I wrote a couple of posts last year about the expanding field of companies offering content-recognition services to user-generated video sites, peer-to-peer networks and other businesses with inventories of uncertain provenance. At the DEMO conference this week, yet another firm joined the fray: Eyealike, a small company from Bellevue, WA, whose strength is in facial recognition technology.

Television networks have garnered a lot of attention in the past year for making their programs available for free online, be it through their own sites (e.g., cbs.com and comedycentral.com), joint efforts (hulu.com) or social networks (MySpaceTV). Many of these efforts rely on Adobe's well-nigh ubiquitous Flash format, which works on Macs as well as PCs. One consequence of using Flash is that the streams aren't encrypted, which means they can be recorded and redistributed. That's not necessarily a bad thing for advertiser-supported programming, but not a good thing if people routinely clip out the commercials before passing the video along. Where there is a vulnerability, there will be tech companies trying to exploit it -- and, inevitably, others trying to fend them off with tighter security.

Warner Music Group's lawsuit against Seeqpod, like Viacom's $1 billion claim against YouTube, raises intriguing questions about how the Digital Millennium Copyright Act applies to sites that rely on copyrighted media furnished by users. I'm going to skip the legal discussion, though, to ponder a related policy question: Should Internet-based music businesses be able to avoid paying copyright holders based on purely technological differences in the delivery of their product?

Eight months after its acquisition by CBS, online radio service Last.fm announced a significant new feature: on-demand songs, free of charge. What's the catch? I'm still trying to figure that out.

Reader James Lubin of Los Angeles pointed out something I'd overlooked in my post Tuesday about Apple's new movie rental service. One of the differentiators between Apple and other downloadable movie sites is that rented films can be transferred to pocket-sized portable players in addition to laptops. Previously, that was something only DivX-enabled services such as Film Fresh could do with rentals, and until this month, no major studio had approved the use of DivX's DRM on its movies. But Lubin pointed me to a post on The Unofficial Apple Weblog reporting that movies rented from iTunes can be transferred only the latest iPods, i.e., the Touch, the Classic, the iPhone and the redesigned Nano.

The explosive growth of Internet use in the 1990s stemmed in part from the arrival of the World Wide Web, but also from the shift from pay-per-minute to all-you-can-eat pricing from Internet service providers. One of the leaders in that shift was America Online, which quickly became the dominant provider of dial-up Internet access. Now, AOL's parent, Time Warner, is flirting with a return to usage-based pricing as a way to reduce congestion on its cable-modem service. It could be a welcome development for consumers but not necessarily for content providers, particularly those offering video through the Web.

EMI Group's relatively new chairman, Guy Hands, announced a plan Tuesday to restructure the company's money-losing recorded music division, aiming to shift from the industry's high-risk, high-reward model to something more modest (and profitable). For starters, he wants to make smaller up-front investments in artists, lowering the amount of sales required before they break into the black. Doing so requires further cuts in EMI's expenses, which means 1,500 to 2,000 of the company's employees will be looking for new jobs this year. The layoffs notwithstanding, EMI's willingness to make fundamental changes in its business model struck me as something the LA Times should applaud on its editorial pages. So, in my role as an editorial writer here, I made the pitch at our editorial board meeting yesterday.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs confirmed this morning its long-rumored entry into the online movie rental business, saying it had deals with all the major Hollywood studios to offer downloadable films for $2.99 (older titles in standard definition) to $4.99 (new releases in high definition). The company's approach is plagued by many of the same studio-imposed problems that have burdened pioneering download sites Movielink and CinemaNow, but it also has a couple of advantages unique to Apple.

In the aftermath of last week's International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the trade group mounting that epic gadget-fest has banned a reporter from the Gizmodo website. The reporter -- one Richard Blakeley -- used a gadget modeled after the TV-B-Gone to turn off an assortment of display screens at the show, including ones used during a presentation by Motorola. He recorded the pranks and posted a short video on Gizmodo, with an intro by the site's editor, Brian Lam. ("It was too much fun, but watching this video, we realize it probably made some people's jobs harder, and I don't agree with that (Especially Motorola).")

One of the trends on view at this week's Consumer Electronics Show was slimmer and slimmer flat-panel TVs. Pioneer showed a prototype that was a mere 9 mm (a little more than 1/3") thick, while several other manufacturers offered technology demos and production models in the 1"-2" range. The closer sets get to the wall, though, the more consumers will want to dispense with the tangle of wires typically needed to connect a set to peripheral devices, such as disc players and amplifiers. One approach is to hide those wires behind walls and under floors, but that typically requires a professional installer. Another idea, from Irvine-based OWLink Technology, is to make the wire all but invisible.

The consumer electronics industry may know where it's headed, but it doesn't seem to know how to get there. That was my takeaway from this week's International Consumer Electronics Show, where once again there was more talk than action around the topic of the connected home. Clearly, manufacturers are focused on creating devices that link seamlessly to each other to share audio, video and images. And they had plenty of prototypes and demos showing how two or three items could feed the same screen and respond to the same remote control. But if you were hoping for a standard way to bring together every piece of your personal entertainment gear, from TV and stereo to camcorder and cell phone, regardless of the brand, you were out of luck. It's not for lack of trying. There are several inter-industry groups working on various aspects of the problem. It's just that seemingly every year a new set of pieces get thrown into the puzzle.

The year-end sales numbers for the music industry came out last week, and they were even more grim than expected. So I have to admit, I was wrong a year ago when I said:

We seemed to have reached the point now where digital sales have grown enough to fill the void left by slumping plastic-disc sales. And if the growth continues at anything close to the current rate -- downloadable albums doubled to 32.6 million, and downloadable tracks increased 65% to 582 million -- total sales of albums and songs in the U.S. might actually (gasp) grow.

Yeah, I feel pretty stupid now. CD sales were down so much in 2007, even when you included digital album sales the total was 15% below the previous year's numbers. Throwing in digital singles doesn't help much, either, despite a 45% increase there: the total for CDs, digital albums and digital album equivalents (i.e., each group of 10 downloadable singles) was 9.5% below the corresponding figure for 2006.

We can all speculate about the reasons for the accelerating slide, although I'm not inclined to blame the artists. Every year I think there's an incredible amount of great music being produced, albeit mostly by independents, and last year was no exception. Instead, I'll refer you to some great number-crunching by Bob Lefsetz. In a nutshell, the problem for this hits-dependent industry is that the hits just ain't as big anymore.

-- Jon Healey

The photo of "Noel" by Josh Groban, the top-selling album of 2007, is courtesy of Groban's website.

As a World Series champion pitcher for the Boston Red Sox and Arizona Diamondbacks, Curt Schilling has long used computer analysis as part of his rigorous pregame preparation.

Now he hopes his stellar baseball career has prepared him for a life with computers. Schilling, who is 41 and says the coming season (for the Red Sox) will be his last in baseball, has founded and self-funded a computer game company that has been hiring industry veterans as well as some notable outsiders.

Though the first big game from 38 Studios won't come out until late 2010, the Maynard, Mass., start-up already has 35 employees and is looking for outside investors.

During a small dinner for the media at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week, Schilling said he had long been an active player of such major multi-user games as "World of Warcraft" and "Everquest."

As a fan of J.R.R. Tolkien’s "The Lord of the Rings" and other detailed fantasy realms, Schilling hired bestselling novelist R.A. Salvatore to create the world and Todd McFarlane, who won an Emmy for the HBO series "Spawn," as creative art director.

Schilling said his only post-baseball occupation will be serving the company, which he likewise hopes will be the last job for other workers.

The Beantown icon said he was motivated in part by the possibility of changing his employees' lives for the better, especially after learning how debilitating the gaming industry can be for software developers.

"My only two rules are: Show up on time and kick ass," Schilling said, attributing that mantra -- and the rest of his managerial strategy -- to Red Sox Manager Terry Francona.

But he conceded that there were times when his All-Star history made it hard to empathize completely with the staff. Schilling, who is famous for pitching with a bloody sock as a result of having his injured ankle tendon sutured in place, recalled one weekly meeting where an employee complained about being tired.

"Let me tell you how this works: I stitched up my ankle to pitch in the World Series," Schilling remembered telling the man. "Let’s GO!"

-- Joseph Menn

Photo by the Associated Press

Here's an unusual first. Paramount Pictures announced a deal Wednesday to let MusicGiants, an online music store that caters to audiophiles, sell collections of movies loaded onto hard drives. Buyers will be able to transfer the contents of those drives onto personal  computers or, more likely, home media servers. The deal marks the first time Paramount -- and probably any major Hollywood studio -- has let its films be a) delivered on hard drives and b) loaded in bulk onto home servers. MusicGiants will also be able to sell downloadable titles one by one through its new online video store, dubbed VideoGiants, although it doesn't plan to do so until later this year.

Heard this one before? A tech start-up company plans to install movie-rental kiosks in airports, train stations and convenience stores. This go-around, the would-be entertainment retailer is PortoMedia of Galway, Ireland, whose business plan revolves around tiny, souped-up flash drives. The company is backed by IBM, which is supplying the kiosk technology, and claims to be in late-stage talks with the major Hollywood studios. The kiosk idea has been floated (and sunk) many times, most recently as a way to burn DVDs on demand at video stores and other retailers. What makes PortoMedia a bit different -- in a way that bodes well for its business -- is shorter wait times for customers and lower equipment costs.

Polaroid has rediscovered its mojo.

The company that defined photographic instant gratification introduced a new inkless printer for pictures taken on a cellphone or with a digital camera. Transfer the image to the Polaroid Digital Instant Mobile Photo Printer via Bluetooth wireless technology on the phone or a USB cable on the camera. The portable printer spits out an image on a 2-inch-by-3-inch sticky-backed paper. In demonstrations, the whole thing happened in about a minute.

But what's really magic about the printer is its zero ink technology -- or Zink, for short. It uses special paper that is embedded with 100 billion yellow, magenta and cyan dye crystals. The colors appear when the printer applies 200 million heat pulses, in 30 seconds, in a single pass. The paper costs about 30 cents a print, and the printer sells for $150.

Unlike Polaroid photos of old, this image is resistant to fading and can be dunked in water without running (we watched).

-- Dawn C. Chmielewski

Photo: Polaroid

Amazon.com's vice president of consumer electronics, Paul Ryder, walked the show floor with us to talk about some of the themes from CES 2008 that resonate with Amazon customers. One theme he repeated was the important distinction for users between convergence-capable and convergence excellence.

-- Michelle Maltais

Sony Pictures Entertainment Co. has spent the last six months trying to elevate its online video site, Crackle, as a cut above the creative chaff of other user-generated sites that serve up fat cats watching TV and skateboarding dogs.

It is in this spirit that Crackle announced the premiere of "Penn Says," the first unscripted series created specifically for the Internet by the outspoken comic, magician and pundit Penn Jillette. I should have prepared myself for what would come next: Even the press release describes the short, four-times-a-week videos as a "raw look inside Penn's life."

Penn placed a bean on his tongue, and, through a series of snorts, grunts and painful facial contortions, expelled the bean through the tear duct of an eye. The gross-out feat -- which Penn chose because he was prevented from doing fire eating -- literally made me retch over my keyboard and, for once, appreciate being too busy at the show to eat lunch.

"Remember, this is what I do when they don’t let me do what I want to do," Penn said. "All the Sony people should keep that in mind: You put one barrier up, it’s going to get worse."

I wonder how much worse it'll get for Sony's online site, which has apparently abandoned the creative high ground for the mosh pit.

-- Dawn C. Chmielewski

As CES winds down, here's some of the most interesting coverage from around the Web on this Wednesday morning (er, early afternoon...).

-- Weird post of the day goes to Gizmodo, which found a mysterious death on the showroom floor.

-- CES has felt a little like a funeral for HD DVD. Its backers haven't thrown in the towel, but the L.A. Times reports that one of them, Paramount Pictures, is considering it.

-- A $1,500 keyboard? Say whaaat?

-- Engadget gets a sneak peek at a Delphi car navigation system whose screen displays one image to the driver and a different one to the passenger riding shotgun. That means you can get driving directions while your companion watches a movie.

-- News.com says one of the techiest people it found in Vegas wasn't in the showroom -- he was driving a cab.

-- Second weirdest post of the day goes to Gizmodo, which gets its hands on a Microsoft children's book that answers that burning question, "Mommy, why is there a server in the house?"

-- Chris Gaither

The only contingent more numerous at CES than gadget freaks is hypochondriacs. Take 140,000 sleep-deprived, overworked humans, cram them sardine-style in planes, buses and meetings rooms, and voila! You've just transformed Las Vegas into a 24-hour party for germs. The lengths to which people here will go to avoid getting sick is impressive.

At a CES event Saturday, German clock radio company Sonoro Audio gave away white gloves, which were far more popular than the press kits they were handing out. It's not uncommon to see someone whip out liquid hand sanitizer shortly after shaking hands. One marketing executive, who declined to have her name used, said she lines the insides of her nose with Neosporin before she boards the plane to Vegas. Other preventive remedies include mega doses of vitamin C and packets of Airborne, an herbal product said to help boost the immune system.

Jay Stevens (pictured above) builds convention booths for a living and has survived five CES shows. He has bacteria aversion down to a science. Stevens, a 35-year-old from Salt Lake City, Utah, gradually pumps his body with vitamin C leading up to the show, reaching a peak of 2000 milligrams a day. Before boarding the plane for Vegas, he sips Airborne. "I swear by that stuff," he said.

At the show, Stevens obsessively washes his hands. He tries never to directly touch escalator handrails,  doorknobs, keyboards, mice and controllers. But that's not always practical, especially at a trade show for gadgets. So every hour or so, he coats his hands with hand sanitizer, which he carries in his front pocket.

"People touch an escalator, pick up the germs," Stevens said. "The cellphone rings and they bring that to their face. That's all it takes. You're done!" This being CES, Steven's solution is a high-tech one -- a wireless Bluetooth headset, so the germs don't get a chance.

-- Alex Pham

Photo credit: Alex Pham

After three blockbuster films, Jack Sparrow is taking his high-seas high jinks online. Disney Online quietly launched its "Pirates of the Caribbean Online" game on Halloween.

Now, it's planning a major advertising campaign to woo fans of the movie online, where they can live out their pirate fantasies (think: swashbuckling, cannon battles, searching for treasure, etc.) and interact with realistic digital proxies of the characters from the movies.

It's initially free. But the goal is to get people to pay $9.95 a month so they can access all levels of weapons and skills or lead their own motley crews as head of a Pirate Guild.

The business proposition -- beyond dipping deeper into the cash cow that is online gaming -- is to keep "Pirates" fans interacting with the franchise until Disney is ready for the next installment.

-- Dawn C. Chmielewski

Photo: Walt Disney Co.

The problem: a houseful of gadgets and devices that all stake claim to your music, movies, pictures and video, like toddlers who amass toys and don't like to share. OpenPeak thinks it has the answer: a universal remote control on steroids that acts like a Swiss governess that can make all those unruly gadgets behave and play nice.

Lenovo, the Chinese computer manufacturer that bought IBM's PC division three years ago, introduced a line of laptops for consumers at this week's show dubbed IdeaPad (like ThinkPad, get it?). One intriguing feature: facial recognition technology.

Planetwide Media of Aliso Viejo was here showing off Comic Book Creator 2, the latest version of a computer program that enables people to make their own comic books. In essence, it helps users arrange photos, graphics and videos into comic-book-style panels, then overlay text in comic-book-style word balloons and caption boxes. It also makes it easy to post one's creations to blogs and social networks.

It's just the kind of tool that remix culture thrives on, because it can recontexturalize all sorts of media into a comic-book setting. In fact, Planetwide encourages this kind of mash-up by offering versions of the product that include imagery licensed from the likes of Marvel Comics. The addition of Marvel characters, however, forces Planetwide to subtract some of its software's most compelling features. For instance, Marvel doesn't allow its images to be mixed with anyone's personal media. (Some licensees impose this restriction and some don't.) As a result, Comic Book Creator can't be used for, say, a series of panels showing Wolverine battling the neighbors' cat. Nor does the Marvel version encourage posting to the Web.

You could argue that Marvel has to protect its characters and trademarks. Those characters and trademarks are valuable only if people are interested in them, though. So which approach seems more likely to sustain that interest: allowing Marvel figures to be part of the remix culture, or trying to keep them out of the fun?

-- Jon Healey

The explosion in digital media has been good for Seagate Technology, the Scotts Valley, Calif., manufacturer of hard drives. "Everything is getting a storage device on it," said Bill Watkins, Seagate's CEO. The main question for consumers these days is whether to leave the music, video and other media they're collecting scattered among their devices, aggregate them in some kind of electronic vault at home or move them all to the Net.

"For us, things are good! Every one of these applications, we sell storage into," Watkins said. One of the strongest areas for Seagate, though, has nothing to do with entertainment or personal media collections. It's storing the feeds from security cameras.

A car that can drive itself -- now that's a gadget Americans would love. But the self-guided Chevy Tahoe that General Motors was showing off in the parking lot across from the Las Vegas Convention Center wasn't exactly a production model.

Developed by a team that also included Carnegie Mellon faculty and students, the  modifications that enabled the SUV to win last year's DARPA Urban Challenge in Victorville, Calif., aren't going to be available as factory-installed options any time soon. And really, does anybody honestly want a LIDAR rig mounted on their roof?

Still, Bakhtiar B. Litkouhi, a manager in GM's research and development division, said some of the technologies that enabled the Tahoe to pilot its own way through 60 miles of simulated city traffic are starting to creep into vehicles today, and will evolve into more powerful versions in the next few years.

Portability was the theme of G4's Best of the Best awards Tuesday night. The website, which covers the gadget and games culture, put the spotlight on devices that were slim, small and sleek. With a couple of exceptions, most of these devices could all fit into a single backpack. Panasonic's new HD camcorder, for example, is about the size of a can of Red Bull.

Also featured was a combination cell phone and movie projector called Pico by Texas Instruments, as was Sony's 11-inch organic light-emitting diode (OLED), which has the width of three credit cards.

Not too long ago, the recording industry was pressing file-sharing networks such as Kazaa to use filtering to deter piracy of copyrighted works.

NBC Universal today renewed the call for technological intervention in a forum at the 2007 Consumer Electronics Show, but with a twist. It's urging service providers, such as AT&T, to filter for copyrighted works as data travels over the network to your computer.

AT&T seems at least willing to consider filtering to curb Internet piracy, noting that Internet service providers recognize that they have moral -- but not necessarily legal -- obligation to deal with theft.

"It is a systemic problem," said James W. Cicconi, AT&T's senior executive vice president of external and legislative affairs. "It is theft. It does burden our network. It creates extra cost to our consumers. It opens them to legal liability in many cases as well. "

The mere idea is bound to trigger consumer backlash, as occurred when Comcast Corp. started throttling BitTorrent traffic.

Other participants in the forum were filtering companies Audible Magic and Vobile Inc., consumer electronics giant Philips and Microsoft Corp.

-- Dawn C. Chmielewski

Check out the i-Fi Chair.

-- Myung Chun

Gadgets for grownups may be chock-a-block at CES, but the electronics market for the juice box set is expanding fast. Sales of so-called youth electronics grew 22% in 2006, contributing $1 billion of the $22 billion U.S. toy market that year, according to market research firm NPD. Some gizmos, such as the V-Smile Baby Infant Development System, target kids even before they can walk.

Since Junior is unlikely to have a credit card, gadgets makers instead try to appeal to parents by boasting that their products can turn kids into the next Stephen Hawking. Many, according to a report released Tuesday by The Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Street Workshop, have no scientific basis for making these claims. Of the 300 video games released in 2007 as "edutainment" titles, only 69 had any educational value and just two were based on any type of curriculum, such as math, science and literacy.

At a trade show awash in mega-big screen technologies -- one of the major stars was Panasonic's 150-inch plasma, perfect for the person who wants a video billboard in the living room -- Venkat Eswara stood in a corner of the Motorola booth amid loud demonstrations of music phones.

But what he had in his hand was distinctive - a handheld television that you actually might want to watch.

There are plenty of handheld TVs on the market, but the screens are so awful that they're more frustring than fun. Especially in room light much stronger than a 60-watt bulb. And just forget about them outside.

But this 4.3-inch TV, the Motorola DH01, had a swell, wide-screen image. It might have not been the quality of LCD, but it was certainly watchable. And although I didn't have a chance to try it outside, it stood up well to the bright lights of the Las Vegas Convention Center.

One problem - the DH01 can't be used in the U.S. because the broadcast band it uses is empty of digital broadcasts here. That band is used in parts of Asia and Europe, though, for digital. And it might go online in the U.S. when all TV goes digital (an event that has been delayed several times but is now scheduled for February 2009).

In the meantime, Eswara was showing video of a soccer broadcast from inside the booth.

Time will tell if the little TV, which will probably sell for about $500, can score a goal.

-- David Colker

At almost every CES, at least one vendor shows a hands-free technology for switching on lights, controlling the TV set, playing video games and the like by just waving or pointing figures into space.

They were good for a laugh (away from the booths, of course) but didn't amount to much of anything.

Finally, Lightglove -- a small company in Cathapin, Va., -- might have gotten it right. With an infrared device on his wrist resembling a thick watch, Bruce Howard of the company was able to mime playing a piano and a laptop responded by playing Bach's "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring" (Howard didn't have to be an expert pianist -- the software on the screen was from a "Guitar Hero" type of game that does not need musicianship). Howard also played an on-screen pinball game and said that the device could be programmed to do things around the house.

Sounded like a high-tech Clapper for people too lazy to clap.

Howard laughed, but he has heard it all before.

"We might think it's silly, but think about what this could do for elder care, for people who have trouble with a remote control," he said, "or even dialing the phone." 

Clap on.

-- David Colker

Just when you thought you figured your way out of the Blu-ray and HD DVD maze, another head scratcher pops up, complete with its own alphabet soup of acronyms. This time, it has to do with mobile digital television--the ability to tune in to, say, a live Lakers game from the car, cellphone or laptop. At CES this week, LG showed off a suite of gadgets that can receive digital TV signals, including two mobile phones, a four-inch portable display and a USB dongle that turns a laptop into a digital TV. LG calls these gizmos Mobile Pedestrian Handhelds, or MPHs.

This is interesting because traditional analog TV signals in the U.S. will stop broadcasting in February 2009. At that point, only digital TV signals will be transmitted. And that's when these devices will kick off.

If you think you've seen this show before, you probably have. Samsung Electronics Co. in 2006 announced a similar initiative, called advanced vestigial sideband, or AVSB. MPH is a competing standard. Samsung and LG have both said they are prepared to launch products in 2009. My colleague Jon Healey offers his take on this here.

--Alex Pham

A year ago, Samsung unveiled a version of digital TV broadcasting that was optimized for mobile devices -- think of viewers speeding along in trains, buses and cars, not just sitting in a park with a cellphone. At the time, it seemed like a nifty A-VSB solution was a sure bet for inclusion in the U.S. standard for digital TV. Since then, however, at least one other proposal (LG's MPH) has emerged to vie for support from the U.S. digital TV standards committee. Samsung has responded at the show by trotting out prototypes of a handful of mobile devices that tune in A-VSB signals as well as a new business model built around the technology.

What comes with a $50,000 bed?

On display at CES was the Starry Night bed from Leggett & Platt, which at the top price includes an HDTV projector that pops up from the headboard, pop-up speakers, dual temperature controls for the mattress, snoring sensors, automatic head lifter (in case snoring is detected), breathing-pattern monitoring (it can be linked to a 911 call system if breathing is absent), iPod dock and automatic lighting systems that can be set for reading, awakening or romance.

A discount model, which comes without the entertainment package and some other niceties, is $20,000.

What ever happened to Magic Fingers?

-- David Colker

Photo: Leggett & Platt

Comcast Corp. Chairman and Chief Executive Brian L. Roberts dazzled the hard-to-impress tech set in this morning's keynote, during which he demonstrated the breathtaking speed of the coming generation of cable modems. He says they're capable of downloading a two-hour high-definition movie (Warner Bros.' "Batman Begins" was used in the demo) in four minutes. He said the same task would take six hours via a high-speed DSL modem or seven days -- more time than it actually took to make the movie, celebrity guest Ryan Seacrest quipped -- over dial-up. 

Roberts' promise to have millions of these modems (that's Docsis 3.0 for you geek-speakers) in homes by the end of the year prompted spontaneous applause from the audience (more than "American Idol" host Seacrest managed to elicit from the crowd).

Roberts also showed off a new Web offering called Fancast, which allows Comcast subscribers to use their PCs as virtual remote controls. It recommends TV shows and movies the viewer can watch, on demand, on the home computer. They also can elect to record using the DVR.

But the biggest moment, by far, was a live performance by Bret McKenzie and Jemaine Clement, the stars of HBO's quirky comedy "The Flight of the Conchords." McKenzie demonstrated his own multi-platform devices -- including a "camera phone" with a disposable camera taped to a phone. The New Zealand folk duo sang their most popular song, "Business Time."

Yes, Roberts agreed, "it's business time."

-- Dawn C. Chmielewski

Here's some of the most interesting CES coverage from around the Web on this Tuesday morning.

-- Wired.com finds a technology that lets you hear air guitar. "We took the air guitar phenomenon and put it into an amp," says creator Nitrous Roxide, who demonstrates it. Rock on.

-- Prada got a cellphone through LG last year. Now News.com reports that Armani has teamed with Samsung for a handset of its own. It features a Web browser, 3-megapixel camera, digital music and video player and stereo Bluetooth.

-- Engadget finds lots of color at CES: Sony Vaio laptops in new hues and CAT5 cables in pink whose purchase supports the National Breast Cancer Foundation.

-- Gizmodo stumbles across geek legend Dean Kaman, inventor of the Segway. The site also finds some of the craziest ways to trick out your car with LCD screens and other high-tech gear.

-- Crunchgear finds one of the weirder lamps you'll ever see. Just in case the need to check your stock quotes grabs you while you're turning on the light.

-- Chris Gaither, LAT tech editor

One rumor flitting around the Consumer Electronics Show is that the federal government will push back the Feb. 17, 2009 cut-off date for analog TV signals because the public isn't prepared enough for digital broadcasting. Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin tried to broadcast his own message on that issue this morning. During a Q&A session with CEA honcho Gary Shapiro, Martin said, "There’s no question that it’s a hard date. I don’t see that moving at all."

Of course, Martin's vote isn't the only one on the issue. Congress can adjust the date, too. And with only about half of U.S. homes having a digital TV today, combined with a troubling lack of awareness about the impending cut-off, some consumer advocates are warning of a huge public backlash next year if analog broadcasts end. But Martin said having a sure date for the cutoff is critical to the government's efforts to resell a portion of the TV band (the auction is due to start in a few weeks). Knowing the frequencies will be available in a year, Martin said, helps potential bidders plan for the investment. It also helps technology and consumer-electronics manufacturers make plans for taking advantage of the new broadband services that are expected to result from the auction. Nothing would deter companies more from making such plans, Martin said, than moving the cut-off date.

-- Jon Healey

Two days ago I blogged that I had seen the best television ever.

I might already be wrong about that. Several times over.

At CES this year, new TV technologies are popping up almost as much as annoying ring tones.

Last night came what will probably be the last of the flashy debuts at the show, Mitsubishi unveiled -- amid flashing lights, smoke and girls dancing on pedestals -- its long-awaited laser television.

It looked fantastic. But so did the production OLED set that Sony debuted. And then there were the alluring backlit LCD TVs shown by both Samsung and Sharp (for them, it was like arriving at the party and discovering someone wearing the same dress).

All the new technologies have drawbacks. The Mitsubishi's 65-inch screen was 10 inches thick -- practically  "Biggest Loser" material in an age when flat panel TVs are all the rage. The backlit LCDs on display were prototypes, probably far from ready for prime time. And Sony's OLED had only an 11-inch screen but a hefty retail price tag of $2,500.

It's not sure which wins the picture quality sweepstakes -- that can't be known until there is real, side-by-side viewing.

But it sure makes this a much more engaging CES than just a few years ago, when the most exciting debut of the show was a longer-lasting AA battery.

-- David Colker

-- Myung Chun

As I walked the aisles in one of the cavernous halls of CES 2008, there were storage devices, printers and PDAs, cellphone cases, gaming accessories and MP3 players-- the expected items. And then something stopped me in my tracks.

Not so much for apparent innovation, but more for its seemingly absurd presence at a consumer electronics expo. I was mesmerized since I'd never considered anything -- not a darn thing -- about these devices to be technology-related. 

A closer look, however, revealed that there is a common thread connecting high fashion and high tech. 

Oh, Brother ... sewing machines? It was the constant tattering of thread to cloth that grabbed my attention over the din of beeps, bleeps and dings echoing through the hall. I wasn't the only one -- I've never seen so many men entranced by a sewing machine in my life -- and, no, they weren't just gawking at fashion models on the monitors.

Maybe these aren't as sexy as a screen that covers a city block and offers oversized Oompa Loompas in color so sharp it could cut glass. But in the shadow of looming LCDs, I managed to see a couple of cellphone items that looked potentially interesting.

Make your BlackBerry into a peach.

Sometimes getting a call isn't convenient, but tapping away incessantly on this addictive contraption is socially accepted -- or at least tolerated.

SimulScribe converts your voicemail into a transcript and emails it to your device, with a WAV audio file. The company says it works with all wireless and land-line providers. You get unlimited storage and can manage your voicemail online -- which can be a blessing and a curse, if you have gabby friends.

Now, the company claims 95% transcription accuracy, but they haven't heard my Trinidadian colleague or Jamaican relatives. (My flesh-and-blood friends have a hard enough time understanding!)

On the "lite" end, theres a pay-per-message plan costing 35 cents a pop. Or you can get 40 transcribed voicemail messages for $9.95 a month and 25 cents for every message over that. Then there's the supersized plan: unlimited messages for $29.95.

Plus, SimulScribe is offering to turn your BlackBerry or Windows Mobile device into an iPhone-plus with SimulSays. The company says it's the first visual voicemail app -- one that offers a transcript -- again, a possible benefit if you're trying to dodge long talkers on vmail.

San Diego-based DivX announced this morning that Sony Pictures has agreed to let online video stores and services distribute its movies with DivX's DRM, an alternative to the electronic locks developed by Microsoft, Apple and Intertrust, a company partly owned by (wait for it ... ) Sony.

It's the first major studio landed by DivX, which has been wooing Hollywood for years with little to show for it. But time and recent history may be on DivX's side here. Like the MP3 format for music, which the major record labels shunned for a decade before accepting, DivX's compressed video format has gained wide support among consumer-electronics companies and (ahem) unauthorized sources of movies. The difference -- and this works in Hollywood's favor -- is that DivX's format can be copy-protected with DRM, while MP3 cannot.

Is that the Internet in your pocket or are you just happy to be connected? In a speech Monday by CEO Paul Otellini, Intel Corp., which makes the chips that drive much of the world's computers, unveiled a new chip, dubbed Menlow, that's designed just for mobile Internet devices. Think the iPhone on steroids. With screens around 5 inches, the gizmos are meant to fit into a shirt pocket and deliver full Internet access.

In his first major speech since taking over as chief executive, a casually dressed Jerry Yang (polo shirt and khakis), set the tone for the new Yahoo Inc.

It sounded a lot like the Yahoo of old, the one he co-founded -- but pretty different from the Hollywood approach former CEO Terry Semel took at CES the last few years.

"It's still the same old face," Yang said, after walking out onto the stage, emphasizing the similarity of his mission to the one Yahoo launched with 13 years ago. But, he said, he and co-founder David Filo
have learned a lot since then. Yang's conclusion: "It is time to get Yahoo yodeling again."

You know what a bother it is to carry both your MP3 music player and your Taser gun?

Worry no more.

Today at CES, Taser International introduced the Taser MPH -- the first combination hand-held music player and Taser. 

The player, which has a 1-GB capacity that can hold about 150 songs, is embedded in a holster that slips on your belt. Feel the need to zap someone and you can unholster the Taser, use the built-in laser pointer to aim, and blam -- a couple of darts carrying 50,000 volts hits your victim.

And you don't have to miss a beat.