitbit Flex

Fitness gadget pioneer Fitbit came out swinging at CES this year, after being overshadowed by Jawbone and Nike’s wristbands. The $99 Fitbit Flex brings most of the company’s health tracking capabilities (sans stair counting) to a device that you can wear with you all day. The Flex makes Fitbit the most versatile health gadget company for consumers. If you don’t like wearing a wristband, you can always opt for the Fitbit One. I’ve found Fitbit’s data management to be the best of all the fitness gadgets, so I’m eager to put the Flex through its paces soon. – Devindra Hardawar

Fujifilm’s sleek X100S camera

While many hot new cameras debuted at CES, one really caught our attention. Fujifim’s X100S digital camera claims to have one of the world’s fastest autofocus on a camera at 0.08 seconds. The X100S is the successor to the well-regarded X100, with sales of 130,000 cameras worldwide since its launch. The outside of the X100S might have a retro look, but the inside is brimming with power. It features a 16.3-megapixel APS-C X-Trans CMOS II sensor and a fast EXR Processor II, both of which should ensure better noise reduction and all-around crisper photos. The X100S runs $1,300 and should be available in late March. — Sean Ludwig

Movea’s indoor smartphone location sensing

Movea showed off a way to use a phone’s existing sensors — an acclerometer, magnetometer, gyroscope, Wi-Fi, and global-positioning system (GPS) satellite data. At the Las Vegas Hotel, Movea’s Dave Rothenberg showed me how his company created software that could calculate a route through the middle of the hotel, up the elevators to the sixth floor, and to the appropriate room.

Rothenberg’s Samsung Galaxy III smartphone showed the path the whole way, though it had to halt a couple of times to fix its bearings. As we rose in the elevator, Movea’s software figured out (using the pressure sensor in the Galaxy III) which floor we were on, and it prompted us to get off when we hit the sixth floor. The company retrieved the indoor map from the hotel’s own blueprints. The system does this in places where there is no GPS signal by estimating the length of your steps, given your height. This won’t work in uncontrolled environments yet, but indoor location isn’t so crazy an idea as phones become equipped with more and more sensors. – Dean Takahashi

Muse’s brain-bending headband

Muse’s Indiegogo-funded headband claims to measure your brain waves related to focus and relaxation. We had previously heard about Muse’s progress, but it was different seeing it in person. I tested it out, and as Muse claims, a program on a screen in front of you shows your brain activity in real time. As I focused more, the app onscreen showed more snow falling down, and as I relaxed more the sky turned clear. What was particularly revealing is that as I talked to different people, my brain activity levels changed, showing that some people engaged with me better than others. – Sean Ludwig

Oculus Rift makes virtual reality … a reality

The Oculus Rift VR headset is in prototype form and the final is expected to ship this March. But it already looks great. Once you put these bulky virtual reality googles on, it immerses you inside a gaming world. When you move your head, the imagery changes rapidly enough to match what you would expect in normal life. I donned the headset and walked around a medieval village built with Epic Games’ Unreal Engine. There was no lag between my movements and the changing imagery, and so I didn’t get motion sickness, as is common with many other virtual-reality headsets.

Some famous game developers such as id Software’s John Carmack and Valve’s Mike Abrash have expressed interest in this. If it gets support from game developers, it might be a really compelling shift in the you play games. For instance, you might hold a controller in your hand. But if you look down inside the game, you’ll see that you’re holding a sword. That adds to the illusion. You can control your movement with the controller, which is so intuitive for gamers so that they can use it without seeing their hands. This is one small step on the way to the virtual reality of the Star Trek Holodeck, where you can’t tell what’s real and what’s not. — Dean Takahashi

Pebble’s smartwatch is finally here

Yes, we love the Pebble smartwatch. It’s gone from a Kickstarter darling to a crowdfunding warning sign to a CES showstopper, all in less then a year. That’s a lot of drama for a watch that connects to your smartphone to display messages and control media.

Mostly, the Pebble’s popularity came from amped-up demand. There have been several attempts at smartwatches, but nobody’s yet managed to make a killer offering. (Apple came the closest with its watch-ready iPod Nano.) But with its simple design and monochrome display, the Pebble managed to capture geek hearts across the web. It makes sense for Pebble to choose CES as its official unveiling: Expect even more killer consumer tech startups to dominate the show in the future. (We’ve already seen quite a few this year.) – Devindra Hardawar

Project Shield: A crazy gamble on gaming hardware

Nvidia’s Project Shield could disrupt the console game business, where new titles typically cost $60. The Android-based portable gaming system lets you play high-quality, free-to-play Tegra Zone games on a 5-inch screen. You can also connect that machine via HDMI to a television and play games on a big screen. [Check out our hands-on video with Project Shield, as well as our exclusive interview with Nvidia's CEO.]

If Android games aren’t your taste, you can also play PC games that you have downloaded from Valve’s Steam digitial distribution service to your PC. And since Nvidia has invested heavily in its cloud-based GeForce Gaming Grid, you’ll be able to play cloud games on it too. The system is open, and you can expect a new model to debut every year. Nvidia is targeting hardcore gamers who want free-to-play games on their TVs.

It might be a narrow niche, given the crowded space. But Nvidia says the system is perfect for traveling people who want to access their own games from hotel rooms. You’ll be able to play any Android apps via the Shield, and you’re also have plenty of horsepower with the system’s Tegra 4 processor.  If this takes off, Nvidia will open up gaming and lower the cost of playing for consumers. – Dean Takahashi

Tegra 4 brings desktop power to mobile

Nvidia’s Tegra 4 mobile processor will be the brains of a new generation of mobile devices. It has 72 graphics cores, compared to just 12 on a Tegra 3. That isn’t nearly as many as the 3,072 on Nvidia’s top PC graphics chip, but the power consumption of Tegra 4 is far less than a desktop chip. Visually, this means you’ll be able to play high-definition games on a TV screen or a small screen with a Tegra 4-based mobile device. And if you have a 4K TV and 4K content, Tegra 4 will be able to run that too.

The chip has four microprocessor cores, plus a smaller core that operates in power-saving mode. The chip will be small since it will be built with a 28-nanometer manufacturing process. The new process also allows Nvidia to cut power consumption by as much as 45 percent.

Qualcomm chief executive Paul Jacobs says the graphics in the Snapdragon 800 series will beat Nvidia’s, to which Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang replied, “Pretty brash words. We’ll see, I guess.” – Dean Takahashi

Qualcomm’s batshit insane keynote

At first I was bewildered by Qualcomm’s zany keynote, thanks to the trio of terrible actors pretending to be “born mobile” youths. Then I felt embarrassed for Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs when he was upstaged by Steve Ballmer. But eventually, I’ve come around to see this monstrous event as something truly wonderful. It may not have done much to encapsulate what Qualcomm is actually doing to innovate the mobile industry, but it sure was memorable.

How could you forget a keynote that featured cameos from Big Bird, film director Guillermo del Toro (who showed off some fun and gory clips from Blade II in 4K), a finale concert by Maroon 5, and a video message from Desmond Tutu. Indeed, Qualcomm’s CES keynote transcends description — and at one point, seemingly space and time. — Devindra Hardawar

Xi3′s Piston ‘Steam Box’

The Xi3 Piston is a cool modular computer, even if it isn’t exactly what Valve will launch with its Linux-based Steam Box. Rumors are rife that the Piston is indeed the living room game console that Valve will eventually launch. Valve has invested in Xi3, and Valve chief executive Gabe Newell confirmed that Valve is making its own open game machine.

The Xi3 Piston has a 3.2-GHz quad-core microprocessor and 384 programmable graphics cores. It comes with 8GB of DDR main memory. It can support three monitors natively and two mini-display ports, and it comes with 64 GB to 1TB of storage, depending on price. It has plenty of other ports, but the box remains tiny, modular, and upgradeable. Piston consumes only 40 watts, compared to 1,000 watts for some of the high-end game PCs. That means it doesn’t need a noisy fan, and you should be able to play kick-ass games on it. – Dean Takahashi

Smart refrigerators have been an object of ridicule among those covering and reading about Consumer Electronics Show 2013. But Samsung’s newest smart fridge isn’t a joke. With a 10-inch display that shows you the weather, your calendar, notes from your family members, and other news, it’s a good example of how a “smart appliance” means more than just connecting to the Internet these days.

The Android-based T9000 refrigerator (not to be confused with the T-800 from the Arnold Schwarzenegger Terminator movie) also runs apps such as Evernote, the popular note-taking and memory-aid app. Evernote lets you create notes, share web clips, photos, links, and videos. You can then sync them with any other device you have that runs Evernote. That means that your spouse can use Evernote to create a grocery list on the refrigerator. That list will instantly sync to your smartphone, and you’ll be able to get the message in time that you need to pick up more milk. You can also display recipes that you have copied to Evernote, and you can share photos via an Evernote update.

You can’t install Android apps on the fridge yourself, so no Angry Birds Star Wars. But it does have a variety of preinstalled apps that are useful. Another cool app is Epicurious. You can look into your refrigerator and list the ingredients in the fridge. Then Epicurious will search through its database to find a recipe that you can make. If you have beef, bacon, onions, and cheese, you can make a meal like bacon-cheddar burgers with caramelized onions. Unilever has an app sends coupons and recipes to your fridge. You can then send them to a mobile device to use them at the store.

The app screen has a menu of icons at the bottom. You can write memos, view AP news, update your calendar and customize it with photos (which you can upload via a SD card, Picasa, or through AllShare). You can add your Google Calendar and show calendars side-by-side. The kids can enter their own appointments by typing on the screen.

The 32-cubic feet fridge itself has a lot of space in four compartments (where, as you can see in the video below, you can fit a giant lobster). You can configure two as freezers, or just one, and up to three as refrigerators. The refrigerator is coming this spring for somewhere around $4,000.

You can make fun of that price, of course. If you buy an iPad for $600, then spend $600 on a refrigerator and $50 on an iPad refrigerator mount, you can save a good chunk of change.

Check out our video of the T9000 below.

The applications for E Ink, the electronic ink technology used in the Amazon Kindle eBook reader, are multiplying. Sriram Peruvemba, the chief marketing officer at E Ink, showed off the world’s thinnest watch this week at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Made by Central Standard Timing, the watch has an E Ink display that simply displays the time in a black-and-white, flexible digital display.

The watch has a stainless steel band that wraps around your wrist and is only 0.8 millimeters thick, which is thinner than a credit card. It weighs 12 grams, or  less than five pennies.

You can change the time on the watch using an external dock, which can charge the Thinnergy microenergy cell battery in just 10 minutes, and it will last a whole month, Peruvemba said. The battery has a lifetime of 15 years, and it says you can recharge it more than 10,000 times.

E Ink saves space with the display. It takes two pigments, black-and-white, and puts them in a microcapsule the size of a human hair. It applies a voltage to the capsule, and it appears as black-or-white when viewed from above. Each display has millions of such capsules.

Central Standard Timing assembled the watch by laminating thin and flexible components into a 0.5 millimeter pocket etched into a single piece of steel. You can order the watch and back the project through a crowdfunding effort. So far, Central Standard Timing has raised $281,593 — more than its $200,000 goal — and it still has 42 days to go on Kickstarter. The watch will go into production in the second half of the year.

E Ink is coming in a number of other products coming, including a plastic e-book reader from Wexler. On top of that, some phones are using E Ink in the backs of smartphones. These smartphones can display something like an airline ticket code. The image of the ticket stays on, even if the phone is turned off. So you can scan your airline ticket at a ticket counter, even if your phone has run out of battery.

Here’s our video interview with Peruvemba about the thin watch.

Plenty of startups made a splash at CES 2013, signaling the start of a new era.

They weren’t all killer ideas, but the ever-growing presence of consumer tech startups foretells the new shape of CES — and perhaps even the gadget world in general. Major tech companies may not have had many big announcements, but these emerging companies are where the future lies.

For the most part, I found the ideas from startups to be far more intriguing than those from big firms. These aren’t companies that are trying to maintain any sort of corporate status quo, so they’re free to innovate and experiment as necessary. And with the rise of Kickstarter and other crowdfunding sources, they’re even less beholden to investors and traditional business paths. This leads to some pretty cool stuff.

Almond+: A touchscreen router with fast wireless and home automation

Who needs a touchscreen on their router? Actually, everyone (except maybe geeks). Instead of dealing with clunky router configuration screens, Securifi’s Almond routers let you deal with the entire setup process right on the router. Its original router has been a hot seller on Amazon since it debuted six months ago, but that’s not stopping it from raising the bar yet again with the Almond+.

The new router supports the 802.11AC wireless standard, which offers theoretical speeds of more than 1.1 gigabits, as well as gigabit ethernet. That’s about three times the wireless speed of the old Almond router. The Almond+ also offers more than double the range of its predecessor, and it also supports home automation standards Z-wave and Zigbee.

Securifi is going to launch a Kickstarter campaign for the Almond+ soon, and it intends to sell the router for around $99. Considering that a good 802.11N router costs around $150, I have a feeling that the company has another potential hit with the Almond+.

Dhama Innovations: Instant contrast heat therapy

Seemingly going against several laws of physics*, Dhama Innovations has developed technology that can instantly offer icing and heating therapy in a variety of wearable wraps. In a brief demonstration at its Eureka Park booth, I felt one of Dhama’s wraps go from freezing cold to incredibly hot within seconds. Dhama says that it’s the first to develop instant cooling, and consequently, it’s the only company offering instant hot/cold therapy.

Founder Kranthi Kiran Vistakula developed the technology while at MIT, and MIT’s Technology Review named him as the Innovator of the Year in 2010 by  (among many other awards he has earned).

Dhama offers a knee, back, universal, and migraine wraps from between $142 and $188. The wraps are light, between .3 and 1 pound, and their batteries offer up to four hours of runtime.

For athletes, or anyone suffering from chronic body aches, Dhama’s technology could be incredibly useful.

* Note: I am not a physicist.

Mauz: Use your iPhone as a wireless gesture mouse

What if you could use all of the great motion sensors in your iPhone to replace your mouse? The folks at Spicebox have developed Mauz, a tiny device that plugs into the bottom of your iPhone that turns motion gestures into typical mousing tasks. But it also uses your iPhone’s front camera for Minority Report-esque visual gestures.

Spicebox launched a Kickstarter campaign for the Mauz on Jan. 7, and it’s already reached more than $8,000 of its $150,000 goal. Check out a short demo below.

Pebble

Pebble’s already received a ton of buzz over its wildly successful Kickstarter campaign, in which it raised more than $10 million from almost 69,000 backers. But it chose to debut the final version of its smartwatch, which connects to your smartphone wirelessly to show you messages, calendar notifications, and control music, at CES. Pebble was likely hoping to target the attention of the gadget hounds that roam the show, but it also faced the danger of being overshadowed by a ton of other tech news.

And yet, despite being Pebble’s very first press conference (and the first press conference creator Eric Migicovsky ever attended), it still managed to make an impact. Looking back at CES 2013, it was Migicovsky’s nervous energy during his press conference, and his sheer enthusiasm for finally getting the Pebble out the door, that resonated with me the most throughout the show.

Popchillas World: Autism therapy with games and a robot

It may look like a Furby, but Popchillas World from Interbots is trying to do much more. It has developed an iPad app, as well as a companion stuffed robot, to help autistic kids learn social skills and daily routines. It covers basic tasks like brushing your teeth or complex scenarios like managing emotions. Interbots head of software David Culyba pointed out that autistic kids tend to interact well with touchscreens and robots, so Popchillas World has a shot at being a big help to their parents.

Re-Timer: Goofy glasses that can solve your sleep problems

VentureBeat’s Sean Ludwig fell for these trippy glasses from Re-Timer, which use green lights to help your body reconfigure your sleep patterns.

You wear the glasses in the morning when you first wake up for 50 minutes four days in a row. Or if you wake up too early, you wear the glasses at night before you go to bed for the same duration.

“You’re training your body to a different rhythm,” Re-Timer operating manager Claire Hoban told us. “The green light activates the photoreceptors in your eyes and makes you more alert.”

The glasses are based on more than years of scientific research, and Hoban noted that they also helped her deal with jet lag when travelling to CES from Australia. The Re-Timer glasses cost $274 and are available online.

Zboard: The electric skateboard rolls on

We were big fans of Zboard’s weight-sensing electric skateboard back at DEMO Spring last year, and it ended up making waves at CES as well. Zboard won the top prize from Showstoppers and Launch.it’s CES startup competition, beating out several strong Eureka Park contenders (including Dhama Innovations and Liquipel).

Zboard also announced that it’s now seeking $750,000 in funding (on top of the more than $278,000 it raised on Kickstarter last year.)

So far, Intuitive Motion has sold hundreds of Zboards, founder Ben Forman said during the competition. It offers two models: The Zboard Classic for $649, which has around 5 miles of range and a top speed of 15 miles per hour; and the Zboard Pro for $949. The Pro version uses lithium ion batteries, so it’s lighter and offers double the range.

Each year at CES, technology companies plan a host of announcements, soon-to-launch product demos, and tease prototype designs for the future of consumer electronics.

But with the sheer volume of announcements and shiny new toys, it’s easy to lose sight of the big trends from this year’s show. Not only did device makers unveil a new generation of ultra high-definition televisions, but there were also things like waterproof smartphones, gaming tablets, and web-connected car dashboards.

BestChoiceReviews came up with their own list of the hottest cameras, tablets, TVs, and more, as you can see from the infographic we’ve embedded below.

Keep in mind that this isn’t VentureBeat’s list of top trends — which should be hitting the site over the next few days — but you’ll find that the infographic does contain many announcements we covered at 2013 CES.

Top photo by Dean Takahashi/VentureBeat; Infographic via BestChoiceReviews

Nvidia grabbed a lot of the coveted media attention this week at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. The world’s biggest standalone graphics-chips company announced it would make Project Shield, a portable game system that can run Android and Steam PC games on a 5-inch screen or via an HDMI cable on a television screen. Nvidia will make and sell this system itself, turning its traditional partners into competitors.

Why it’s potentially disruptive

It’s a bold move — the kind that Microsoft made when it decided to move beyond software into hardware. This kind of transition from making components to designing fully integrated products is becoming more common. It happens when a company has either been disrupted or plans to disrupt others. The pros in this case outweigh the cons, but Nvidia will have to make a lot of trade-offs as it enters this market.

Whatever happens, Nvidia has an interesting chance to change the market with an open system that lowers the cost of gaming for consumers. The $60 console-game companies haven’t embraced free to play or cloud technology in a big way yet. By bringing free or 99-cent Android games to the TV, Nvidia may very well disrupt the $60 club. At the same time, Nvidia needs more exclusive content to launch its machine successfully. Android and Steam games alone may not be big sellers.

Deciding to move into integrated hardware is not something that a component maker does lightly. Nvidia will be competing with companies that are or could be its potential customers or partners, like Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft. Those customers won’t be happy though they may still be forced to partner with Nvidia in other areas. Jen-Hsun Huang, the chief executive of Nvidia, pondered the issue for seven years before he finally went public with it. Only when you have a chance to disrupt a market is a strategy worth it.

The good thing about Nvidia’s overall strategy is that it is creating supercomputing graphics technology and integrating its graphics into big data center servers. Those will be useful to all providers of cloud gaming services, and Nvidia is ahead of its rivals in this aspect. So while some potential customers won’t like Nvidia competing with them, they may very well be forced to ally themselves with Nvidia when it comes to the cloud, which also happens to make Project Shield a lot more viable as it provides games directly to the device. As such, this is not just a game device. It is game device with access to a load of cloud-based services and games.

The devil is in the details

It’s not the kind of move you want to make out of weakness. Microsoft has tried to move into tablets for years, and it finally made its own Microsoft Surface tablets with the debut of Windows 8. But that move seems defensive — made out of weakness in the face of competition against Apple. Nvidia has pretty much lost out to Advanced Micro Devices in the race to supply chips to next-generation consoles. In that respect, Nvidia has made this business decision from a weak position, too, but it also has nothing to lose.

Nvidia has probably lost some trust among its partners and customers. How do they know that Nvidia won’t compete head-on with them? Then again, this is an age of “co-opetition,” where many companies are both competing and partnering with other large tech companies at the same time.

The tough challenge for Nvidia will be marketing since it has very little elbow room in a crowded market. Rivals such as PowerA (the maker of the Moga controller) and Green Throttle Games (the creator of an upcoming Android game controller) will be selling their products for a lot less. How will Nvidia convince customers to pay a lot more for its device?

JJ Richards, the head of marketing on PowerA’s Moga mobile-gaming controller marketing team, doesn’t think adding the screen to a controller will add much value, and he notes that it entails a lot of cost. But Huang doesn’t think anyone will want to buy a controller to play games only on an Android phone or tablet partly because the gameplay will drain the battery life of the device. No consumer would tolerate that. Also, a phone-controller combination would be too top heavy, he said.

Some big advantages that outweigh risks

But the timing seems good for Nvidia. Nintendo’s Wii U and Microsoft’s Windows 8 have debuted, but they don’t seem to be setting the world on fire. Sony and Microsoft aren’t expected to launch new game systems until the second half of 2013 at the earliest. Nvidia will have cool new hardware driven by its new Tegra 4 chip, which has four computing cores and 72 graphics cores. Smaller rivals are launching in the spring, but Nvidia will be the biggest one.

Nvidia’s edge over the smaller rivals is in the support it already has from developers. The company has established Tegra Zone as a collection of Android games that best exploit its Tegra chips. Other game devices die for lack of developer support. But Nvidia has built Tegra Zone for this purpose over a couple of years. The question is whether it will have a lot of exclusive content. It probably will.

The challenge is that Nvidia is going into areas where it has little experience, such as mass-market customer support and heavy-duty marketing. Nvidia also lacks the kind of design expertise that makes consumers lust after a new tech product. Some observers have reacted with disdain to the system’s design and wondered why it has a tablet that can’t be detached. (Huang says the device is a dedicated gaming machine, not a multifaceted product where you will want to use it as a tablet; as such, it makes sense). If Nvidia gets one aspect of the design wrong, you can bet a competitor will get it right.

The solution might be too clunky for some consumers. Right now, Nvidia has to attach the Project Shield device to a TV via an HDMI cable. That means it isn’t as untethered an experience as gamers would like. It’s too bad that wireless technologies such as 150-megabit-per-second 4G are too immature to allow for a wireless connection to the TV. But when you hold the device in your hand, it doesn’t seem nearly as silly as critics have made it out to be.

One of the key features of Tegra 4 is its support for 4K video and 4K games. But there is very little 4K content out there. This feature adds costs, but it may not gain any new customers for Nvidia. Anand Shimpi, the head of tech analysis site Anandtech, said he doesn’t fault Nvidia for including this feature because somebody has to drive the 4K ecosystem forward. He said that someone should stand up for PC games, which are the most graphically beautiful. But he isn’t so sure that Android developers are up to the challenge of producing mobile games that people really want to play on a TV. And if there is no killer content for Nvidia, then the Project Shield system will fail.

And what about the fact that the system can play titles from Valve’s Steam digital distribution service? Those games are made for the PC, and I haven’t heard much about PC gamers wanting to play their games on the TV instead of the PC. On top of that, Valve itself is expected to launch its own Linux-based open game console, dubbed the Steam Box. If that box takes off, will Nvidia’s take off, too? At some point, Valve’s success means Nvidia’s failure.

What we still need to know

Here are some questions Nvidia has to consider to make Project Shield a success:

• Just how large is the market for this device, and who will buy it? It could be hardcore gamers, but that may prove to be an unsustainable niche.
• Are cheap Android game controllers going to accomplish much the same thing as Nvidia’s (presumably) more expensive portable console?
• Will it have to subsidize hardware costs by pricing the machine low at the outset?
• Will it succeed against a bunch of other competitors, including the Steam Box that may be coming from Valve?
• Does Nvidia have the marketing muscle to educate consumers about why this device is much more than a simple game controller?
• If Nvidia has to price the machine higher because of the high costs of components such as the Tegra 4, will it be trampled by other general-purpose mobile devices, such as those that Google and Apple are making?
• Will this Nvidia machine sell at $300? The example of the PlayStation Vita, which hasn’t sold in higher numbers, suggests that there isn’t a big market opportunity.

Nvidia will no doubt be answering these questions as the spring launch nears. We look forward to the answers.

Sony may have finally its stride with Android handsets with the Xperia Z. One of the few smartphones announced at CES this week, the Xperia Z is Sony’s entry into the big-screen Android handset race.

Judging from my short time with it, it’s also one of the most elegant Android phones I’ve seen. Sony has emphasized premium materials all over the device, from its 1080p 5-inch screen and  iPhone 4-like glass rear, down to the design of its power button (see photos below).

The phone is waterproof and dust proof — so, not surprisingly, it feels solid and high-quality in your hand. There’s no cheap plastic here, so common on other Android handsets.

The Xperia Z felt fast while bouncing around Android’s interface and switching between apps. You can thank its 1.5 gigahertz Snapdragon S4 Pro processor and 2 GB of RAM for that. It’s not the only speedy Android phone around, but it’s certainly one of the most refined. LG’s Nexus 4, for example, also sports a glass rear, but it feels incredibly cheap and garish compared to the Xperia Z. At this point, I hope that Google ends up tapping Sony for its future Nexus phone. (No, I’ll never get over the cheesy semi-holographic design on the rear of the Nexus 4.)

My only gripe with the Xperia Z is that it relies on Sony’s custom Android skin, which I’ve found to be slow and problematic in the past. Sony has also been slow to release Android updates in the past, so that’s another potential worry for Xperia Z buyers.

Pricing and availability for the Xperia Z hasn’t been announced yet. Sony also introduced the Xperia ZL this week, a slightly thicker (but also smaller) phone without the dust and water resistant case.

Premier game developer Valve shook the electronic entertainment world on Monday when it said that it had was working on its own open system console, which the press has dubbed the “Steam Box.” Rumors had been building for some time, creating huge excitement.

Gabe Newell, chief executive of Valve, acknowledged in an interview with The Verge that his company was working on the Steam Box and had invested in Xi3, which has a new gaming PC, called Piston, on display this week at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

We interviewed David Politis, chief marketing officer at Xi3, a maker of modular computers that can be used either as server computers, regular PCs, or gaming PCs. Piston can run either Linux or Windows.

To be clear, the Piston computer pictured is probably not the exact same thing as the Steam Box, which in pictures looks very different. However, Xi3 is able to pack a lot of firepower in this little device. That makes the Piston’s specifications and general size a proxy for whatever Valve finally ships. Newell said that the Steambox will run the Linux operating system.

Politis showed us an exclusive case (pictured at top) for the machine, which can be configured with any kind of design on its shell cover. We looked around but didn’t see any cases with the name Steam Box on them. But note the thematic similarity of the names “Piston” and “Valve.” Wink, wink. Politis acknowledged that Valve has invested in Xi3, but he said he couldn’t talk about a Steam Box and has a non-disclosure agreement with Valve.

At CES, Xi3 unveiled the 7A series game machine coming this spring.

The specifications

Piston packs a lot of muscle in a tiny space. It fits in a box no larger than the size of your hand. The device uses the Advanced Micro Devices “Trinity” combo platform which combines a microprocessor and graphics functions in the same chip.

The machine has a 3.2-gigahertz quad-core microprocessor and 384 programmable graphics cores. It comes with 8 gigabytes of DDR main memory. It can support three monitors natively and two mini display ports. It has four USB 3.0 ports, four eSATA ports, and four USB 2.0 ports. And it has 64 gigabytes to 1 terabyte of storage, depending on price. It has three programmable audio ports. The storage can transfer data at a speed of 12 gigabits a second at the high end.

The device can run 4K resolution video and graphics. Piston consumes only 40 watts, compared to 1,000 watts for some of the high-end game PCs.

“You can use this for gaming,” Politis. “To fit it inside this form factor took a little bit of magic.” The device has 13 patents granted and the company has applied for 1,000 more.

One of the most interesting aspects is its modularity. You can pull apart the chassis by removing four screws. You can then snap out the circuit board (above left) and replace the central processing unit. You can also wire multiple devices together in a server rack for high-end data center processing (pictured right).

But this machine isn’t going to be cheap. It will cost $999 — higher than its earlier Series 6 version that currently sells for $499. Politis said Piston will ship in March. Newell told The Verge that he wanted a machine that is quiet and without a big optical media drive. The Steam Box has to have low latency and be open. Newell described Windows 8 from Microsoft as “unusable.” He said that the Steam Box will run a regular web browser and be able to access services like Netflix via the web.

Check out our video interview with Politis.