There's a ZDNet post by Jason Perlow suggesting that the show has 3 years to live given that APPL doesn't participate and that MSFT has withdrawn starting next year. May be correct despite this year's apparent high energy and positive tone. It seems like a lot of "also rans" chasing market share of the remainder after Apple has gobbled up smartphones, tablets, etc.
The OLED TV screens (Samsung, LG) are superduper: vivid colors, very bright, very thin, very expensive although the prices will come down as manufacturing gets down the learning curve. Living room integration and home control integration have made incremental progress since last year, but no big "Ah Has". More floor space to digital health gizmos and applications. Auto / Entertainment integration continues incrementally in both the new car and aftermarket products. The distraction factor remains a concern.
There were all too numerous small companies trying to get design wins for their component products. Hope springs eternal, I guess. Then there were the also all too numerous companies displaing add-ons to Apple products with an interesting substantially fewer number doing Android phone and tablet add-ons.
Digital rights management, watermarking, and fingerprinting are alive and well in a broad range of content identification and content distribution and access value propositions. Civolution, Gracenote, and Motorola (Secure Media's HLS+) were among those showing explicit applications of various content protection and identification technologies. I saw incremental improvements and some new applications. Most of the DRM related capabilities were transparent to the user as they should be.
Although a bit off topic, the 3D printers from MakerBot and Cubify and the 3D printing service from Sculpteo were very interesting. Hard to tell whether this will be a "great idea" with limited markets or whether the vendors can do the right marketing to grow revenue sufficiently to sustain these companies.
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