In January, I wrote a story for Forbes called Is Samsung Invincible, predicting that the South Korean manufacturer might just have carved itself a defensible Number One spot in electronics, achieving an ambition that has eluded Sony, Panasonic and many others.

3 Reasons Samsung Is On Top

1. Samsung has been one of the top three players in major markets like TV and cell phones for more than a decade. Forget those stories that claimed Samsung came into its own at CES 2013. Samsung achieved its dominance way back in 2003. $53 billion in revenue in 2012 is tough to argue with.
2. It is one of the top manufacturers of the crucial components — flash memory, DRAM, LED screens and OLEDs — that everyone else has to buy. Even when Samsung loses market share, it still wins.
3. Samsung doesn’t make mistakes. Sony stuck its neck out with Rolly. Panasonic tried to get into movies when it bought Universal. Microsoft tried to popularize the tablet in 2002 and something called SPOT that certainly resembles the fabled iWatch in 2003. Samsung makes interesting products, but it doesn’t make foolish bets. And it sells 500 Android phones a minute.

Game over. And for the cherry on top, Samsung continues to crank out some pretty funny ads, showing it has a surprising flair for consumer outreach.

This why a Wall Street Journal story claims that Google is now afraid of Samsung because of Samsung’s dominance in Android phones. The idea is that Samsung will leverage its share to gain concessions from Google.

"There is a threat from Samsung to Google that is real," Rajeev Chand, a managing director at boutique investment bank Rutberg & Co, told the Journal. "Over time, Samsung will be able to leverage market-share dominance to negotiate better terms from Google.”

(See also How Samsung Ate The Smartphone Industry – And Now Threatens Google.)

Second Thoughts On Samsung's Dominance?

So what could change all this?

Petulance.

Corporations take advantage of consumers all the time. You can feed them horsemeat burgers and lock them into credit card contracts that Sauron himself would admire. But if your success becomes too public, if it somehow looks like you’re bragging about it, they will walk.

Your mission: To Serve Man — without any hint of irony.

Dell was an invincible juggernaut in PCs until customer service and satisfaction ratings began to dip. Instagram recently risked a peasant revolt when it unveiled plans to use photos in ads. Consumers don’t have much power, but they’ve come to realize that many globe-spanning operations can be brought to their knees by collective hissy fits.

Hanna Montana. MySpace. Australopithecus. Look upon my 2003 Motorola Razr, ye mighty, and despair.

And So It Begins…

So how will the Samsung decline begin? It won’t happen for a few years. In fact, expect to see the company enjoy a temporary surge of popularity. But then you’ll see the backlash begin to sink in: Buy a Samsung? Ewwww. Don’t know why, just ewwww. An investment bank will make a prediction about Samsung quarterly shipment declines. Others will pile on.

And let's be clear: The power in the Google-Samsung relationship all sits with Google. Google has the best information retrieval system in the world. It owns a global data center that is absorbing more functions — like shopping and advertising — by the day. To undercut Google, you’d have to engage in the equivalent of medieval warfare and invest billions in infrastructure just to come close. Samsung’s value in the relationship is that it’s a slightly more upscale partner than HTC or LG. That's it.

The company will also eventually find itself on the horns of the killer product dilemma. Samsung has always been a great fast follower. It aspires to have the most feature-rich or best designed products in the majority of the high-end price bands. But it doesn’t create truly new products. Comb the company's product catalog and you won’t find a Walkman, or an iPhone, the first $1,000 PC or the first laptop. You’ll find the digital equivalent of John Kerry.

To truly become the sort of company that rivals the best of Sony or Apple, Samsung does have to create a signature product. The flexible OLED phone comes close. It rolls up! OLEDs, however, remain difficult and expensive to make in volume, particularly large format OLEDs. Companies have been trying to bring them to market for more than 10 years.

If Samsung can pull that one off, here’s to another ten years on top. If it even slightly misses the mark, let the dog pile begin.

The big question is, how many companies can come up with a hit on demand? That is Samsung's problem.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock. Samsung logo from Samsung

Japan didn't just give us the quartz wristwatch, the DSLR, and the Playstation. It also gave us the Subway Sleeper, the Hay Fever Hat and the Kaba Kick Russian Roulette Toy for Kids! The country has long been a hub for wacky inventions you never knew you wanted, so in tribute to the keepers of the bizarre, here are some of our favorite devices to make you say それはクールだ!

#1. Taily - "The Tail That Wags When You Get Excited"

We're all fans of Necomimi, the "Brainwave Cat Ears," right? Right. I mean, without cat ears to wiggle, how will we ever know if you liked your donut? Well, Shota Ishiwatari, creator of the Necomimi prototype, isn't resting on his fuzzy laurels. Ladies and gentlemen, we give you Taily:

You wouldn't wear a jacket without pants. Now there's no need to wear those adorable kitty ears without a matching tail. You'll be the talk of the furry convention circuit, and your friends will never have to ask how you're feeling again!

#2. The H-Boya USB Creepy Kid

Source: audiocubes.com The letter "H" is bad. Very bad. So bad, in fact, that you need a bobbleheaded child to blink at you in creepy terror every time you type it. Yup. That's all the H-Boya does. It blinks when you type "H," because, as the story goes, "H is for Hentai," and that's bad. But terrifying robochildren who watch your every move? That's totally right.

#3. The Marriage-Hunting Bra

When a suitor is feeling amorous, the Marriage-Hunting Bra helps him check his intentions. The bra sports a digital countdown timer headed for the precise moment when its wearer wants to tie the knot. It also has a ring-carrying compartment and a pen holder, so you'll never be a a loss if you decide to jet off to Vegas for a quickie ceremony.

Lest you think we're just beating up on Japan, we give you two humble entries from other countries with too much time to burn. First up, China's entry:

#4. The Home Core Toilet-Sink

Source: yankodesign.com
The iPotty was child's play. The champion of the pro toilet circuit is industrial designer Dang Jingwei. His second toilet design (following the ingeniously low-tech Portable Paper Toilet) is the Home Core Integrated Toilet, which combines a sink, a vanity, and, of course, a toilet. It's a bit crowded for our tastes. Gray water recycling is a fantastic idea, and we're all for saving the environment, but a shower might be an easier place to start. 

And in case you think innovation is dead in the USA, we bring you the awesomeness that is:

5. The TV Hat

Yes, that's right. Theres no need to buy a battery-busting Galaxy Note II to watch movies when you can slap a magnifying glass over your iPhone. Plus, you get a super-cool hat to hide your identity from thieves who'll want to break into your house and steal the hat! Or the horrifying possibility that someone you know might see you wearing this thing.

Honorable mention: the GoJo.

Ever seen a 3D printer in action? If not, here's your chance.

At CES 2013, MakerBot showed off its new Replicator 2X, an "experimental" version of the company's landmark 3D printer that offers some twists on the Replicator 2's design. The 2X features dual extruding nozzles that allow printing in multiple colors, and it uses thermoplastic ABS instead of the material known as PLA, which tends to be the preferred material for those new to the 3D printing world.

"If you are a MacGyver, a Doc Brown or have a little mad scientist in you, and want to experiment with one of the fullest-featured desktop 3D printers and see where it can take you, the MakerBot Replicator 2X Experimental Desktop 3D Printer is for you,” said Makerbot co-founder and CEO Bre Pettis.

“The MakerBot Replicator 2 Desktop 3D Printer that we introduced this past September, is probably going to be one of the most successful 3D desktop printers of 2013, and we love its ease of use and reliability. But there are many ABS Filament fans out there that want to keep using ABS, even though it can be a trickier and more challenging product to use."

At the MakerBot booth, the company had a wall of its Replicator 2 machines whirring away printing miniature houses and all manner of other things one might find in the Thingiverse, the online treasure trove of 3D printing patterns. Some items are whimsical, sure, but the future of DIY manufacturing powered by open-source databases looks bright.

Check out our photos of the new MakerBot Replicator 2X and its creations above and watch an army of Replicator 2s in action in our video below. 

Video and images by Taylor Hatmaker.

Pity the poor computer mouse. What with touchscreens and trackpads, mice are no longer the input devices of choice. And things are about to get a lot worse for the once-dominant computer controllers.

If I had to name my personal Best of Show for the Consumer Electronics Show last week, it would be Tobii, an eye-tracking startup that does one single, amazing thing: it lets you use your eyes to move the cursor around the screen.

As I thought about it a bit more, I realized that many of the companies that have impressed me the most of late have been those that offer new ways to physically interact with the PC and other computing devices: companies like Tobii, Leonard3Do, Leap Motion and Oculus VR.

Maybe it's the influence of smartphones, Windows 8 and the Kinect peripheral for the Xbox 360 console. Suddenly, touch, voice, gestures and motion have become the ost talked-about ways of interacting with computers. Like many people, I'm perfectly content with using the mouse and keyboard as my preferred means of entering content. But that doesn't mean that these other methods aren't just as viable - especially when consuming content.

Tobii Rex

I was most impressed with Tobii, if only for its simplicity: it simply replaces the mouse with your eyes. A year ago, Tobii teamed up with Lenovo to design a custom notebook that integrated its eye-tracking or "gaze-tracking" software. Last week, the company showed off the Tobii Rex, a USB peripheral that can attach to the bottom of your LCD monitor. At this point, the Rex is a developer platform that costs about $1,000; however, the company will soon begin preorders for a limited run of 5,000 devices that will ship this fall. Pricing for that device, which may be known as the IS20, has not been announced.

Some have said relying too much on touch on a desktop PC could result in tired, "gorilla arms" after a few hours of use. With Tobii, that's not an issue. 

Tobii's eye-tracking peripheral uses low-power infrared lights to illuminate your retina and cornea, tracking the reflections. Chief executive Heinrik Eskillsson assured me that the infrared posed no danger to people's eyes, and wouldn't cause additional fatigue. After a few seconds of training, including looking at colored balls to calibrate the device, I was able to interact with Windows 8 using just my eyes.

And in my experience, Tobii was amazing - not just for its potential, but because it worked extremely accurately, right now. In the demonstration, Tobii mapped the mouse keys to little-used keys on the keyboard, so that if I wanted to click on a widget, I simply looked at it, clicked, and moved ahead. It takes a second or two to remove one's hands from the keyboard, find the mouse or trackpad, then realign them for typing. Tobii eliminates all that. Scrolling is accomplished simply by looking at the bottom or side of a window. Highlighting text is as easy as holding down the "mouse button" and moving the cursor (which appears only when you click.) Another reporter also recorded video of using Tobii during a version of "Asteroids".

Scrolling in and out of a map was a bit trickier; instead of highlighting a point and then spinning a mouse wheel (or pinching), you looked at a spot and clicked in and out. Still, it worked just fine. The only drawback is that your gaze is essentially a single point of contact, so it can't technically replace multitouch gestures. Still, for 99% of the interactions you'll have with your computer, Tobii should be terrific.

Other eye tracking technology is apparently being used for research, with names like Applied Science Laboratories, Sensomotoric Instruments, Optitrack, or SR Research. But Tobii appears prepared to take eye-tracking tech mainstream.

Leonard3Do

Budapest-based Leonar3Do also wants to replace the mouse - with a bird. The winged "bird," which users wave through space, incorporates horned antennas that helps Leonar3Do's software manipulate 3D models.

What's interesting, however, is that the models don't "live" inside your monitor. Because Leonar3Do's software is synced to a 3D monitor and goggles, the model appears to float outside the 2D display. (Leonar3Do has a non-embeddable video on its website with more information.)

In some ways, the bird didn't appear to offer the sort of fine resolution that CAD designers would want, although Roland Manyai, the company's director of marketing, sales and business development, denied that. However, it seemed nicely intuitive to be able to rotate, "push" and "pull" 3D models, deforming surfaces easily.

Leonar3Do was on hand at CES to launch HelloVR, a program that eliminates the "bird" and replaces it with the gyroscope found within a user's smartphone. Interesting stuff, although serious modellers will still want the bird or something similar.

Oculus Rift

I wasn't able to actually use Oculus VR Oculus Rift gaming headset directly. But old-school gamers will remember Virtuality, a 1990s-era arcade game where users wore a virtual reality headset to look about a primitive gamefield, shooting others with blocky pixels.

The Oculus Rift replaces those headsets with a similar pair of goggles employing a shared 1280 x 800 display that, most importantly, minimizes the latency that accompanied the previous versions. So far, Oculus appears to be marketing the Rift as a gaming peripheral, but it will be interesting to see what other applications it . 

Leap Motion

ReadWrite's Dan Lyons characterized Leap Motion as the hottest tech company of 2013, and in fact it might be. Leap's technology lets users incorporate Kinect-style gestures into PCs and other devices, manipulating what's on the screen without having to touch them. Leap's technology sounds fascinating, but I'd still rather be able to manipulate objects with my eyes then be forced to physically gesture with them. Oh, who am I kidding - I'd like to have both.

But no matter whether it's working with eyes or hands or heads, the most interesting products of the last few months involve translating physical movements into the virtual space. Companies like Tobii and others still face plenty of questions about pricing and availability, but it's clear that these kinds of devices can anticipate a bright future.

For the venerable mouse, not so much.

Image sources: Oculus Rift/OculusVR.com; Leap Motion/LeapMotion.com

For all our brand loyalty, consumer electronics are commodities. A very small number of suppliers produce the guts of most electronic devices, and competing brands are often assembled in the same factories (we're looking at you, Foxconn). Assuming the same components, the only major differences among many products are fit-and-finish standards and customer support.

What Would You Pay For Giant Monitor?

Sometimes support is reason enough to pay more. When my Macbook Pro's hard drive died 10 months after purchase, I had a replacement hard drive installed within two hours. That beats boxing the computer and waiting weeks for a replacement. When it comes to laptops, a few dollars more can be a worthwhile investment. But what about components that don't usually break? Like monitors, for example?

Source: Shutterstock For the past several years, budget-savvy buyers have saved cash by buying grey-market Asian (usually Korean) merchandise - including large-screen monitors - directly from importers. The sellers typically work through eBay, Amazon, or an auction site, and the products the buyer receives are pretty bare-bones. Seller warranties usually cover products that are Dead On Arriva and (in the case of monitors), a negotiable number of dead pixels, but that's it. The manufacturer warranties are typically written in Korean, and it's up in the air whether they even apply in the States. It's a lot like the gray market trade on which many camera vendors have built a business, but in this case the manufacturers themselves are relative nobodies, too. When you buy a Yamasaki Catleap or a Crossover 27Q monitor, you're pretty much on your own.

The flip side, of course, is that you get a whole lot of 27-inch monitor for your money. Less than $400 to your door (add an extra $10 to $100 for a "pixel-perfect" guarantee) buys components found in domestic monitors at more than twice the price. Inputs are limited, controls are basic, and case design can be a bit wonky, but you'll get the same LG IPS panel Apple uses in its Cinema Display, which is a truly beautiful thing to behold.

What About The Warranty?

At this year's Consumer Electronics Show (CES), Monoprice (the ultra low-cost retailer that's been the king of cables and accessories for some time) was showing off its entry to the sub-$400 27-inch monitor market: the CrystalPro WQHD. Like the other Korean imports, the CrystalPro sports a high-resolution, 2560 x 1440, LG IPS panel, a VESA wall mount, and dual-link DVI inputs. The difference is the warranty. Monoprice offers a 30-day money-back guarantee, a full one-year warranty on the monitor, and a lifetime warranty on cables and accessories. Plus, it's located in Rancho Cucamonga, California, with live chat support seven days a week.

There's no denying that Apple's Cinema Display is a better, more polished product, but when properly calibrated, the display quality of the Korean imports can hold their own at a fraction of the cost. For system builders, those contemplating a multiple-monitor setup, or anyone looking to step up from a smaller screen, the $400 deal is tempting. With the addition of a real warranty from an American importer, we may have reached a tipping point.

My old 24-inch monitor is suddenly looking kind of small and tired. For $390, I'm willing to give an off-brand alternative a shot. How about you?

Sure, Windows 8 - Microsoft's new touchscreen operating system - will run just fine on PCs designed for Windows 7. But you won't be able to take advantage of the new touch capabilities the OS enables unless you scrap your existing PC and upgrade to a new computer.

Or maybe not.

At the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, a company out of China demonstrated a peripheral that combines a stylus and either a USB or wireless receiver to touch-enable a non-touchscreen LCD monitor or laptop screen.

The technology has made its way to the United States via Shenzhen Yifang Digital Technology Co. Ltd., mercifully shortened to Yifang Digital, whose E Fun brand markets the APEN Touch8 system. Got that?

Discovering the Touch8 digitizer was a happy coincidence. Wandering though CES' maze of booths, you never quite know what you'll find. In the rear of the South Hall, for example, Trojan was handing out thousands of vibrators. So there's that.

Yifang was showing off several versions of the Touch8, including a USB-powered model and one that used wireless technology. According to Eric Ju, an account development manager with the digital pen business unit within Yifang, the company is attempting to license or has already licensed the technology to accessory vendor Targus, which is marketing a very similar device known as the Touch Pen. The Targus Touch Pen costs $99.99 and will be available during the second quarter; the Touch8 will be available this quarter for $79.99. (Update 1/12: Targus claims that they have an exclusive license to the Touch8 technology within the United States, while APEN will sell its product in Japan.)

The Touch8 system, and presumably the Touch Pen as well, both use a receiver that mounts to one side of your screen. A combination of ultrasonic and infrared beams detects the stylus' soft, fuzzy tip, orienting it on the screen. Ju told me that a brief period of "training" the system is required, so the Touch8 learns the boundaries of the available touchscreen real estate. The stylus itself requires power, but it can be used for 500 hours (about 62 days of 8-hour workdays) without replacing the small, watch-sized batteries that power it.

I was able to play around with the Touch8 for several minutes. According to Ju, the system accommodates up to 15.6-inch displays, making the Touch8 suitable for a notebook or a small desktop monitor. The peripheral is magnetically clipped to the side of the notebook, and must be removed and recalibrated every time the notebook is closed. In other words, you'll have to suffer through some inconveniences to eliminate others. 

To its credit, the Touch8 works well at what it does: Enabling "touch." Swiping works fine, and single-touch gestures seemed to work as advertised. True touch hardware, however, is multitouch, and I'm not even sure if holding two stylii together, chopsticks style, would even work. Right now, the Touch8 works best for drawing, swiping and other single-mode uses.

Should you buy one?

Yes, but only if:

• You're desperate for Windows 8 and touch interaction
• You're running a small monitor
• You leave your laptop on your desk
• You don't mind the absence of multitouch
• You're willing to spend $100 but not willing to buy a brand new machine

Pictures by Mark Hachman.

At last, this year's Consumer Electronics Show (CES), launchpad for the world's least-necessary inventions, is over. But now comes the most fun part of the show: We asked you to nominate the worst products you could find on the show floor, and boy, did you deliver.

As promised, the first person who submitted the winning loser will receive a brand new, 32GB Nexus 7 tablet with cellular data, a pretty great gadget. It's one of Google's flagship devices, which was announced at Google's own conference last summer. That's not the kind of thing that gets launched at CES. CES is the kitchen sink of electronics products. And here, as dug up by ReadWrite readers, are the worst of the bunch.

Dishonorable Mention: The USB Flipperizer

Noah Jacobs found this beauty advertised on what looks like a conference lunch room table. It best represents the Tiny Waste Of Materials category, the little gizmos that just deplete the Earth's resources for no reason.

The website advertised on this crazy-looking flyer calls it The Flipper, but the flyer itself calls it the Flipperizer. Whichever it is, this is like one of those infomercials that makes up a problem and then sells you the solution. "Don't you hate it when you try to plug your USB cables in upside down?" Uh, I guess.

Dishonorable Mention: The Steady Snake

John Kilmister found this monster, which gets an honorable mention for being ugly and terrifying. It's actually a somewhat handy thing, but it's too scary-looking to use with dignity.

The Steady Snake is a tensile hose beast that you use to position your iPad or camera on your lap or or desk - or around your neck. It's a neat idea, but I would be afraid of anyone who used it.

Runner Up: The HAPIfork

From John Zeisler (and many others who followed), this was the most popular entry in the 2012 Was A Stupid Year category. It's a smart fork. A HAPIfork. It tracks your eating habits and blinks if you're eating too fast. It's the most 2012 thing ever, except that it's not networked; you have to plug it into your computer via USB.

This thing won Design & Engineering Showcase Honors at CES. That hurts to know. All it does is track how often you lift your fork to your mouth. Are you going to get one and wash it after every meal? Don't ask me how much it costs. They didn't say. I don't even know if it exists. All the press images are computer mock-ups. This is CES we're talking about.

The Winning Loser: The iPotty

There is no question what the worst product at CES was. Maulik Shah was just the one who told us about it the fastest, and he's getting a Nexus 7 for his troubles. Here's Maulik's review of the iPotty:

Attached is my pick on worst of the best or best of the worst @ CES. I spotted an old fashioned classic toilet training for toddlers called iPotty by CTA Digital caught my attention which allows parents to attach an iPad to it. This way, junior can gape and paw at the iPad while taking "care of business" in the old-fashioned way. They also plan to "reward" toddlers for accomplishing the deed by monitoring the time spent on the app.

Yours for $40 from Amazon.com in March. Where's my Nexus 7?

It's on the way, Maulik. This is the worst. The worst. I don't need to explain why. It's like WALL-E meets Idiocracy, but worse because it's for LITTLE CHILDREN.

While major hardware makers are busy squabbling over "4K" vs "Ultra HD", the future is quietly creeping in around the edges. A future with implications in the real world - big ones. Really big ones. Think using crowd-sourced mind control to change the color of Niagara Falls and the CN Tower big. 

Crowd-funded and completely hackable - by definition the exact opposite of gadgets that today's bloated, out-of-touch companies crank out - projects like the Muse headband are about to crash into technology as we know it with meteoric force.

Meet The Muse - And Your Brain Waves

Most people laud the Muse, crafted by InteraXon, as a "mind-controlled" game. But that sells it short - and then some. The device is a stylish, sturdy headband that measures the patterns of electrical activity in the brain - electrical signals are divided into "bands" based on their frequency. 

"This Muse headband has four clinical-grade EEG sensors," says Michael Apollo, InteraXon's Director of Applied Mind Science. "What they do is measure the electrical signal and the signature of your brain. With that we know that through interpreting those signals, we can determine certain states that you're in. We can determine when you're in a focused, attentive state - or when you're not. Or when you're in an actively engaged mind, for example analyzing or maybe overanalyzing… and also looking at it at your level of relaxation too."

Traditional EEG reading next to InteraXon's data visualization

The Muse measures two of the better-understood frequency tiers: alpha waves (8–12 Hz), associated with relaxation and restfulness, and beta waves (12–30 Hz), which correlate with alert or attentive mental states. "This sensor [monitors] the pre-frontal cortex and your occipital region," says Apollo. According to InteraXon, "brains of people in relaxed states create gentle, slow-moving alpha waves, while those engaged in intense concentration generate quick, jagged beta waves."

The Muse and devices like it might seem like they've traveled here from the future, but EEG has actually been around as a scientific tool for studying brain activity in humans and animals for almost 100 years. Though simple, it remains clinically relevant for diagnosis of conditions like epilepsy and sleep disorders. But InteraXon wants to empower people to take the reins of these electrical peaks and troughs. In doing so, they can gently steer their brains through these quantifiable mental states, which for most are solely a subjective, qualitative experience - a feeling we have about ourselves.

Mind-On With Mind Control

I happened across InteraXon's booth when its inflated dome full of blissed-out looking show-goers caught my eye. A few minutes into chatting up Apollo, it was evident that the Muse is anything but pseudoscience. The Muse, available widely for consumers in mid-2013 for $175, is the marriage of electrical sensors in a wearable package with some clever data visualizations - the "game" - cooked up by InteraXon's excitable interdisciplinary team. The games and exercises will be packaged into the Muse's companion app, which was responsive and fun, in my time with the prototype. The app will track all of the data the Muse collects and beam it to the cloud, making these patterns trackable over time.

The Muse booth was never short on fascinated onlookers, and I was happy to get my chance. Once inside, I was rigged up with a Muse headband, which wrapped comfortably around my forehead and tucked behind my ears. It required a bit of fidgeting, the Muse didn't like my hair getting in the way of its conductance or my freakishly small ears, but then we were off and running. Seated in a low-slung chair, I was handed an iPhone running the headset's companion app and instructed to watch the TV screen in front of me.

Moving The Heavens And The Earth

In the first exercise, a sun and a moon appeared on opposite sides of the screen. My job was to merge them. And with no controller to speak of, that meant getting my brain to cooperate - easier said than done. The faster I could concentrate and arrive at an attentive, beta wave-rich state, the faster the sun and moon would overlap. I tried a few quick tricks to rein in my thoughts with little luck, like repeating a line from a poem I'd just read in my head over and over. The sun and moon didn't budge, so I started counting every time one of the animated wavy lines between the two orbs hit a precise spot on the screen. The heavens moved, literally - seconds later, the sun and moon had overlapped into a virtual eclipse.

In another game, my brainwaves powered an auditory feedback system. When I was chilled out, the beat slowed to a pleasant, peaceful set of sounds. If I let my attention wander - to the cameraman pointing his lens at me from just outside the dome, for instance - a thudding drumbeat galloped into my ears. This exercise encouraged breath control, a major focus in the mindfulness and meditation practices that clearly influenced the Muse's creators.

Muse prototype on display

It's Not A Game - It's Data Visualization

These tasks are games, in a way, but more so they're exercises. Rather than controlling the sun and moon or the drum beat with your thoughts, you're actually controlling your thoughts themselves, which are in turn interpreted with the Muse's sensory flourishes. The game is just a clever way to show you what your brain's alpha and beta waves are up to, but it's a fascinating representation of realtime bio-feedback - all streaming right out of your cortex over bluetooth.

The most striking thing about wearing the Muse is watching as your subjective, internal mental experience - the kind of thing you just feel in the basement of your brain - as it's interpreted and articulated visually. Having this kind of quantified feedback makes you truly feel like the master of your own mind - and that was just from my 20 minutes with the headset on.

The Future Of The Future

So what's the point? Well, it isn't just to move the sun and moon together. A device like the Muse is all about personal feedback and tracking. Attention, a traditionally hard-to-pin-down construct in the neuroscience community, is also infamously tough for most of us to wrestle into submission. Our minds stray and suddenly we've wasted 10 minutes, eyes glazed over, clicking Like on Facebook.

The vast power of our own minds is leaking out through these kind of attentional holes that we can't quite plug or quantify. And in the digital era, humans might be even worse at actually relaxing than we are at paying full attention to things - and we're already pretty bad at that. Pathological multitaskers, we can hardly sit still and direct our mind toward the kind of cognitive breaks that research shows not only boost productivity, but increase crucial skills like memory retention.

Consumer-oriented, EEG-powered monitors like the Muse aren't just about gimmicky (but cool) tricks like flying helicopters with our thoughts. Think of the applications. Therapists and mental health practitioners can affordably measure their patients' progress on quantifiable goals. Depression and anxiety, today's most pervasive mental disorders, are scientifically proven to yield to treatment that focuses on breaking bad cognitive habits, so-called negative "automatic thoughts." 

And consumer devices have some distinct advantages, even for the medical community. "One thing is portability," says Erica Dixon, member of American University's Center for Behavioral Neuroscience lab. "Something that's really cool about these things is that if you can get a laptop, a jump drive and a headband, you can take it anywhere. Think about Doctors Without Borders - if they can even do half of what a traditional medical device could do, that's still really amazing."

In the workplace, imagine working in efficient bursts when you know your brain is focused rather than spreading your attention in a thin layer over a whole eight-hour shift. And that's just the start. Later this year, when developers get their hands on the Muse's open development kit and the little wonder headband becomes commercially available, we hope to see all sorts of cool apps and hacks spring up. 

Updating Your Brain's Firmware

According to Apollo, the idea is that a device like the Muse will actually train us to make our brains more efficient when we're not wearing the device - by literally reprogramming the brain. "We're using the most scientifically validated brain training protocols. We've run in-house studies - in the last one, within eight weeks we had people's brains change in structure and function. They're seeing the world through different eyes." When the brain is the limit, the possibilities are truly endless. Welcome to the data of you - this is your quantified self.

Just put on your headband and look straight ahead.

You'd think terrestrial radio would be at death's door by now. 

Just like written news, audio content is delivered much more effectively via the Internet than by traditional means. But FM radio is going strong and Internet services comprise only a tiny percentage of total listening time. Now, though, more and better in-car integrations are about to give Internet radio a huge shove into the future. 

At the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas this week, the partnerships are springing up left and right. Chrystler and GM are teaming up with iHeartRadio. Rhapsody is coming to new Ford cars. So is Amazon Cloud Player. Slacker Radio is integrating with Chrystler's UConnect in-car entertainment system, which happens to be Pandora's 19th such partnership as well. 

Expect to see many more of these integrations between cars and digital media services. Not only are one-on-one formal partnerships becoming more common, but cars are becoming platforms for third-party app developers. Ford just launched an open-source software development kit (SDK) so apps can be built right into the steering wheel and dashboard. One of Ford's technical partners is jacAPPS, an app development house with a long list of digital radio projects under its belt. "They're people who understand radio, working on radio's in-car future," writes radio futurologist James Cridland. 

Terrestrial radio isn't sitting idly by, either. Clear Channel has been aggressively developing its iHeartRadio service, which is being built into more and more new cars. Meanwhile, NPR is already working with Ford Sync, Audi, Honda and Subaru, with several more partnerships with carmakers in the works for 2013. 

Changing The Face Of Radio, V-e-r-y S-l-o-w-l-y

All of this is a big deal for Internet radio adoption. Americans do about half of their radio listening in the car. Connecting smartphones via auxiliary cables and Bluetooth is increasingly common, but the user interface remains clunky and jumping from app to app and queuing up Internet radio stations can be cumbersome - if not outright dangerous - while driving. That's why Apple is working with car manufacturers to integrate Siri into the dashboard. It's also why voice control is a central feature on Ford Sync. 

These deals aren't going to kill terrestrial radio overnight, or perhaps ever. After all, radio stations don't crash or experience service outages like Internet apps and services too often do. And radio signals remain much more reliable than Internet connections, especially in moving vehicles. More to the point, though, while all of the new innovations are neat, new cars are expensive and the roads are filled with older ones that run just fine but don't have the latest technology. It will be decades before technology like this exists in a majority of U.S. cars. 

By bringing the most popular Internet radio and music streaming services directly to the dashboard, car manufacturers are making the user experience even more seamless - and crucially, putting more listening options at driver's fingertips. It will be a slow process, but expect radio to sound more decidedly less old-fashioned as more connected cars fill the road.

Folks were starting to wonder if it would ever happen. But the Pebble smartwatch, the e-paper-equipped, smartphone-synching time-teller that exploded onto Kickstarer last summer, will finally begin shipping to the project's backers on January 23, said creator Eric Migicovsky at Pebble’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES) press conference Wednesday morning.

Kickstarter Backers To Get Theirs First

The first 85,000 watches will be going out to backers in the order in which they funded the project. For the most successful Kickstarer campaign ever, this is a cause for long-delayed celebration for some - and the time to bemoan not pledging when you had the chance for others

If you missed the Pebble boat, or simply forced yourself to stop reading about the elusive smartwatch after it massively missed its initial September 2012 shipping deadline, here’s a roundup of the big features: Not only do you get a 144 x 168 pixel e-paper display, seven days of battery life and Bluetooth 4.0 capability, but the Pebble is also waterproof up to 5 atmospheres and comes in white, red, grey, orange or black.

Migicovsky demonstrated a number of features at the CES event, including the ability to play music, read email and setup push notifications, a feature he says will get more advanced and efficient over time. Something that must be noted - connecting the watch to your smartphone 24 hours a day will drain the battery life by 5% - 10%, says Migicovsky.

Big Moment For Kickstarter

The success of the Pebble, which overshot its original funding goal by a whopping $10 million, and the subsequent production problems its creators faced was a moment of truth for Kickstarter. Could the site really fund ambitious projects, and if it could, would the projects be able to actually deliver physical products that met backers' expectations.

(See also: Remee & The Lucid Dream Of Crowd Funding.)

Migicovsky and his team learned the hard way what it’s like to scale production from 1,000 watches to 85 times that. They were forced to switch to their “Plan B,” which involved moving production from Silicon Valley to Taipei, where he and other Pebble engineers spent long stretches of time working to get the manufacturing right.

More Features Coming

Looking ahead, the watch has been called “future-proof” by Migicovsky, meaning it will be open to a wide range of developer customization. The Pebble software developer's kit (SDK) has already yielded some nice new watch-face designs, and we should start to see custom apps and new smartphone integration options in the coming months.

For those tens of thousands of customers who simply pre-ordered the watch off the Pebble website after the Kickstarter campaign ended, you’re next in line after the backers get theirs. Let’s hope that’s not too long, because those drooling over this smartwatch have already waited long enough.

Everyone in the gaming industry currently has their eyes on two companies that have long been major players in hardware and software, but have never made an official foray into gaming platforms until now.

Graphic processor maker Nvidia and gaming developer Valve have begun outlining their visions for the future at this week's Consumer Electronics Show (CES), giving the world a peek under the hood of forthcoming devices they hope will someday become entertainment mainstays.

Nvidia is in the late stages with codename "Project Shield," a portable Android-based device fitted with a mishmash of the company's hardware. Resembling an Xbox controller connected to an HD touch-screen display, Shield is bound to shakeup the lackluster handheld market that is being slowly crushed by the rise of mobile gaming on smartphones.

On the other hand, Valve, the creators of the Steam distribution network and the Source engine that powers Half-Life and Counter Strike, is taking its time, and for good reason. The company is aiming to not only give consumers an all-powerful living room console, known on the Web as the "Steam Box," but also a seamless way to tie together every device in the home using screen-mirroring technology like Miracast.

No such Steam Box will hit shelves in 2013, says Valve's Ben Krasnow, but the company is at CES to meet with hardware developers. And the team has brought along a few prototypes that have spurred the rumor mill and led them to drop a few details.

Both companies have big ideas, and if there are any two players in the industry that can pull off revolutionary changes, it's Nvidia with its hardware track record and Valve with its Steam network. Either way, video games — and where and how we play them — will only get better as two of the biggest names in PC gaming move beyond the mouse and keyboard.

Nvidia Shield: A Handheld With Big Potential

When Nvidia began to see its role in traditional console gaming slowly squeezed out by rival chipmaker AMD, whose Radeon processors have steadily captured more of the market (including the Xbox 360 and the Wii U's Graphics Processing Unit, or GPU), the natural response was to develop a fully packaged product targeted at a specific gaming niche. Shield is that device.

Marketed as a handheld, but with big-screen potential, it will be able to wirelessly stream games to your television. That puts Nvidia in the somewhat precarious position of having to market the device somewhere between casual handheld gaming you can do on the go and the HD, graphics-heavy gaming you do on a big screen. So there is no telling yet how well it will perform, or if will come even close to competing with the next- or even current-gen consoles.

There is reason to wonder whether the Shield's insides are up to the task. Using the Android Jellybean operating system, it will run a custom 72-core (72-core!) Nvidia GeForce GPU and a quad-core A15 CPU, the newest additions to the company's Tegra processor line, while the touch-screen with be able to push 720p visuals. That sounds great for high-end Android games currently running on tablets, but who knows how far Nvidia will push the envelope. The possibility of Shield being used to play games equivalent to those on of current-generation game consoles remains up in the air.

There's no word yet on whether the screen is detachable, though it would certainly make for an interesting move if it became a second screen while you gamed on your television, effectively bringing Nvidia into Wii U territory.

As for Shield games, Nvidia lags a bit  in terms of the breadth and quality offered by its TegraZone, which right now mainly offers up solid old-school ports and Android favorites. But if the company can create the right kind of developer interest in the device's hardware capabilities, Project Shield has the potential for great handheld games - and maybe even some console-quality titles. Just don't get too excited: Nvidia did not announce a release date for Project Shield.

Valve Plans To Extend The PC Gaming Ecosystem

While Nvidia focuses on the handheld market, Valve is carefully crafting a full-blown overhaul of the PC gaming ecosystem. What's being thrown around the Internet as the "Steam Box" is known as "Big Foot" inside the company, said Valve founder Gabe Newell in a recent interview. And at CES this week, prototypes showed up of an intriguing new device - though not officially confirmed to be the same as what Newell discussed.

Codenamed Piston and developed with Xi3, the small, blue rectangular console was built to port Steam to bigger screens using Valve's Big Picture TV streaming service. It's also pitched as a "development-stage computer game system," so there's really no telling where it stands in Valve's Steam Box vision.

Piston could be the first in a long line of many prototypes Valve works up with a number of different hardware partners. But one thing is for sure: Newell and crew aren't banking on just one device to compete with the Xbox and PlayStation. Instead, Valve will keep tinkering until it knows it's ready to make a move beyond the PC.

Despite the mystery regarding the Steam Box, Xi3's Piston, "Big Foot" and so on, Newell did offer some concrete details in his CES sit-down.

After struggling with the consumer issues and philosophy behind open and closed systems, Newell says, the company decided on a Linux-based device that hands a huge amount of freedom to the consumer. Users will be able to install Windows - or any kind of software - if they want.

And there is in fact a "Little Foot" mobile component, Valve's take on what mobile and tablet gaming need to succeed in a seamless gaming ecosystem. As for controllers, Valve is staying away from motion and trying to incorporate what Newell believes is the future of innovative gaming philosophy: biometrics, including the possibility of wearable devices.

Valve could release a whole suite of devices that route the Steam ecosystem on multiple screens in the next two years. Newell was bold enough to suggest that the next-generation GPUs could support as many as eight simultaneous screens!

"So you could have one PC and eight televisions and eight controllers and everybody getting great performance out of it. We're used to having one monitor, or two monitors — now we're saying let's expand that a little bit," he said. The ambitious effort is already generating some skepticism, but it will take this kind of effort to push the boundaries and once again give the term "next-generation" some legitimate weight.

If you didn't make it to this year's Consumer Electronics Show - or if you wouldn't touch the annual tech explosion with a 10-foot pole - live vicariously through ReadWrite, all from the relative comfort and sanity of your own home. We've been here in Las Vegas for the full pre-show, and now that Day 1 has come and gone, join us for a virtual stroll through the not-so-hallowed halls of the Las Vegas Convention Center? We're already so worn out and strung out that we might have hallucinated the whole thing, but the photographic evidence suggests otherwise.

CES is among the flashiest, most absurdly over the top tech events of its kind. The sheer scope of the thing is nearly impossible to convey with words - it's just absolutely massive. Spread across 1.9 million square feet are 3,250 exhibitors unveiling an estimated 20,000 brand new products. This year, Ultra HDTVs are the ostensible hot new thing, but new gadgets abound across every category imaginable.

From iPhone-controlled quadrocopters performing a synchronized in-flight dance to water-resistant cameras getting dunked in a pitcher of beer - you name it, it's lurking around here somewhere. And since this week's excitement has technically only just begun, we haven't even ferreted out the truly weird stuff yet. 

At the formal kick-off event of this year's Consumer Electronics Show, Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs took the stage with the claim that this was the first year that "a mobile company" - namely a company that isn't Microsoft - would be doing the honors. But just minutes into the presentation, none other than Steve Ballmer himself rushed onto the stage to join the head of the ubiquitous chipmaker - quelle surprise! (Note: Please don't see 5 Things That You Won't See At CES 2013!)

In classic hyperactive used-car salesman fashion, Ballmer delivered a quick blitz on Windows Phone and Windows RT for tablets, highlighting the Nokia Lumia 920 and the HTC 8X but stopping short of announcing any real Windows news. (Ballmer's surprise appearance was met with enthusiasm, but Sesame Street's Big Bird earned the only standing ovation, during a demo late in the keynote.)

Qualcomm's Star Parade

Ballmer wasn't the only special guest, though after announcing that Microsoft would take a break from the annual electronics event, he was certainly the most unexpected. Movie director Guillermo del Toro made a cameo to promote his upcoming film Pacific Rim, an apocalyptic robot sci-fi epic in which many things appear to explode. Other guest stars included Alice Eve, geek-bait from the upcoming Star Trek film, Into Darkness, Nobel-prize-winning South African social rights activist Bishop Desmond Tutu (via video) and soulful crooners Maroon 5 - or Maroon 3, considering that only two members were present for the croonage.

Born Mobile: The CES 2013 Mantra

Before the star power full-court press, the crowd was treated to a heavy-handed skit depicting this zany digital era - and the apparent elation of constant connectivity. According to Jacobs, 84% of people say that can't go a single day without mobile. On stage, we were met with three such characters: a l33t-speaking gamer guy, a Bluetooth-sporting startup type and a Facebook-happy tween.

What does it mean to be "born mobile"? Business, gaming and social media are certainly three answers to that question, but Jacobs also skated across the impact of mobile technology in every emerging sector, from accessible healthcare in the developing world to educational apps, like Sesame Street's "Big Bird's Words" that steep children in a visual world of words as they learn to read.

Qualcomm Debuts Next-Gen Snapdragon

Of course, no keynote is complete without a product launch. On stage, Jacobs announced the evolution of its Snapdragon processor, the Snapdragon 600 and 800. The 600 is an incremental upgrade, but the 800 is a leap forward. The 800 series chip leverages LTE Advanced to support download speeds that blow vanilla LTE out of the water. The 800 will also support HD sound and ultra HD video, which boasts four times the resolution of regular HD.

On mobile devices, the chip will also support video capture of ultra HD files. To keep all of those major processes running, the 800 series will pack a quad core CPU that consumes half the power of its predecessor. 

"Snapdragon is really built from the ground up for mobile. We meticulously optimized the hardware and software to deliver the best experience. We have the advantage of being mobile natives."

Welcome To The Internet Of Everything

But Qualcomm isn't the only mobile native. According to Jacobs, "Mobile is the largest technology platform in human history." And as sensors are increasingly present in out lives, "Our phones will become even more connected with sensors on, or even in, our bodies... They'll be providing us with something we call our digital sixth sense. It's kind of like making the real world clickable."

The intersection of this vast interconnectivity and increasingly high fidelity chunks of data - think UltraHD movies or expansive gaming worlds - comes with some steep challenges. Strapped for spectrum already, the growing demand for 3G and 4G bandwidth to ferry huge files to and fro will call for some creative problem solving. 

Qualcomm anticipates that strain on mobile networks will increase by a factor of 1,000 - and it's betting on small cells to ease the burden. "Small cells are kind of like a wifi access point, but they provide cellular connectivity too, " says Jacobs. "The goal we have is to bring the network closer to the user. You can basically have a tiny cell phone tower on your bookshelf." 

With 6.4 billion mobile connections worldwide and almost one million new smartphones activated every day, the mobile growth curve is explosive. In this fast-emerging "internet of everything", Qualcomm's riff on the internet of things, every device can communicate fluidly - and everything is a device.

This year at CES 2013, it seems that Samsung might actually be in touch with what real people are looking for in their cutting-edge new gadgets.

With its "see what sticks" approach - an you name every Galaxy Tab form factor? If you said. "Yes," you're lying - the company commands a massive empire of products across a vast array of markets - and it's hell-bent on making them all play nice with each other. Happily, the company is adding some cool bells and whistles along the way.

Connect All The Things

"We're committed to providing different form factors, screen sizes and operating systems," said Tim Baxter, President of Samsung Electronics America, at the company's CES press conference. "One screen isn't enough anymore. Consumers want their devices to be connected and they want their content to move freely between them. 

Actually Smart Smart TVs

But beyond weaving an interconnected web of devices under its banner, Samsung is pulling some nifty tricks in its new product lines. Samsung's surreal new OLED TVs, set to hit shelves later in 2013, can convert regular content to ultra-HD, so buyers aren't stuck watching prehistoric-looking content on their entertainment hardware of the future. In its Smart TV fleet, a little device the company calls an "evolution kit" - "a brain transplant for your TV" - can plug into your 2012 Samsung set to bring it up to speed with the features of a 2013 model.

But here's the most bizarre twist: On the new OLED TVs, a feature called Multi-View employs 3D glasses sporting earbuds to allow two people watch completely 2 completely different programs on the same screen at the same time, supposedly with no deterioration of viewing quality. (But not in 3D, obviously.)

The Clever Future Of Smart Appliances

Samsung has all kinds of crazy stuff cooking in the home, too:

• A four-door LCD fridge that can turn into a modular freezer on the fly. (It's even integrated with Evernote.)
• A "Flex Duo" oven that can cook two meals at two different temperatures simultaneously. (Kind of like that Multi-View TV!)
• A "speed oven" that combines a convection oven, broiler, microwave and traditional oven.  

Cameras And Computers Round Out The Deck

Of course, even when these bleeding edge products finally hit the market, they'd be priced well beyond mainstream consumers' budgets. At least at first. Still, it's nice to see that Samsung's future of a smart, well, everything includes ways to extend the shelf life of its products and expand their utility beyond conventional parameters. At its CES 2013 press conference, the company also announced updates to its acclaimed Series 7 notebooks and the NX300, the latest in its well-regarded mirror-less camera line.

Samsung Eclipses Sony

Samsung has come a long way. Sony, former electronics top dog, missed the boat on big trends - like mobile - and has been hurting ever since (See ReadWrite DeathWatch: Sony), posting a massive $6.4 billion loss for fiscal 2012. The Korean upstart has filled the vacuum - and then some.

Samsung now dominates the all important smartphone market, and is working aggressively to connect the dots from mobile to its other product areas. 

Since there weren't already enough strangely shaped, wireless computers to plug into your television, Asus on Monday announced a new one at CES called the Qube. It's a Google TV-powered device, but instead of bringing clarity to the Google TV product line, it adds even more confusion - if such a thing is possible.

The Qube has a custom Asus interface, and it uses Asus' own cloud storage service instead of Google's. Just what the brutally low-margin TV business needs: more infighting with itself.

From Q to Qube

First, Google made something called a Nexus Q. It was the most inscrutable computer-like object of 2012 - a heavy, glowing orb that does the same things as every other decent smart TV box. Except for the TV part, which is what Google TV is for.

The Q was supposed to cost three hundred freaking dollars until Google un-launched it because no one understood what it was, and there's still no word on if or when it will re-launch. (I have been trying to give mine away since Google I/O, and no one will take it.)

What About Google TV?

The obvious question about the Nexus Q was, what about Google TV? Google TV has been a failure so far. Would there be an official Nexus-branded Google TV box to set things right by standardizing and streamlining the interface?

Well, not yet. There's just this mythical CES beast called a Qube by Asus. No Nexus brand, no price, no release date. It has a "rotating on-screen cube" interface for a motion-sensitive remote or smartphone, which sounds insane to use, and it's backed by 50GB of Asus's own WebStorage service. So this thing actually competes with Google, even though Google approved it.

Sure. Sounds like a slam dunk.

I'm sure this contraption is very exciting to everyone at the Consumer Electronics Show, which is known for being attended by zero consumers. As for real "consumers," it's probably fine that they would have no idea what a Qube is or what to do with it. After all, plenty of CES gadgets never get released - what difference will one more make?

As the annual Consumer Electronics Show grows away from its humble roots as, you know, a consumer electronics show, its focus increasingly turns to things altogether unrelated to technology - like celebrities!

Last year I recall spending three hours chasing down Justin Bieber with my telephoto lens - he made a brief, grumpy appearance promoting some entirely forgettable robotics company that I have since entirely forgotten. This year, the celeb safari is back on.  Here's who is showing up to CES this year and why you should - or shouldn't - care.

Get your bingo cards ready. No really... why not make a bingo card? Fill one up, find me and I'll buy you a shot. (Just don't blame me for knowing more about smartphones than pop culture - this is who I think these people are, anyway.)   

Felicia Day

This year's "CES Celebrity Ambassador," you might know Felicia day from the World of Warcraft spoof web series The Guild, or just from being generally cool and having preternaturally perfect skin. She tends to appear at every geek-adjacent event known to man, and we imagine that she'll spend most of the week in a cocktail lounge in an ivory tower somewhere in the South Hall. She's the CES celeb bingo equivalent of a doubleword score.

Maroon 5

Qualcomm Incoporated Preshow Keynote / 6:30-7:30pm, Monday, January 7, The Venetian, Palazzo Ballroom

This is a band, I think. I'm honesty not totally sure. It sounds like a racecar. Or a craft beer.

will.i.am

The Next Generation of Innovators Keynote / 11am-12pm, Tuesday, January 8, LVH Theater

This dude is from The Black Eyed Peas and has the cojones to downstyle his name like an Apple product. He's A+ in my book.

Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson

SMS Audio (LVCC, South Hall 1, #20206) / 3pm, Wednesday, January 9

Isn't this guy blatantly sexist and homophobic? Surprise! He's at CES 2013 representing SMS Audio, a brand that I will now ardently choose to not give a shit about. 

Travis Barker

Pioneer Electronics (USA) Inc. (LVCC, North Hall Booth #1101) / 12-1pm and 1:30-2:30pm, Tuesday, January 8

The Blink 182 dude? Really? Don't make me make the "what's my age again" joke.

Dana Cohen

Haier America (LVCC, Central Hall, #10939)

I have zero idea who this woman is, but apparently she was dubbed the “Scallop Queen” on season 10 of Hell’s Kitchen, which is the best title I've ever heard of. All hail the bivalve queen!

I Fight Dragons

Bém Wireless / 7pm, Wednesday, January 9, Luxor, Flight Lounge

This is probably an indie band. Okay, yeah, I looked it up and it is definitely an indie band. I hated them at first based on their name alone, but apparently they are into the chiptune retro video game sound thing, so now I'm totally into it.

Lil Twist

Nikura (LVCC, South Hall 4, #37134) / 1pm, Thursday, January 10

A young rapper of sorts, I imagine. And apparently Justin Bieber's BFF.

LL Cool J

CNET (LVCC, South Hall 3, CNET Booth) / 4:30pm, Tuesday, January 8

This guy is kind of actually famous! All these years and he never changed his name to something more pretentious or with fewer vowels - props to you, Mr. J.

Rohan Marley

House of Marley (LVCC, Central Hall, #10544) / 11am-3pm, Tuesday, January 8 - Thursday, January 9

Bob Marley's son is here every year with his crazy bamboo headphones and a big smile on his face. He's a super nice guy and he'll take a picture with you and you can almost pretend you met the "real" Marley instead of Lauryn Hill's ex boyfriend.

Nicole "Snooki" Polizzi

Zeikos/iHip (LVCC, South Hall 1, #21142) / 1-3pm, Wednesday, January 9

Yep, Snooki.

Tim Tebow

SOUL Electronics (Venetian Tower, #31-234) / 9am, Thursday, January 10

Isn't this that sanctimonious football player guy who never actually gets to play? We geeks come to these events to get away from you people. Whatever.

Chris “Ludacris” Bridges

SOUL Electronics / 10pm, Thursday, January 10, TAO Nightclub

Rapper turned actor Ludacris seems like a nice dude. I count this as a real celeb.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta

Digital Health Summitt (LVCC, North Hall, Room N250) / 9-10:15am, Wednesday, January 9

CNN's overexposed rockstar doctor guy. If he had accepted the job as Surgeon General, that would be one thing.

Dr. Oz

Digital Health Summitt (LVCC, North Hall, Room N250) / 10-10:50am, Thursday, January 10

Maybe Dr. Oz can tell you what that weird growth is on your foot. If not, try Sanjay Gupta.

Carrot Top

Gibson Guitar Corp. (LVCC, CES Central Plaza, CP-30)

We all know that the obnoxious comedian Carrot Top is just hanging out here in Vegas anyway. I don't know what he brings to Gibson's brand, but now that CES celebs are like trading cards, you might as well collect 'em all.

Danny DeVito

Panasonic (LVCC, Central Hall, Booth #9406) / 2:30pm, Wednesday, January 9

Okay, Danny DeVito is actually kind of awesome. If he's anything like his character on It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia, I'd like to commit a misdemeanor or drink stale beer with him. 

Ryan Vogelsong

JVC Americas Corp. (LVCC, North Hall, Booth #1810) / 11am and 2pm, Wednesday, January 9

A pitcher for the World Series Champion San Francisco Giants. Who let all these athletes in here?!

Brian Singer

Private Event, Parnassus Group / 5:30-7:30pm, Thursday, January 10, Cili's at Bali Hai

Singer directed the first two X-Men movies, which were awesome. But I'm still mad that he bailed on the trilogy to make a Superman movie. If you see him, ask him about that.

Want to track down even more weirdo celebs? Check out the full list.

This week's super-duper Consumer Electronics Show (CES) announcements that companies like Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo and others are rolling out a bunch of new laptops, desktops and monitors seems to have caused some surprise in the technology world. After all, the world is all about tablets now, so why would any company devote precious resources to developing such archaic technology?

Well, what the heck else were they going going to do? Billions of dollars of infrastructure is invested in manufacturing PCs, so it's not like the company was going to turn around overnight and say "Oh, well, that was a mistake, let's make tablets and nothing but tablets from now on."

And it's not like Lenovo is ignoring the whole concept of alternative computing platforms. The China-based hardware maker also pushed out a line of Android phones and a big-ass "Table PCs" that just barely avoids the raging failure of the original Microsoft Surface by (a) not costing a gazillion dollars and (b) not requiring the help of a furniture mover to be repositioned. HP is busy with its convertible tablets. And that's the story with pretty much ever hardware vendor you can name.

Still, it may seem weird that hardware vendors are putting in a lot of marketing and sales into "traditional" PC form factors when all the hype is about mobile and tablets.

Workers & Creators Unite!

But it's not so weird when you take two very important facts into consideration:

1. People still need to get work done
2. Right now the best software for productivity is geared towards the PC form factor. And that's true even of Web-based applications.

It's not that you can't get work done on a tablet. I write on my iPad all of the time and I've gotten to the point that I will haul it around instead of a full laptop when attending various events. But I always use a TouchFire keyboard overlay or an external Bluetooth keyboard with my iPad - anything to avoid typing directly on a glass screen.

And I always still bring my laptop along when I travel. Because even though I can (and will) write a complete article on the tablet, using most Web-based content management tools requires a keyboard and mouse/touchpad interface.

PCs Still Rule For Productivity

More generally, that's still the preferred interface for most business applications, not just website back ends. Using Google Docs (especially the spreadsheet) is painful on a tablet's browser, and unless it were heavily modified, I could not imagine using an application like GIMP long-term on a tablet (although I have done it done so in a pinch using remote desktop software).

Sure, there are tablet-specific alternatives for increasing numbers of common business applications, and many custom business apps are now going mobile as well. But many other apps still don't have mobile equivalents, and even when mobile versions do exist, they're not always as full-featured and easy to use as the original PC versions.

All the hardware vendors are well-aware that there are two kinds of computer users out there: those who consume and those who produce. Most "consuming" users can get by with tablets, smartphones and touchscreens. Many producers, on the other hand, still find such form factors limiting at best.

They may not be the meat of the computing market going forward, but they're never going away completely. Heck, someone has to get some work done, right? Hence, the continued investment in PC devices.

For my part, I hope new and better PCs keep on coming. if Lenovo and HP and everyone else (including Apple) ever abandon those who create in favor of those who consume, productivity would decline and make us all poorer.

As a teacher, I worry that my students are increasingly ill-prepared for business computing work because their parents are buying them the latest tablet or smartphone instead of something they can actually work on. As a father, I may lend my kids a tablet for fast research or messaging, but to write reports or build presentations, the PC is still the best way to go.

Image courtesy of Lenovo.

A Russian company called Displair is pitching a 3D display that's made up of air. No glass, no screen, no keyboard. They claim it is coming to the United States later this year, initially in some kind of business-to-business application. Is this another step toward the world of Minority Report? Or just a cool idea that will come to nothing?

Check out the video below, plus a bunch of others in Displair's YouTube channel.

Video and image courtesy of Displair.

In the not-so-distant future, everything in our lives is going to be connected to the Internet of Things. Fire hydrants, medical equipment, toasters. Really, everything. Yesterday a “smart” fork was introduced to bring “metrics to your mouthfuls.” If you can slap a sensor to a device and add wireless connectivity, eventually it will be connected to the Internet.

Qualcomm and AT&T want to make the process of creating Internet of Things devices and applications easier. Today the companies announced a joint project called the Internet of Everything development platform. Based on Qualcomm’s QSC6270-Turbo chipset and Gobi modem for 3G connections, the Internet of Everything platform aims to decrease time to market for IoT projects. The development platform will use AT&T’s cellular data bandwidth to connect things to the Web. The chipset supports Oracle’s Java ME Embedded 3.2 to write the programs necessary to create IoT devices and applications. The Internet of Everything platform should be available to developers in the second quarter of 2013. 

The Real Benefit

The idea is to lower the barrier to entry for connecting devices to the Internet. As such, it is a good sign that two of the leading American technology companies are starting to take IoT seriously. When we wrote our Futurist Cheat Sheet on the Internet of Things, we noted that much of the technology to create a robust Internet of Things possible is already in place - it just needed more infrastructure refinement to speed adoption. 

"This IoE development platform with Java support is a tool to extend the power of our integrated chipsets to application developers,” said Kanwalinder Singh, /SVP of business development at Qualcomm Technologies in a press release. “We are excited that AT&T shares our vision of a cellular-connected IoE, and by the opportunities that will be created by the AT&T developer community."

Qualcomm and AT&T join a growing community of machine-to-machine (M2M) companies working to make the Internet of Things possible. The leaders in M2M development over the last several years have been companies like Cosm, Numerex and KORETelematics, while other consumer- or enterprise-focused companies like Google (with Android) and Research In Motion (with its QNX-based BlackBerry 10 system) also have software platforms that could provide the capability to integrate items like home utilities and aspects of automobiles on the Web. Apple has not specifically built any products for the Internet of Things, but its iOS mobile operating system could easily be outfitted to run a variety of items beyond the iPhones and iPads that currently run iOS. 

Unlike other aspiring technology sets (Near Field Communications, for instance), IoT development lends itself to a variety of business applications. Name an industry, and entrepreneurs and innovators will be able to find a way to connect it to the Internet. Qualcomm and AT&T specifically mention healthcare, energy and automotive as sectors that will be able to use the Internet of Things to provide tracking, remote control and analytics.The Internet Of Things will give businesspeople capabilities that they could previously only track through inference, not directly.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

It's that time of year again - time for the most horrific waking nightmare in every techie's life, the Consumer Electronics Show. A few years ago I just stopped going, because the whole thing seemed not just crowded and noisy and unpleasant, but also pointless. But this year I'm being dragged out to Las Vegas and will do my best to remain upbeat about ginormous television sets that no actual human being ever buys, the boring keynotes, the endless taxi queues, the terrible service, the horrible, overpriced food, the grim hawkers on the sidewalks snapping their fingers and shoving escort service flyers at you, the awkward briefings in hotel suites, the greasy bedcover on your bed, which you know is alive with bacteria. 

Pretending To Care

I will pretend to give a crap about pixel counts and clock speeds and camera specs. I will feign excitement about a new kind of Wi-Fi and cars that promise to confuse and traumatize drivers by forcing them to use software made by Microsoft.

Yes, friends, this is CES, and if there's one bright spot this year it's that Steve Ballmer will not be giving the keynote.

Otherwise, it's just the regular old tenth circle of hell, the four days in Vegas that make you lie awake at night wondering how your life has come to this and why didn't you just go to medical school like your parents told you to do and what other jobs could you do to make a living that would not involve subjecting yourself to this horror show every January.

But there is one thing that might redeem this show, and that is the opportunity to identify the absolute worst product of this year's CES.

Like this. Or this. Or this.

You get the idea.

The Best Of The Worst

My colleague Taylor Hatmaker and I will be scouring the show floors, peering through the dim dusty dark corners of the far-flung back rooms where only the cheapest, stupidest, most pointless and scammy products sit neglected on card tables, hawked by sad-eyed people who speak bad English and carry in their shabby clothing the odor of utter hopelessness, which for the record smells like cabbage. (Don't ask how I know.)

But there's only so much two people can do. We can't spend all of our time looking for crappy products. So we'd like to throw this out to everyone else who's attending the show.

Find something awful. Take photos of the awful thing. Send us the photos and a brief note explaining why it deserves to be named the worst product of the show.

Send the note to: WorstOfCES.RW@gmail.com

Whoever finds the best worst product will win a shiny new Nexus 7 tablet, with 4G capability. No kidding.

The almost-but-not-quite-best-worst products will get posted on ReadWrite, with credit to the finder, so at the very least you'll get your 15 minutes of fame.

Also, if you want create any video the captures the horror of CES, please send that in too. We'd love to see it. Just keep it short. It's not fair to the world to subject people to too much of this stuff.

Again, please send all entries to: WorstOfCES.RW@gmail.com

Image courtesy of TV Hat.