Tim Conneally

Touch Revolution, a year-old California company that specializes in custom touch-based devices is showing off a desktop Google Android device similar to one that will be released nationwide through service providers later this year.

The desktop TFT LCD touch device is not the exact device that will be released later this year, since "Our customers wouldn't be so happy about us showing it off before they do," according to CEO Mark Hamblin.

Its enterprise brands have all been succeeding quite nicely -- Windows Server, SQL Server, Visual Studio, Office, SharePoint. But in the consumers' mind, Microsoft took a beating last year. How will Ballmer recover?

7:50pm PT: They have moved over to a surface controller that will integrate with the tablet as well as a smartphone. They're showing off an e-ink style mockup as well, this is followed by typical Ballmer comment about how excited he is about everything. Gary Shapiro: "Bill left you a big sweater to fill, Steve, but I think you've pulled it off!" And with that, Tripod comes back on, to play out the quickly vaporizing crowd.

This afternoon, the One Laptop per Child project announced cutbacks that CEO Nicholas Negroponte called "unavoidable."

The nonprofit project that envisioned the $100 laptop that could be used in even the most remote settings has changed its vision to the $0 laptop, and as such has to eliminate roughly half of its workforce.

No longer "Matsushita," and given a big boost with the pending acquisition of Sanyo, how will the world's most recognized brand in consumer electronics, geographically speaking, react to this sluggish economy?

3:43pm PT: And that brings the show to a rather abrupt end, the lights come up and the crowd naturally flocks to the 1/3" thin screen. We will snap some pictures and put them up shortly.

Known worldwide as an infrastructure company, Cisco now plays a bigger role in the CE field for being the parent of major consumer router manufacturer Linksys, and for finding its way into the IPTV infrastructure.

1:54pm PT: Closing statements

The first of NetGear's three big product announcements at CES this morning is its Internet TV player set top box which carries on it, among the usual Web-based offerings, a built-in BitTorrent client.

Netgear's Internet TV delivers Internet content like other set top boxes available today, but ups the proverbial ante by including a video search engine called "Vtap" that combs through the associated Flash video sites, downloadable CinemaNow rentals, and even available BitTorrent files.

Recent iSuppli data shows that the market for LCD panels continued to decline through the holiday season, as demand for TVs, notebooks, monitors, and anything with a 10" or larger LCD panel languished.

With declining demand from both the consumer and corporate sectors, LCD manufacturers reduced their production to a fraction of capacity. Hardware analysis firm iSuppli expects that the conditions of the economy will continue to disrupt the LCD supply chain well into 2009, and could have a severe impact on revenue until the market is stabilized.

The broadband-connected television market will be in full bloom at CES 2009, with Samsung announcing that its newest lineup of HDTVs will sport "Internet@TV", a Yahoo-powered widget interface.

The availability of TV-based widgets traces back to last year's CES, when Intel CEO Paul Otellini showed off the "Canmore" system-on-a-chip in televisions and set top boxes. Later on in the year, at the Intel Developers' Forum in San Francisco, Yahoo expounded a bit on the concept, adding its JavaScript widget engine to the Canmore architecture. Along with service provider Comcast, the companies discussed the Widget Channel distribution mechanism, and the various web-style applications that users would be able to load onto their televisions.

Amazon today announced that owners of the formerly Netflix-exclusive Roku set-top box will be able to access Amazon Video On Demand, and LG announced it's building Netflix instant streaming directly into some of its upcoming HDTVs.

Video rental company Netflix is proving to be a genuine gateway to streaming video content. Today, Amazon announced that its Video On Demand service will be hitting Roku players early this year, adding nearly 40,000 more titles to the around 30,000 Netflix delivers to the diminutive box. Titles are pure H.264 streams (no downloading, since the Roku device has no storage) and will play back at 300, 600, 900, or 1200 kbps. Amazon says movies and TV shows will be rentable or buyable.

Addressing the recent announcement that he will not deliver the Macworld keynote this year, Apple CEO Steve Jobs released a statement this morning about his mysterious health condition.

Jobs' health has been an issue of considerable interest to the Apple community, and indeed to the tech community at large. Jobs' now gaunt frame causes some level of discourse at each of the CEO's public appearances, and the intensity of the rumors is only aggravated by Apple's secretive nature.

Here's a very familiar theme for us every year: Despite not only manufacturers' own best efforts but also certain governments' own regulatory bodies to drive and even enforce industry standards, there's no one way to do digital mobile TV.

Despite the push from manufacturers, mobile carriers and government regulatory agencies, mobile digital television has failed to make an impact on the world like it did in South Korea.

Before CES 2008, Betanews debuted our "Better Questions" contest, where we asked you, the reader, what questions you wanted answered from the CES floor. This year, we're asking you again.

Our correspondents will be out in force all next week, meeting with the companies, executives, and business leaders whose decisions directly impact the consumer electronics industry -- which is experiencing as much volatility now than at any time in its history. We're already asking some of the big questions, in our ongoing CES 13 Countdown series. But we've heard from some of you that you might have better questions of your own.

In the early morning hours of the final day of the year, many Zune users found their devices frozen on the logo screen, totally unresponsive.

The 30 GB Zune experienced a Y2K-like mass failure at around 6:00 am this morning, where the portable media player goes to the loading screen and freezes permanently. Zune.net's service status today warns: "Customers with 30gb Zune devices may experience issues when booting their Zune hardware.  We're aware of the problem and are working to correct it.  The Zune Social might be slow or inaccessible. Sorry for the inconvenience, and thanks for your patience."

Video search engine Blinkx has taken a new approach to video advertising with its "un-roll" format, in a move which leverages its technology for sorting videos for a project with a potentially much higher rate of return.

Instead of tag-based cataloging, Blinkx uses contextual cues such as speech recognition and video analysis to sort its videos. The service is now taking a similar approach to advertising.

During the summer, South Korean CE maker LG debuted the first streaming Netflix-enabled Blu-ray player. Today, the company announced its Blu-ray players will receive content from more streaming partners.

LG's network-connected Blu-ray players will be receiving an upgrade in early 2009, endowing them with features similar to the latest broadband TiVo DVRs: Users will be able to access CinemaNow and YouTube content.