By Michael V. Copeland

If you want a hint at where innovation in the gadget world is headed, talk to the chip guys. These nuggets of insanely complex silicon that companies like Intel, AMD (AMD), Atheros, Broadcom and Marvell (MRVL) are creating today will end up in the phones, laptops, televisions and mobile video/music/Internet devices of tomorrow.

We all know that Intel is dead-set on making WiMax — wireless access measured in square miles — a reality. When they start shipping WiMax PC cards in laptops is another matter (Intel (INTC) said it’ll be around the middle of the year), but when they do, your laptop might start acting and looking more like the tidy mobile device it should be. Think about a sub-subnotebook machine, always connected to a broadband signal — it might make video calls via VoIP, stream movies, take photos and send them wirelessly back home or to the office. I want one now, but it doesn’t happen without the chipset (and the network infrastructure to go along with it). That’s a ways in the future for most of us, especially in the United States. But the capability is coming soon, and a raft of new gadgets that take advantage of it will follow.

One of the most interesting chip trends I saw last week at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas was encapsulated in a little device called the Eye-Fi. Here’s a gadget that exists today, but has lots of implications for tomorrow. What the Eye-Fi does is automatically stream photos from your digital camera via your Wi-Fi network to your PC or an online photo service. What the Eye-Fi team has done essentially is wrap a service around a common flash memory card and a low-power Wi-Fi chip from Atheros (ATHR). It’s these lower power Wi-Fi chips that are extremely interesting, when you start thinking about other services they enable.

All the manufacturers in that realm of the chip business are working on prototypes that are as power efficient and powerful as possible. But think about all the things that can happen if you can put Wi-Fi into all sorts of mobile and fixed devices and connect them to either the Internet or a private network. Gadgets get smart and can receive, send and potentially respond to whatever information they are set up to handle.

It could be smarter light switches that turn off and on via an e-mail or text message, or LCD picture frames that stream your e-mail to your bedside and upload a recipe to the kitchen screen every day before dinner. Or maybe some slick mini-display that scrolls updates from your Facebook friends on one side, reads you the news on the other, and does any number of other things that you find important or entertaining.

Who knows? The possibilities are numerous, but it begins with these chips now starting to ship. It also calls into question the future of other wireless standards like Bluetooth and Zigbee. Zigbee, a low-power wireless technology, has never really taken off. Bluetooth has, but combining Bluetooth with Wi-Fi in devices is much more of a headache than engineers would like it to be. Low-power Wi-Fi plays nicely with its full-power brethren and has the potential to sweep both other wireless standards away.

In the Broadcom (BRCM) booth at CES I got a demonstration of a lower power chip now ready to ship that allowed for high-definition video, graphics and audio in such a small package that you can already see all the little video devices/phones it will spawn. One very cool potential application combined that low power HD video chip with a motion control chip that Broadcom builds for the Wii controller and another very popular music device/phone that begins with the letter “i.” Basically, you get a handheld Wii, which, I would bet you’ll be seeing sometime in the near future.

By Yi-Wyn Yen

LAS VEGAS - One of the amazing things about the Consumer Electronics Show is all the cool toys you’d like to have, but don’t really need or can’t really afford. Like Panasonic’s 150-inch plasma screen TV. Or a $3,000 flight simulator.

The basic version of the DreamFlyer retails for $2,800, and the premium version that includes pedals costs $3,225. It does not include the PC, video game software, or flat-screen monitors you’ll need to set up the machine (up to three is recommended for a more realistic viewing experience). Oh, and some assembly is required.

After that, get ready to soar. Considering that it doesn’t use hydraulics or motors, Flight Motion Simulators’ DreamFlyer does an impressive job of mimicking being in a cockpit. It uses the weight of the individual in the pilot’s chair to generate flying motions like pitch and roll.

The company is currently working on a race car version. There is no release date yet, but you can bet it won’t be cheap.

By Yi-Wyn Yen

LAS VEGAS – Last month Veoh, an Internet TV startup that offers shows from “30 Rock” to “The Young and the Restless” online, discovered a telling statistic about consumers. Of the 23 million viewers who visited the site, a whopping 40 percent of them were watching shows on the Web during prime-time hours.

“Given the option, instead of sitting in front of the TV watching cable or satellite broadcasts, they were sitting in front of their computers watching Internet shows,” says Dmitry Shapiro, founder and chief innovation officer of Veoh.

“It’s the dream of every lazy employee to watch episodes of “Lost” at work,” says Shapiro. “But really, the better value is the ability to watch shows at any time. Whether you’re sitting at Starbucks with your laptop or watching TV in your living room, people want access to the same content. And they want it now.”

That message rang clear at the Consumer Electronic Show this week. TV manufacturers like Samsung, Sharp, and Panasonic all announced deals to stream content from companies like Google to wireless televisions in an effort to bridge the gap between TV and the Internet. HP (HPQ), which along with Sony (SNE) began offering Internet-enabled flat-screens in 2006, announced that all future HP televisions will be wireless.

“A big indicator that this is really happening is that three years ago, we went to content providers and studios to talk about wireless TV,” says Alex Thatcher, a product marketing manager for HP’s Digital TV Solutions. “They were pretty lukewarm. They were focused on distributing their content with Blu-Ray discs. Now, we have content providers approaching us and asking how can they get their videos onto our TVs.”

As the technology improves for TV sets to stream content to and from the Internet and Hollywood continues to port digital movies and shows onto the Web, the prediction that viewers will be able to call up every past episode of “Law & Order” or the Spiderman movies in high definition on the tube doesn’t seem so far-fetched.

“In 2018, the idea that you once had to drive to a store and pick up a movie to rent will seem so strange,” says Curt Marvis, CEO of CinemaNow, which sells and rents digital movies and TV shows online.

A number of Internet distributors are racing to offer digital video on the web. Veoh announced a partnership with Viacom (VIA) this week that will expand its lineup to include hit shows like MTV’s “The Hills,” Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show,” and Nickelodeon’s “iCarly.” Last quarter, CinemaNow struck a deal with HP to provide its movies on HP’s MediaSmart TV sets. Vudu, a newcomer that offers more than 5,000 movie titles on demand with the purchase of a $300 set-top box, will expand its HD service to more than 70 titles next month.

Apple’s iTunes may be responsible for the consumption of digital music, but online video providers say there is still no clear winner in the Internet TV market. “The question is, who’s going to build the right interface and the right model and right set of content where consumers say, `That’s what I want,’ ” says Shapiro.

By Michal Lev-Ram

LAS VEGAS — Paul Jacobs got his start in a robotics lab in the south of France. Now he runs Qualcomm, one of the world’s largest wireless technology companies. Fortune sat down with Jacobs at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas to talk about the future of wireless services like mobile TV, 4G technology and Qualcomm’s recent legal troubles. Late last month Qualcomm suffered a significant setback when a federal judge barred the San Diego-based company from selling chips that infringe on patents held by chipmaker Broadcom’s (BRCM).

Let’s talk about MediaFLO, your live mobile TV standard. I know Verizon (VZ) has already launched it and AT&T (T) has signed on. Are you happy with the progress you’ve made so far?

It’s like any service, you’d like to have more people on the service as quick as possible, more devices out there and more content. It’s like any new technology — it takes a little while before things start to take off. Plus, there were a lot of things we had to do to get it running. We had to get a lot of rights cleared for it. It really wasn’t just about getting a technology going, it was a much broader ecosystem that had to be built up. It’s moving along but, like anything, you always want to go faster.

What was the thinking behind developing yet another mobile TV standard?

The genesis was looking at doing broadcast TV over the cellular network. We realized you couldn’t really do it economically, so we said, how about we start with a clean sheet of paper? How do we build something that really will provide great multimedia and very high quality video at a fairly inexpensive price? That’s why we decided to start from scratch. And, in fact, when we started it, it wasn’t the case that there were other competing technologies for broadcast out there. That kind of came as we were doing the development of MediaFLO. I think we felt like we could do a better job.

What’s your take on the different 4G [high-speed cellular networks] technology standards and when do you think we’ll see mainstream adoption of 4G in the United States?

Obviously Sprint’s (S) talked about rollouts of their service starting in the end of 2008. But the WiMax technology that that’s based off of hasn’t really been developed specifically for mobile use — it doesn’t handle handoffs [transferring calls or data from one cell tower to another] and streaming as well as I would say the next version of it should. Then there are two other technologies: There’s LTE [Long Term Evolution, a 4G standard designed for GMS networks], which Verizon recently said they’ll look at as one of their paths going forward and there’s the UMB [Ultra Mobile Broadband] technology that we worked on. We will be able to roll out chipsets and infrastructure for UMB in the 2009 time frame. But for the most part, I think you won’t see mainstream, major adoption of 4G technologies until a few more years. As with any of these technologies it takes a little while to get through the teething pains and really get it up into the large volumes.

In the past Verizon has been a reliable proponent of your technologies. What kind of impact does Verizon’s decision to embrace LTE have on Qualcomm (QCOM)?

We developed a lot of LTE technology as well. Early on we had been working on various technologies that go into LTE, so we have a lot of intellectual property in it. Plus, we make chips for all different technologies, so we’ll make chips that have LTE in them as well. And really from our core business standpoint, it’s not that big of a difference which technology they chose. For us it’s just another opportunity to put some more tech into the chipsets. Sure, we prefer the technologies that we’ve done all of the system design for, but, in fact, all of these technologies have aspects of our designs in them.

Are you still hopeful about the prospects of UMB?

We’re doing trials with other operators in other countries, so I think there’s still an opportunity for it.

You’ve been involved in several patent disputes recently. Most recently there was an injunction against several Qualcomm products that were found to infringe on Broadcom patents. What kind of impact will that have on the company?

We announced that we have a set of chips where we’ve actually designed out the [infringing technology]. There’s a short-term impact on us and our customers in switching those customers from the chips that they were using to these new chips. We believe that we’ll be able to have those handsets on the market before the end of this quarter. So there is that short-term impact, but we believe that we’ll be able to mitigate it by the end of the quarter. In the medium term there were some products that were in design that we have to make some modifications to. In the long term they had this sunsetting period as part of the injunction which said that we could continue to sell certain products for a certain period of time. We have that time frame by which we have to do a full design-around for some of the other patents. It’s really just a question of getting clarification from the court in time so that we can get the design-around done.

What are some things you think we’ll be doing with our phones five years from now that we’re not doing today?

One of the things that’s exciting is we have this new microprocessor technology that’s got about 10 times better power consumption than the existing thing you have in your laptop. I think we’re going to see people doing a lot of computing in a device that’s handheld and pocketable. Obviously entertainment is going to be big, and there’s 3D gaming, data services and music services. Then there’s navigation. I think we’ll see some interesting combinations with that and services that already exist on the web. And over time, you’ll see the phone take more and more of a role in mobile commerce.

By Yi-Wyn Yen

LAS VEGAS - The Consumer Electronics Show is increasingly about media and content, so it’s no surprise that online advertising companies were setting up parties in the parking lot outside the Las Vegas Convention Center. AOL and Microsoft have white tents and Yahoo has a purple one. But the biggest search giant is missing.

While Google (GOOG) is not attending CES as an official exhibitor this year, don’t be fooled. It may not have invested in its own booth (it did two years ago when co-founder Larry Page gave a keynote speech), but the company has brought an army of Googlers to Vegas and booked a number of hotel suites on the Strip to conduct its meetings.

“We send a fair amount of people to CES to represent us because our work touches all things at CES,” says Tim Armstrong, Google’s president of advertising and commerce. “CES has a wide representation of companies that we deal with. Having them all in one location in January when everyone’s planning their year is a big opportunity for us.”

For Google, CES is a place to plug advertising on YouTube and mobile search ads. Google, which has 65 percent of the search market, according to research firm Hitwise, spends a good deal of its time laying out partnerships with wireless companies and setting up operational plans for the year with its clients. “We took roughly the first half of last year working on a monetization plan for video ads,”Armstrong says. “This year at CES, we’re talking with our partners on how they can migrate search-type programs in a YouTube environment.”

For online ad companies, the high-tech gadget show is a sounding board to learn what consumers want. With consumers demanding online access on mobile phones and location-based devices, online ad companies are looking for ways to be better marketing partners.

“You see all these new connected or semi-connected devices like the iPod that haven’t become meaningful ad-supported models. From an advertiser’s perspective, you really have to get what it is consumers want,” says Jeremy Allaire, CEO of Brightcove, an online video ad network. “There’s a lot of learning and experimenting. Outside of the traditional media and the Web, it tends to be a crapshoot.”

That’s why Yahoo (YHOO) executives say they spend a good portion of their time at CES in learning mode. “There are always new ad formats and platforms emerging, like mobile and rich media ads, and our customers are always asking us about how they can better use those technologies,” says David Karnstedt, senior VP for Yahoo sales.

Advertisers at CES are getting more savvy and demanding more ways to reach their customers beyond typing keywords into a search box. Yahoo, which wants to be the starting point for Internet users with its My Yahoo homepage, says it’s working with partners like major CES exhibitors Samsung, AT&T (T), Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) and Dell on delivering more graphical ads and ads targeted within social communities like Yahoo Answers and Groups.

“We’re seeing advertisers getting more sophisticated and more specific in how they want their ads delivered,” says Mary Bermel, who heads Yahoo’s tech and telco categories. “A lot of our clients in these categories are the early adopters, so if they want to reach 22 different audiences, we need to know how we can better target them.”

Microsoft (MSFT), a distant third to Google in search, is taking advantage of its Xbox 360 console to market video gamers through its 10-million member online network, Xbox Live. It promotes everything from Adidas to Quiznos ads on its network. “These are dynamically-generated ads that are constantly changing,” says Jeff Bell, vice president of marketing for Microsoft’s Interactive Entertainment Business. “The content and advertisement is determined by who you are and where you’ve come from. Our goal is to provide advertising content like on Facebook.”

By Michael V. Copeland

LAS VEGAS — I am not saying it’s safe or smart (and it’s probably illegal in most states), but I’ll be damned if a little driving is going to keep me from checking e-mail on my BlackBerry. And if I already have driving directions on my laptop screen, why not prop it up on the passenger seat next as a sort of ad-hoc navigation aid?

The point is, all the things we do, and all the gadgets we use as part of our work and fun, are steadily finding their way into our cars.  So far, we’ve mostly been the ones who are initiating that migration, not the automakers. People were watching movies on laptops in the back seat, and hacking their car stereos to use their iPods, long before they could get a factory-made LCD screen in a headrest or an in-dash dock for their favorite digital music player.  But based on the miles of auto tech on display at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show, that’s about to change, and fast.

I’m not talking about the usual CES assortment of monster speakers, neon-lit amps and GPS units that if placed in a pile would  become their own geographic feature on a map. The new trend is the ability to bring your entire digital life  — not just music and driving directions — into your car.

Auto parts maker Delphi is showing off a device by partner Autonet Mobile, a Bay Area based startup that has developed a mobile WiFi kit for your car. Screw the base station into your trunk, connect the power, fire up the cellular-based broadband to bring in the Internet signal and your ride is bathed in WiFi.  Passengers can update their Facebook profiles, stream a YouTube video, or check restaurant reviews while on the road. Anything that can connect to WiFi will work. “It’s all about extending the Internet lifestyle into the car,” says Autonet Mobile CEO Sterling Pratz. When you are in range of your home WiFi network you can even send music or video wirelessly back to whatever is in the car.

The Autonet package will include the hardware to bring in the signal and a monthly or annual service fee for the cellular broadband service.  You can try it now for $10.95 a day at certain Avis rental locations, but the ultimate plan is to roll it out nationwide as an option in new cars. That begins in two weeks when two Bay Area car dealerships, one Volvo the other Toyota (TM),  start selling the in-car Internet gear. Pratz would not say what dealers are going to charge, only that it would be “much less than an in-car DVD system,” and the monthly fee would be at a discount to a typical $50 per month cellular broadband contract.

Pratz and his team have taken the approach that it’s far better to let people bring the gear they already have into the car. The logic is that it offers flexibility and no risk of obsolescence as long as WiFi is around.

One gadget that would be a perfect complement to Autonet, essentially an in-dash computer, hits the auto parts after-market in April. Developed by Grand Blanc, Mich.-based Azentek, the Atlas CPC 1200 amounts to a $2,800 PC cum GPS unit that fits in your car dashboard. For that price, the Atlas CPC 1200, has all the bells and whistles you can imagine. Up to 160 gigs of storage, DVD/CD drive, Bluetooth, 6.5-inch LCD touch-screen. The pricey PC, which starts shipping in April, uses an Intel Core Duo processor, and runs Windows Vista Ultimate. What it misses, however is connectivity. But since it does sport Wifi, you could bring in the signal via Autonet and boom, have your e-mail and you buddy list up while you drive.

Microsoft was making noise this year at CES with its Sync partnership with Ford (F).  And while slick in execution, the Sync technology, which will be an option on every Ford 2009 model, it mostly offers voice-activated cell-phone calling and music. One cool feature is the ability to have incoming text messages read aloud by the computer. But if it can do that, surely audio e-mail wouldn’t be too much of a technical hurdle. Give me that, and I’ll bet not only would Sync be a hit, but the roads would be far safer without all the BlackBerry reading drivers out there  — myself included.

By Yi-Wyn Yen

LAS VEGAS - GM CEO Rick Wagoner announced his arrival at the Consumer Electronics Show Tuesday night by rolling up in a silver Chevy Volt. But it was another concept car that Wagoner introduced during his keynote speech that wowed the crowd — the electric-fuel cell hybrid Cadillac Provoq.

In hopes of changing negative perceptions about big American car makers, Wagoner — the first automotive chief executive to speak at CES — used his hour-long presentation to highlight GM’s vision for greener, safer, smarter cars.

Wagoner unveiled the silver Provoq, a zero-emissions protoype designed to have a 300-mile range by using a hydrogen fuel cell to charge a lithium ion battery pack. The car can be charged on a home electrical outlet and its roof sports solar panels to extend battery life. Wagoner did not say when the concept car would go into production, but GM (GM) hopes to deliver fuel-cell cars in three to four years. “With oil hitting $100 a barrel last week… the auto industry can no longer rely exclusively on oil,” he said.

GM is aggressively pushing to change its gas-guzzling image by introducing eight hybrids this year, including the Chevy Tahoe and GMC Yukon SUVs. The Chevy Volt, a battery-powered car whose range is boosted by a small engine that runs on a range of fuels, was unveiled at an auto show last year and is expected to hit showrooms around 2010. Wagoner said GM will continue to push for ethanol-based cars and expects to increase production of energy-efficient cars by 50 percent in the next four years.

Further into the future, Wagoner said he hopes cars will be smart enough to drive themselves. He highlighted a video of a self-driving Chevy Tahoe nicknamed “the Boss” that won a 60-mile DARPA race last year. The Boss will be on display starting Wednesday outside the Las Vegas Convention Center. “Someday you can do your e-mail, watch a video, apply your makeup while commuting to work. You can do all that right now, but imagine if you can do it safely,” Wagoner said.

While self-driving cars may be a thing of the future, car owners won’t have to wait long for car doors that can be locked with with cell phones and for cars that put on the brakes when stolen. GM revamped its 12-year-old OnStar safety and alarm system to slow down a stolen car when it’s being chased by the police. It is also working with Verizon (VZ), Qualcomm (QCOM), and LG on mobile phones that can activate car alarms, lock doors and download driving directions. Said Wagoner: “This has been a massive learning experience for us of understanding where and how the auto and electronic industry intersects.”

By Stephanie Mehta

In his first-ever keynote address at the Consumer Electronics Show Tuesday, Comcast  CEO Brian Roberts seemed to be saying content is king. (Not what you’d expect from the nation’s largest distributor of pay television.)

Roberts, who was joined by radio personality and “American Idol” host Ryan Seacrest for part of his speech, told the Las Vegas audience Comcast (CMCSA) is embarking on a strategy to make a vast library of professionally produced video content available through its “on demand” channel. “Project Infinity plans to give consumers the best and most content they will find on demand anywhere — more HD, more sports, more movies, kids’ programs and network TV,” Roberts said.

The announcement was a shot at satellite television operators DirecTV (DTV) and Echostar (SATS), which have been pledging to deliver 100 channels in high definition. (DirecTV says it now broadcasts some 85 national channels in high def.) Comcast doesn’t offer as many so-called “linear” channels in high-definition, so it isn’t surprising Roberts is touting new two-way technology that will enable it to deliver high-definition video programming on demand.

In addition, Roberts said the company was boosting its library of movies on demand (not necessarily all of them in HD).

Comcast also announced the launch of Fancast.com, a website aimed at helping consumers find, organize, view and even purchase video entertainment. The site is a sort of mash-up of entertainment database IMBD.com, online retailer Amazon, TVGuide and some of the fun, Web 2.0 apps one can find on Facebook.

One reason Roberts might be emphasizing content is because the distribution business is out of favor with investors right now. Comcast’s stock is trading near its 52-week lows, as are the stocks of Charter Communications (CHTR) and Time Warner Cable (TWC), which, like Fortune, is controlled by Time Warner (TWX).

In a recent interview, Roberts explained how cable can keep rivals from the satellite and phone businesses at bay. Content was the last thing he mentioned, but clearly programming is not an afterthought. “We have to innovate, have an open architecture and interoperate between cable companies, and our customer service has got to continue to reach new levels of excellence,” Roberts said. “We also have to have the most content, which we clearly do. Put together, we have a winning strategy.”

By Yi-Wyn Yen

LAS VEGAS - Imagine using a touchscreen that you don’t have to touch. Samsung’s 57-inch LCD functions like a touchscreen by recognizing a person’s motion from a short distance.

Interactive media company Reactrix has partnered with Samsung to use its Wavescape technology that allows people to interact with one of these high-tech screens from up to 16 feet away. Reactrix has spent five years working on the system that uses wireless technology and sensors on the screen to interact with people in 3D. It will allow advertisers to use the monitors to promote their brands.

“This new form of digital signage gets the attention of people walking by. They want to react to it, and as they get closer to the display the interface changes,” says Reactrix CEO Michael Ribero, who described the Wavescape system as a cross between a Nintendo Wii, iPhone (AAPL), and Microsoft’s surface-computing table (MSFT).”Our technology is generations ahead of what Microsoft, Apple and Nintendo have deployed in the marketplace.”

The Redwood City, Calif.-based company already has a long list of major clients that use its interactive ad display. Reactrix projects large video images onto the floors of malls and theaters that customers can interact with using their hands and feet. Shoppers can walk over a Coca-Cola (KO) ad and move snowflakes with their feet or wave their arms to push around Acuvue (JNJ) contact lens.

Now Reactrix, which has raised more than $60 million in funding since 2002, is banking that it can broaden its real estate reach from malls to other high-traffic areas like airports, stores, and hotels. “Out of home really represents the final frontier for media,” Ribero says. “We’re bringing a much more compelling display system outside the living room.” The company delivers 90 million impressions, or views, each month in more than 175 malls and theaters nationwide.

Hilton Hotels will be the first to test out the new 3D interactive LCDs this spring. Hilton will display the systems in lobbies and elevator banks at about 20 major locations, including New York, San Francisco, Chicago and Washington. A Hilton executive says the hotel chain is using Reactrix screens to promote package deals, its resorts and hotel amenities like fitness centers and breakfast specials. Hilton is also planning to use the displays as an interactive concierge to allow hotel guests to access information like weather, local restaurants, and meeting rooms. “There’s a great novelty to this where guests get that instantaneous, immersive experience,” says Jeff Diskin, Hilton’s senior vice president of brand management.

By Michael V. Copeland

LAS VEGAS — The quiet here in a booth sponsored by Dell is at odds with the pandemonium all around at the Las Vegas Convention Center. Four plywood lounge chairs designed by Charles and Ray Eames sit on a dark floor made of some obviously recycled material. In one chair , a guy with headphones covering most of his head quietly taps on a laptop. Squares of drought-resistant grass act as a border around displays highlighting how to live and work with less impact on the environment. A Plexiglas wall invites people to use a grease pencil and answer the question, “What Does Green Mean to You?”

Although it is often wrapped up in a good deal of marketing hype, it’s a question that is beginning to be asked by the exhibitors here at the annual Consumer Electronics Show. Much of the “greening” of the technology world is by necessity. Stringent manufacturing standards and recycling goals must be met. But for their own success, gadget makers are developing new technologies that consume less energy so they can provide longer run times or cooler operating environments.

The goal is better functioning products that happen also to be greener than the power-sucking alternatives. Chip makers like Intel (INTC), Broadcom (BRCM) and Marvell (MRVL) have been beating that drum for several years and are getting amazing results. At this year’s CES, Broadcom is showing off powerful yet very efficient chips that enable things like the playback of high-definition  video on a cell phone. Other companies like Sony (SNE) and Samsung are using organic light emitting diodes to offer super-thin, bright and incredibly efficient screens. Are these kinds of technologies overtly green? No, but they are headed in the right direction.

A new cluster of companies at CES this year featuring “sustainable technologies” are overtly environmental. Some of the companies in this group include, Freeplay Energy which makes solar-powered radios and Meraki Networks, which sells solar-powered WiFi gear and aims to build a free WiFi network in San Francisco. This CES green group is a start, but it is a ridiculously small bunch of fewer than 10 companies.

Still other companies outside of this group have come to CES with a green agenda. One that is making a splash at CES is a company called Green Plug. The Silicon Valley startup previewed its technology Monday — an electronics component chip that provides a layer of intelligence so that gadgets can talk to their power source and make more efficient use of energy, whether it’s from a battery or a wall plug. Applications range from consumer electronics to cars, aircraft and power tools. And GM (GM) on Tuesday will unveil its Cadillac Provoq concept car, which it says will be “free from petroleum fuel and emissions.” That can only mean all-electric or maybe a hydrogen fuel cell-powered vehicle.

Back at Dell’s little green oasis, which must be noted is separate from the massive main Dell (DELL) booth and is tucked into the “sustainable technologies” area, spokesman Adam Schaeffer looks around at the mostly empty booth and stresses, “This is all about promoting the start of a conversation.” Nigel Williams, one of the 140,000 CES warriors here in attendance, walks up to the Plexiglas wall and ponders the question, “What Does Green Mean to You?” Next to replies already written in green, yellow and pink grease pencil that say things like “Hope” and “Breathing clean air,” Williams writes a simple statement, “There needs to be more green products.”

He’s right.