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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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.

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]

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.

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.

Fruit Ninja is the popular fruit-slicing game that took off on touchscreen smartphones such as the iPhone. Now you can play it on a giant touchscreen TV.

I passed by the booth of TCL today at the Consumer Electronics Show. I saw a game of Angry Birds being played across three connected displays. And I also saw this woman playing Fruit Ninja on an UltraSurface TV. You control Fruit Ninja with slicing gestures. In contrast to gesture-based game systems like the Wii or Microsoft’s Kinect for the Xbox 360, you directly put your hands on the glass in this game.

It sure looks fun, but it seems like the market for apps that do this is limited to gesture games and maybe art applications. Otherwise, I’d rather be 10 feet away from my TV, rather than right up close to it.

Check out the video here.

Microsoft has sold 60 million Windows 8 licenses. This announcement came today from Chief Financial and Chief Marketing Officer for Windows Tami Reller at the Consumer Electronics Show.

Windows 8 was released to the public in October to mixed reception to the OS itself as well as Microsoft’s future as a company. According to a study conducted by NPD Group, which conducts consumer and retail research, Windows notebook sales declined in 2012. But Reller said these sales are “roughly in line with where we would have been with Windows 7,” as reported by ZDNet.

Read more about Windows 8 on VentureBeat.

Lego introduced its new Lego Mindstorms EV3 toy robots, a new line of building blocks that enable people to program robots without using a computer.

The Lego Mindstorms EV3 has an “intelligent brick” that you can use to program instructions for your robot. In the past, you had to program the robot on the computer. Once it was done, you had to download the program to the robot via a cable. Now the system can bypass the computer altogether.

After three years of development, Lego unveiled the new system at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week, and we saw it at the Digital Experience party at the MGM Grand. These new Mindstorms should be available in the second half of 2013 for $349. The platform now has native-language editions for Russia, China, Spain, Japan, Denmark, France, Germany, Holland, and Korea.

Lego first launched Mindstorms in 1998. It has redesigned it for an audience of children who have grown up with technology and are more proficient in commanding and controlling mobile devices. Today’s audience for consumer robotics is bigger than it used to be, but Lego wants to widen the market further by simplifying the experience for younger users. At the same time, the new devices will be more flexible and powerful for hobbyists and other enthusiasts.

We got a demo of the “Reptar,” a robotic snake (in middle left of picture) that slithers, shakes, and strikes. The Lego team also set up some simple missions for the robots to perform, such as detecting colors and firing little projectiles.

As the international team designed the system, 12 Lego fans from various nations (like Canada and Greece) tested the platform and offered advice. Lego is making a new version of the platform optimized for schools, since Mindstorms has become a huge phenomenon in educational competitions.

The system has an ARM 9 processor, 16MBs of embedded Flash memory, 64MBs of RAM, an expansion slot, USB 2.0, four input ports, four output ports, a matrix display, loudspeaker, button-based user interface, on-brick programming, Bluetooth 2.1, three interactive servo motors, two touch sensors, an IR seeker sensor, an IR beacon for remote control with six-feet range, a better color sensor, and icon-based programming. The system is backward-compatible with the older Lego Mindstorms NXT.

Check out the video below.

Lego Mindstorms robot from VentureBeat on Vimeo.

Turtle Beach isn’t so turtle-like. In fact, it has to move more like a hare these days. The maker of gaming headsets is cranking out the latest wireless and wired audio gear at the Consumer Electronics Show today. And their latest products show that disruption has come every part of the gaming business. Turtle Beach now has to make its headsets on the assumption that gamers are going to play on many devices, not just one.

The line-up includes sleek black headsets aimed at turning the heads of hardcore gamers who play titles such as the bestselling Call of Duty: Black Ops II. The headsets are also designed to be usable across consoles, PCs, and mobile devices. For Turtle Beach, this represents a strategic expansion into the PC and mobile gaming headset markets.

Valhalla, N.Y.-based Turtle Beach is one of the biggest providers of audio headsets in the game industry. It is expanding because gamers are changing as well. About 24 percent of players regularly play games on a console, a PC, and a mobile device, according to MocoSpace.

The new wireless headsets include the Ear Force XP510 for Xbox ($290, available in the first quarter) and the Ear Force PX51 for the PlayStation 3 ($270, available in the Q1). The headsets use Turtle Beach’s proprietary digital signal processor, Dolby Digital surround sound, dual-band Wi-Fi for an interference-free connection, a rechargeable lithium polymer battery with a 15 hour lifespan, and Bluetooth technology. The latter enables cable-free wireless chat.

The company is also launching its Ear Force Seven Series headsets. These are tournament-grade headsets that will also be targeted at the rest of us. The models include the Ear Force XP Seven for console gaming ($280, available in Q1); Z Seven for PC gaming ($250, available in Q1); and M Seven for mobile gaming ($250, available in Q1). The interesting thing about that last headset is that it probably costs more than most smartphones on two-year subscription plans. The Seven Series headsets are the same across all platforms and have interchangeable cable kits. They have removable boom microphones and in-line microphones.

The Seven Series headsets for console and PC come with Turtle Beach’s state-of-the-art, touch capacitive Audio Control Unit, which gives players the ability to instantly change the mix of game, chat and microphone audio levels.Players can also use a sound editor to replace standard audio presets with customized audio mixes.

Turtle Beach is selling a TM1 audio mixer for $250 now for use with the Seven Series headsets. It offers communication for up to six players on the same team, or two teams of three players. Turtle Beach is also unveiling the Ear Force PX22, a universal wired headset that upgrades the earlier PX21. It has a variable Bass and Treble Boosts, Dynamic Chat Boost and a 4-pole connector for compatibility with mobile devices. The PX22 will sell for $80 and be available in the second quarter.

Turtle Beach will also offer the Z300 headset with high-end features, and a USB-powered Z22 headset for PC gamers. Details on those will be announced later.

Panasonic announced a 20-inch tablet with 4K resolution for businesses today at its keynote talk at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

The Windows 8 tablet is designed for professionals such as architects who need to manage high-resolution photos and drawings while touring sites. Tablets with 720p or 1080p high-definition resolution are normal, but the 4K technology has four times as many pixels on a screen.

Joe Taylor, head of the North American business for Panasonic, demonstrated the tablet with journalist Lisa Ling on stage at CES.

If hardware manufacturers are to survive, they can’t just keep pumping out hardware, Panasonic chief executive Kazuhiro Tsuga said in a keynote speech at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas today.

“We are expanding our role from a hardware manufacturer to a total solutions provider,” he said.

Having said that, he promptly introduced a new 4K OLED TV. The TV is a half-inch thick and 56 inches diagonally. That’s a pretty big achievement, but it won’t fly off the shelves unless there is content to support it.

Panasonic’s approach to organizing home video involves creating profiles for each family member. When you sit down and login, the TV shows the channels that are relevant to you.

Panasonic believes a next-generation TV experience is more personal. And in a world flooded with content, discovery of what is important to you is a priority. That problem has popped up for those perusing app stores, which have hundreds of thousands of apps, and it will happen soon on TVs as well.

Tim Vanderhook, CEO of Specific Media, spoke on stage about a partnership with Panasonic to create an enhanced viewing experience. Specific Media uses your history of rating shows and liking content to make recommendations to you within a menu. A heat map (or darker color) shows which shows are highly recommended to you.

A few more key areas Panasonic said it is focusing on: It’s working with IBM to bring cloud computing to managing connected devices in smarter, greener homes. It’s also working to push forward the electric car market, making batteries for a variety of electric cars, like the Tesla S, and applying its energy-saving know-how to that industry.

If you want to push your PC’s brain to the edge of its sanity, you need liquid cooling to keep it from melting down. Digital Storm has come up with custom cooling for its Aventum II, its newest computer for gaming enthusiasts.

Unveiled today at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the Aventum II features a nickel-plated copper pipe system that cools off the machine while it’s running intense 3D graphics. The company says the cooling improves system durability while providing a visual aesthetic enthusiasts will “drool over.”

“The Aventum II is a performance inspired machine, its very nature required our engineering team to push the envelope during development,” said Rajeev Kuruppu, Digital Storm’s director of product development, in a statement. “That’s why we chose to be the first system integrator to offer copper piping to end users inside a high-performance PC, like the Aventum II. Enthusiasts will get an infinitely more durable cooling system that can weather the extreme heat that bleeding edge hardware produces.”

The computer isn’t just a show piece. It has a control board that allows you to control the array of 22 fans. In fact, you could probably make a game out of controlling all of those fans.

The machine also has a new exhaust chamber design, designed to create air flow within the computer.

Digital Storm is a boutique computer maker that has been around since 2002. The company will release specifications and prices later. The system goes on sale in mid-March.

An Intel-funded startup wants to bring augmented reality to your television screen. Telibrahma‘s Point uses image recognition technology to turn your smartphone into a tool for a “second screen experience.”

Using the Point app, you point your smartphone at an image on the TV screen, and it starts an interactive sequence. If you point it at a product in a video, movie, commercial, or TV show, the Point technology recognizes what’s in the image and gives you a visual overlay that further describes the product or helps you figure out how to buy it. The technology can recognize moving images as well as still ones and will work with 3D games.

“Point provides a Shazam-like experience for consumers that takes them to the next level of engagement, and we’re thrilled to offer this exciting technology to users,” said Suresh Narasimha, chief executive and founder of Telibrahma, in a statement.

The company is unveiling the tool for consumer engagement at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas today.

Point also works with print ads, editorial content, brand logos, newspapers, magazines, and websites to create “real world” experiences for consumers on their mobile devices. The technology tries to outdo QR codes in that respect, as it can recognize more than just bar codes or scan diagrams.

Telibrahma is working with brands such as Dove, Nokia, Nike, and Toyota. The company was founded in 2008 and has offices in New York and India. It works with iOS, Android, Blackberry, Nokia, and Windows.

The terrifying video of a Russian plane crash on a freeway was captured using a dashboard-mounted camera. Those cameras are going to become a lot more common for documenting driving, and Ambarella is going to make them more cost-effective.

Santa Clara, Calif.-based Ambarella designs low-power video chips used in all sorts of sports cameras and digital still cameras. But the new A7L-A chip it’s introducing today at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas is designed for use in car video cameras.

Cameras in cars have become like airliner black box recorders, capturing video proof in case of an accident, Ambarella marketing vice president Chris Day told me in an interview. They’re a lot more popular in places such as Russia, China, Taiwan, and Korea. But Day believes they will eventually equip cars in the West as well.

The new A7L-A is a version of the A7 chip that has been the workhorse of video cameras since 2010. It can capture decent image quality, even if you’re driving at night or at dusk. Video memory is integrated directly into the chip.

Rivals include CSR’s Zoran division as well as major Japanese and Korean companies that make chips for their own cameras.

[Image credit: the Telegraph]

Consumers aren’t going to be that crazy about prices for next-generation TVs. But the tech industry is salivating at the possibilities of upselling people from high-definition TVs to 4K TVs, which have four times as much data on a screen. These so-called Ultra HD TVs could be a boon to the industry if they fall in price and take off.

Broadcom hopes for such a future, and that’s why the chip maker is unveiling its first Ultra HD TV home gateway chip at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas today. The Irvine, Calif.-based company says chips like this one are a necessary first step in building an ecosystem to make the next-generation TVs thrive.

A home gateway is a box you can buy at an electronics store and hook up to your home network. It is a portal into a web-connected home and the point in your own personal network where you can store all of your digital content. If you click on a movie, a service provider will send the digital bits to your gateway. From there, the gateway transcodes the video (converts it to the right format), and then sends it on to the appropriate screen in your home where you want to view it. The gateway also handles in-home wired or wireless networking.

The new Broadcom gateway will be able to take a 4K video stream coming in from your cable TV provider and transfer it to the right TV screen in your home without choking on the huge amount of data. (A 4K video uses four times the data an HDTV video stream uses). Consumers are likely going to want their video on multiple screens around the home, and the home gateway is the most efficient way to get it to those screens without using a ton of network bandwidth, which is a scarce commodity.

The chip inside the home gateway will pack a lot of punch. Built with a 28-nanometer manufacturing process, the quad-core ARMv7-based BCM7445 Ultra HD video decoder can handle tasks such as transcoding, which takes a lot of computing power. It can process 4K video streams, and it uses an efficient compression technology based on the new High Efficiency Video Coding standard. That HEVC standard (which will be known as MPEG-5 or H.265) will be required to broadcast Ultra HD video. It will enable better speeds for Internet video downloads, enabling consumers to download movies in half the time, with higher quality video, at half the bit rate previously required.

“The clarity and brilliance of UltraHD television is a significant step forward in viewing enjoyment and is the next true evolution in TV innovation,” said Dan Marotta, executive vice president and general manager of the Broadband Communications Group, in a statement. “Broadcom is enabling a dramatic improvement in the TV viewing experience while making UltraHD video delivery economics work for service providers.”

“HEVC will be required to broadcast UltraHD content, notably major sporting events and Hollywood content,” said Michael Inouye, senior analyst of TV and video at ABI Research.  “Next-generation user experience, including 80-inch and larger displays, will be improved by the adoption of UltraHD and HEVC. The efficiency of HEVC will also enable additional services, including faster IP downloads and the provisioning of VoD services over wireless networks.”

The chip is available in samples now and will be in full production in mid 2014.

With Ambarella chips, a new generation of sports cameras and professional still digital cameras will be able to capture your action sports exploits in stunning detail.

The new video chips from Ambarella, based in Santa Clara, Calif., will be built into a variety of cameras: sports video cameras, mirrorless DSLRs (for high-end shooters), and digital still cameras that can capture huge amounts of photographic detail. So the next time you go skiing down a mountain, you can capture the whole run on video and stream it to your friends live. (And they’ll be able to see the freckles on your face). The company announced the new chips at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas today.

The new A9 camera system-on-chip uses the ARM Cortex A9 CPU architecture and can capture video at a resolution of 4K Ultra HD (or four times the number of pixels in a high-definition 1080p image) and a speed of 30 frames per second. And since we’re talking sports cameras operating at high speeds, you have the option of adjusting the frame rate, so you can capture 1080p video at 120 frames per second or 720p video at 240 frames per second. A previous version of the chip could do 4K video, but only at 15 frames per second.

Those are stunning speeds, and they’re functions of the advance of chip technology, said Chris Day, vice president of marketing and business development at Ambarella, in an interview with VentureBeat. Ambarella launched its previous generation of HD video chips three years ago, and it has made many advances since then. The new A9 chip is built with 32-nanometer manufacturing technology, which allows for low-power consumption, high performance, and extended battery life.

The 4K technology is impressive. During the past year, the first 4K TV sets appeared but were priced in the tens of thousands of dollars. The cost is getting lower, and Ambarella wants to drive the technology into the consumer camera market, Day said.

With the new A9 chips, you can capture still images at fast rates. You can, for instance, capture 60 12-megapixel still images each second. That makes for a mighty awesome digital still camera. Ambarella, which went public last year, designs on low-power HD video compression and image processing chips.

The A9 is available now.

The company has 440 employees and was founded in 2004. Rivals include large Japanese and Korean companies that make their own chips used in their high-end video cameras.

Meanwhile, Ambarella has also launched its A7L-A video chip for automotive video recorders.