It’s MacWorld’s 29th year, and it’s the fourth year since Apple unceremoniously took its ball and left. But it could just be the best MacWorld yet, with star power, fan power, and … ecosystem power.

“The show really has become the ultimate iFan festival,” MacWorld general manager Paul Kent told me last week. “We have training classes, celebrities, noted experts, tips and tricks … before it was really a platform for Apple, but now it’s really about the ecosystem.”

Kutcher and Gad will provide some of that celebrity star power, but not all of it.

Will.i.am will also be present to talk about technology, gadgets, and creativity with Intel futurist Brian David Johnson. And the NASA team behind the Mars rover Curiosity will also be in the Moscone Center, home of so many of Apple’s iconic product announcements, to talk about their use of Apple products.

“But perhaps the most interesting story is going to be the innovation in the products,” Kent said. “We have the accessory companies, over 100 app companies … it’s like walking into an Apple store, except that the products kind of come life at MacWorld.”

Forty percent of the companies demoing products are new to the market, Kent said, adding that MacWorld was sort of like “CES for Apple fans,” and perhaps the last great consumer-focused technology convention.

MacWorld/iWorld 2013 starts on Jan. 31st, in just over a week. IDG World Expo, the company behind the convention, expects “more than 25,000″ attendees.

Image credit: The Jobs Movie

Macworld Expo, a once powerful Mac tradeshow, is getting new life as smaller event for Apple consumers and fans. The revamped three-day event, now called Macworld | iWorld, is taking place this week in San Francisco.

“We took a little Comic Con, we took a little South by Southwest, and then added our own kind of special flavors,” said general manager Paul Kent. “It’s product discovery on the show floor, learning in our tech talks, and then there’s this concept of inspiration. People come here to see what cool stuff people are doing with this technology.”

There are two floors of product booths, classes, art installations, and various “infotainment” options that attempt to appeal to casual Apple fans. The main show floor is filled with lively demos, such as a skier and a snowboarder on a trampoline promoting sports headphones. There’s a greater-than-usual amount of booth babes mingling with Apple fans of all ages and backgrounds. And upstairs in the “Macworld Midway” area, a DJ spins music that can only be heard on headphones.

To stay relevant, the show is aiming younger: hipster band Modest Mouse played the opening party and South Park Studios (the cartoon guys, not the San Francisco startup zone) has a big presence. In order to draw in the geek-on-the-street, Macworld/iWorld dropped the price of advance tickets from $300 to $75.

Official numbers won’t be released until after the event, but Kent says attendance is up, 20 percent of pre-registrations were first-timers, and there are 10 percent more exhibitors than last year. Presenters say the classes and panels have had better attendance than in years past.

Of the 300 exhibitors, nearly half are Mac and mobile app developers. As the addition of “iWorld” to the name indicates, organizers recognized mobile is taking over and sought out independent mobile developers. iPhone and iPad apps and accessories dominate the show floor.

The shift in focus to what Kent calls a “hardcore consumer lifestyle event” wasn’t a choice, but an attempt to recover from Apple’s not-so-amicable departure. The company pulled out of the show completely three years ago, after unveiling the first iPhone at Macworld Expo in 2007. The IDG World Expo group, owned by IDG, immediately lost a lot of other big name companies and had to scramble for a plan B.

Macworld Expo’s first year without Apple felt like it would be the last — the space was too big for the small number of booths and attendees, every-other exhibitor was slinging cheap iPhone cases, and the biggest topic of conversation was Apple’s departure. The next year was slightly better, helped by a great schedule of classes and talks. But as with any break-up, it seems time was needed to heal, and this year it seems like the show is doing all right, all by itself.

The latest rumor: Apple is preparing two new iPad models for a January debut. That’s according to sources cited by the Taiwanese news site Digitimes (which has recently been off the mark quite a bit with Apple rumors).

Previously, we expected Apple to announce the iPad 3 in February or March for an April release.

The new iPads will fill in the mid-range and high-end tablet segment for Apple, with both sporting high-resolution displays and Apple’s new quad-core A6 processor, the sources say. The existing iPad 2 will remain unchanged and be positioned as a low-end entry to compete against the Kindle Fire (though I can’t imagine Apple would drop its price below $250).

Uncharacteristically for Digitimes, its report is filled with plenty of interesting detail — for example, that both new iPads will feature dual-LED light bars to increase brightness. The high-end iPad 3 will feature an 8-megapixel camera, while the mid-range is said to feature a 5-megapixel shooter. Contrary to previous reports, both new models will stick with 9.7-inch screens, rather than smaller displays.

While the added details lend some legitimacy to the report, Digitime also said that Apple will unveil the new iPad models at the Macworld iWorld conference in late January, which rings false, since Apple hasn’t participated in the conference for years. Perhaps things could change next month, but right now there’s no reason to believe Apple would head back to Macworld when its own press events gather plenty of attention.

–At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas that started last night, Micrsoft’s Bill Gates announced Windows Home Server software, to be made available in the second half of 2007. It wants to become the center of a home’s computer network, from photo and video storage to television, to accessing computer files at the office while away from home. (More details here and here, at the Mercury News, which also summarizes seperate plans by Micrsoft to make the Xbox 360 console a set-top box for Internet protocol television, or IPTV, by the end of the year.)

–This sets up a showdown with Apple Computer’s MacWorld in San Francisco beginning tomorrow, where Apple’s Steve Jobs is expected to provide more details on its iTV set-top box.

–The big question is whether Jobs will also unveil a rumored Apple phone, dubbed by some the iPhone, but unlikely to be called that. See review of other most likely stuff to be announced at MacWorld. And regarding the phone, evidence that something was up showed up a couple of months ago, with some more speculated details here last month. Now, the expectations have reached frenzied levels: “Apple is about to touch off a nuclear war,” Paul Mercer, a designer of software for hand-helds tells the New York Times: “The Nokias and the Motorolas will have to respond.”

–HP has a new HP Pavilion tx1000 Entertainment Notebook PC with high-speed cellular technology EVDO built-in, available in February for $1,2999, giving users a way to get online without needing WiFi.

–Sling Media, of San Mateo, has unveiled a new device, called the SlingCatcher, which will take video and audio from you PC or from your TiVo recordings in your living room, and transfer them to another TV in another room in your house. It will sell for under $200 by mid-2007. The SlingCatcher attaches to TVs, and comes with both wired and wireless networking. It lets you transfer just about anything online — from YouTube videos, or Flickr photos — to any TV.