We didn’t do a list of our top ten CES gadgets  at Technology Report so we are going to bring you ten lists from others who were a little more thorough in their coverage of CES 2010.    One of the great things about the CES show is the sheer number of press and bloggers who attend – some 4000+ each year.      Larger blogs like Endgadget and Gizmodo have something of an army of writers fanning out over the show bringing coverage of the huge numbers of new and nearly-new consumer electronic items from the show.

CNETs Best of CES and  FWIW I thought Drew Carey was the best of CNET at CES!

Telegraph UK:  The Top Ten Gadgets

Tech Cocktail:   Best of CES

…. more lists coming soon ….

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During CES Las Vegas  Technology Report joined a small group of fellow CES bloggers for a backstage tour of Cirque du Soleil’s KA theater at the MGM Grand.

Cirque’s media and technical staff are as extraordinary as their performers and we were joined by KA’s Technical Director Erik Walstad, Cirque’s  Social Media Manager Jessica Berlin, and Cirque Publicist Jeff Lovari.

This remarkable show – one of seven permanent Cirque productions in Las Vegas – is the most technically advanced production in the Western Hemisphere and perhaps the world (I could find no other shows that compare).

KA has several extraordinary and unique technologies, but the most imposing and amazing were the massive moving stages that lift, move, tilt, and spin during the performance, providing everything from an empty abyss when the stages are lowered to a sandy beach (using thousands of pounds of tiny pieces of cork as the sand!) to a massive sheer cliff when one is rotated 90 degrees and flipped into a vertical position, with several performers perched precariously on the edge of the deck.

As we toured the massive “basement” of the KA theater, many stories below the seating area, Walstad explained that the production required a massive retrofit of the existing building, with special support structures required to anchor the gigantic gantry crane that moves the huge deck with extraordinary precision and agility using hydraulics that use vegetable oil as an environmentally friendly alternative to more toxic oils.

Two decks appear and disappear during the performance:

The Sand Cliff Deck weighs in at about *40 tons* and measures 25×50 feet with a six-foot depth.   It is supported and controlled by an inverted gantry crane attached to four 75-foot long hydraulic cylinders running along massive support columns.   Together the crane and deck weigh in at about *175 tons*!    The crane is powered using five pumps and about 3500 gallons of vegetable oil.

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Chihuly Glass Gallery at CITYCENTER

Originally uploaded by JoeDuck

Note: Aria Resort, Vdara Hotel, and Crystals are sponsors of Technology Report’s CES Coverage.

Next to the ARIA at CITYCENTER Las Vegas are two spectacular art galleries – one with Chihuly Glass Sculptures.  Chihuly glass is also in the incomparable Bellagio Lobby ceiling.  However the glass “flowers” are backlighted at the Bellagio – against the artist’s wishes I understand – making the glass less striking than in the CITYCENTER gallery where the special lighting effects blend with the colors and glass to make spectacular pieces.

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ASUS at CES

Originally uploaded by JoeDuck

There are more different types, sizes, and brands of computers at CES than you can shake a stick at, though Apple is always conspicuously absent. In fact the Apple Tablet somewhat overshadowed much of the innovations of the Las Vegas show because clearly the Apple Tablet is going to be the “one to beat”, especially given the lack of any clearly “superb” tablet offering at CES.

Although I have not done enough research to generalize much about the best new PCs I think it’s clear that the mainsteam trend is towards smaller laptops and netbooks with robust features. Costs are going down – features that would have been unheard of at any cost 5 years ago are now standard on even a modest PC. Battery life is impressive and getting better – one of the ASUS PCs shown here had a battery that lasted something like 10 hours.

ASUS also has a new interesting line of *very large* laptops with high quality speakers built into the sides of the chassis to the left and right of the screen. Although heavy, these will offer huge power and a “desktop” feel for your mobile computing. Still, I think weight is the key factor driving down PC size and predict it’ll be the netbooks that dominate the market for the next few years.

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CES South Hall

Originally uploaded by JoeDuck

It’s hard to describe the size of CES becuase it’s really, really big. This is a photo of *part* of the South Hall of the Las Vegas Convention Center. There’s also a North Hall and Central Hall, the Hilton Venue and the Sands Venetian Convention Center (though that venue was a lot smaller than last year.

Still, the early numbers suggest attendance was up this year even as total exhibit space appeared to be somewhat smaller and the “party food” metric suggested that folks may have been scaling back somewhat despite the fact that this is generally considered the largest and most influenctial technology conference of the year (there is some dispute about that I understand as some conferenences have more attendees, though I think CES remains the largest in terms of exhibit square footage.

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Cirque du Soleil’s KA – backstage at MGM

Originally uploaded by JoeDuck

Before the CES show began I toured Cirque du Soleil’s KA theater at the MGM Grand. This is one of the world’s most technically advanced theatrical productions and the tour gave us some amazing insight into how much work goes on behind the scenes in this amazing show.

There are actually more technicians *behind the scenes* than in the large cast of about 75 performers and musicians. Advanced Technology is everywhere at this show.

Tomorrow we’ll begin a two part series on the amazing technology behind Cirque du Soleil’s KA.

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ZigBee Energy Control

Originally uploaded by JoeDuck

Monitoring and controlling energy use has become a major theme in technology and several CES vendors had devices, chips, and standards that worked to monitor and control energy use for appliances.

A question I’m working to answer with more research is whether the best approach for this type of home energy control are the solutions proposed by some of the high end exhibitors at CES – Control4 and Zigbee , or the very simple yet elegant “smart socket” approach taken by USA / Beijing’s “i-Sockets.com” where very inexpensive sockets communicate with the home PC and allow control of things plugged into these sockets via the PC and even remotely over the internet.

Another inexpensive “smart socket” approach is from Picowatt, featured as a CNET CES top pick

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Twitter at CES

Originally uploaded by JoeDuck

The rise of Twitter as a business tool was a major theme at CES 2010 as well as at many hotels and attractions in Las Vegas, most of which are now using Twitter to communicate with potential and current customers. Several vendors were using Twitter “retweets” to get buzz and take advantage of one of the potentially most cost effective “viral marketing” tools on the internet – Twitter.

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CES Unveiled – the Pre CES Show event for Press and Bloggers

Originally uploaded by JoeDuck

Well, it’s time to bring some order to the CES Coverage now that the hundreds of photos are uploaded and the frenzied week of new technologies is over.

I’m always disappointed in how little “Web 2.0″ there is at CES. In 2008 – the show year before the bubble burst and when big money was flowing very freely for big internet players – we saw a large number of major displays by internet companies like Yahoo and Godaddy. Last year and this year it seemed hard to find many “mostly internet” companies at CES although an interesting exception to this was COPIA – a brand new social networking website for book lovers that also provides a line of e-Readers. I’ll have a separate report on COPIA as it’s an interesting idea and approach that I think is designed as much to be aquired by Amazon than to become a separate player in the online book space.

Another exception to the “little Web at CES” rule is the rise of Twitter and Facebook as key marketing tools for many of the businesses there, as well as the fact most are bringing forms of interconnectivity into the equation. So we’re seeing the internet in huge use as something to *enhance* existing technologies more than as standalone websites. Is this simply because CES is mostly a consumer hardware show?

Will we find that the future of the internet is primarily how people relate in pure online environments or in how they interconnect their devices and flow their lives online?

Stay tuned….tuned online that is.

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CES Intel – Brilliant

Originally uploaded by JoeDuck

The best exhibit at CES, Intel’s brilliant “World View” showcased their new super fast processor, an Intel Core i5s i7 though not sure which model.  Wikipedia on Intel Core Processors.

This display was probably the most imaginative and appealing I’ve seen – a huge double touch screen that collected data in near real time from web sources like Flickr and Twitter, added images to smaller rotating cubes on the screens that could be touched to expand the data source. This was a beautiful way to display a clever Web 2.0 application.

Here’s a Video from the team at TechViShow though I think videos don’t do this justice as it’s something of a 3D real time device.

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