A treasure trove of new health devices unveiled at the Consumer Electronics Show promise to make us healthier by more accurately measuring what makes people thin and athletic. Calorie counting, for instance, can be a terribly misleading way to lose weight, since research shows what and how we eat can affect our love handles more so than the total calories consumed. But such brute-force measures persist because, prior to the consumer health sensor industry, we had very few ways of monitoring our internal wellness.

In other words, what we can measure will become the new means of self improvement. Below is a roundup of the new gadgets launched at CES and how they’ll redefine what we watch.

Weight Loss

Speed Eating – HAPIfork – Many of us meticulously avoid Snickers, yet slam down our salads during the busy workday. Unfortunately, rapidly eating healthy foods can have a similarly poor effect as can eating sugary foods. Speed eating also leads to overeating, since satiety doesn’t register till long after the body no longer thinks it needs to feed. The HAPIfork aims to end the cultural habit of shoveling food into our mouths with a fork that vibrates when users eat too quickly. Check out Stephen Colbert giving a “wag of my finger” to the HAPIfork below:

Air Pollution – Withings Scale: polluted air might not only be killing you quickly, but sending you to an extra-wide coffin, as research has implicated air toxins in obesity. The new Withings scale, which measures weight and fat percentage, added a new feature to measure carbon dioxide, an important proxy for airborne poisons, and can affect sleep, breathing difficulty, and heart rate. Check out our own Darrell Etherington’s review below:

It’s difficult to describe just how misleading calorie counting can be. Last year, I hacked my diet to transform an extra 1,500 calories a day of ice cream and cheesecake to lose fat and gain muscle. While it may not have been the healthiest way to disprove the calorie-fat link, it’s clear, at least for me, that the types of food I eat and how I measure my wellness are much more effective ways of controlling my body composition.

Athleticism

Blood Saturation – Masimo iSpO2 – Olympic athletes train in the mountains because high-altitude training transforms our bodies to more efficiently utilize oxygen when athletes return to lower altitudes. Some readers may have experienced this effect in reverse, feeling lethargic after flying from a sea-level state to one of elevated altitude. The Masimo iSpO2 is a consumer-friendly pulse oximeter that measures the blood oxygen saturation of blood through a fingertip clamp. Athletes could utilize the iSpO2 to measure how their oxygen saturation is influencing their training and make corrective steps, such as high-altitude training, or more experimental steps, such as non-mouth breathing or oxygen masks (masks were found not to have much of an effect in one trial).

Body Temperature – Spree: Warming up your muscles is an important part of working out, but how do you know you’ve actually reached the right temperature? Or, if you’re running on a hot summer day, how do you know if you’re about to overheat? The Spree headband measures internal temperature for safe and efficient exercising.

Heart Rate – Mio Alpha: Runners are fond of measuring their heart rates for peak performance, but some of the most popular devices, such as the Garmin Polar, require a chest strap. Kickstarter-funded Mio Alpha is a heart-rate monitor without the cumbersome strap.

So, go forth my number-crunching uber readers. Measure your way to a thinner, more athletic body.

Being geeky is awesome; number-obsessed performance geeks should be able to wear their devices loud and proud. Last year saw an explosion of calorie-tracking wearable devices, but none of these plastic-looking gadgets were fit for the runway. At the Consumer Electronics Show, BodyMedia revealed an upgraded armband that aims to make data-driven weight loss a fashion-forward accessory by embedding their device into a chic jewelry bracelet. “If I’m taking care of myself, it’s no different than my glasses that help me see better or my watch that helps me tell time.” says BodyMedia CEO, Ivo Stivoric.

The sleek design seems to have accomplished BodyMedia’s goal. At a private dinner held during CES, I witnessed a woman compliment the BodyMedia representative wearing the silvery Core 2 bracelet without her even knowing it was their new model. Ivo says that “intelligent jewelry” is the next step for BodyMedia, which he hopes is “something that people would even wear if it was off.”

Unlike popular alternatives such as the Nike+ Fuelband or Jawbone Up wristbands, which estimate calories from body movement, the BodyMedia device can distinguish between picking up a pencil and picking up a 300lb Olympic barbell. Sensors capture skin temperature and galvanic skin response (sweat) for a more individualized measure of performance.

The distinction is especially important to someone like me who has the resting metabolism of a sleeping gerbil. The Fuelband may estimate that I burned more calories than I actually do, because it assumes I’m an “average” amount of calories while resting, when in fact I pack on pounds by merely thinking about Twinkies.

For the past year, I’ve used the BodyMedia device for various dieting experiments, but the current bulging, white plastic sensor leads many people to believe I have some sort of odd disease. A more fashionable tracking device would reduce stares and help make my geeky obsession with minute-by-minute calorie tracking a chic statement. Perhaps more important, in the near future, it might incentive those without the predilection towards calorie tracking to becoming more weight-loss oriented simply to seem cool.

The Affordable Care Act will flood the resource-strapped national emergency room system with 30 million more insured citizens, increasing already-long wait times to see a doctor. A new hospital-in-a-box, HealthSpot, aims to alleviate congestion with medical stations capable of treating emergency room visits for minor inflictions by beaming in idol doctors via video conference. “Emergency rooms and the urgent cares are being crushed because they’re being used for convenience,” says CIO Dave Sebenoler, who helped launch the product at the International Consumer Electronics Show.

The 10-foot clinic houses a private medical room that feels like a well-lit outhouse. Inside is a scale, chair, and television dashboard, as well as locked bays on each side for medical equipment. After a medically certified assistant helps patients through a kiosk check-in, users are greeted by a friendly doctor who guides them through the use of common medical tools, such as a stethoscope. Vitals are displayed graphically over the doctor’s head throughout the visit.

HealthSpot is currently being piloted in Ohio urgent care and children’s hospital (yes, an urgent care inside of an urgent care – so meta). Eventually, the company wants to bring these tiny health clinics to a local Walgreens, where users can get treated and walk out with an e-prescription right into the pharmacy. Longer term goals may bring tele-doctors to impoverished nations. HealthSpot argues there’s a host of underutilized medical professionals, such as semi-retired doctors who can see patients from the comfort of their homes or  nurses in low-traffic rural hospitals who can be beamed into busy urban emergency rooms.

HealthSpot plans on selling stations to hospitals and retail outlets for around $10K to $15K, with a $950-a-month prescription. Properties get a cut of every visit. On the patient side, HealthSpot boasts cheaper rates of around $60-$80 a visit (urgent care visits can be a few hundred dollars). The company is currently navigating the state-by-state insurance system to see how providers can cover telemedicine and e-prescriptions.

Personally, I can’t wait until I can visit my doctor inside a Burger King.

Beyond their own pet projects, members of Congress often know little more than the public about what the legislature will actually accomplish in a given year. The International Consumer Electronics Show provides a rare escape for America’s tech-savviest policymakers, who are normally inundated with budgets and crises, to focus on their geeky agenda. We sat down with the members in attendance at this year’s show to give you a glimpse of what Congress will–and will not–accomplish in 2013 on privacy, immigration, intellectual property and cybersecurity.

Intellectual Property – Free software zealots may get a small present this year, as a few congressmen, including those close to the powerful Judiciary Committee, are aiming to exempt software from strong patent protections. Members seem to agree that crazy attempts to patent obvious technologies, such as Amazon’s ‘one click to purchase‘ button, demonstrates that software is uniquely prone to abuse.

Democrats and Republicans were also happy to demonize so-called “patent trolls,” those companies who purchase patent rights solely to extort others, with no intention of innovating themselves. “There’s a tremendous amount of bi-partisan support,” says Representative Peter Defazio (CrunchGov Grade: B), for a surgical approach to patent reform, especially on software and litigation issues. “we are focused on getting at the worst actors out there and confront them with costs,” he says, who believes that Congress should be able to pass a law that requires patent trolls to pay legal costs if they lose in court.

Given the recent comprehensive intellectual property legislation, the America Invents Act, no one was optimistic that there will be any broad redefinition of how the U.S. approaches intellectual property.

Immigration — Don’t expect any love for high-skilled immigrant visas without comprehensive immigration reform. After last winter’s spectacular failure to pass the STEM Jobs Act, which would have given out 55,000 more STEM-related visas at the expense of unrepresented nations, it became clear that congress will likely need to solve low-skilled and high-skilled issues at the same time. “There are certainly those who insist that any immigration legislation be apart of a comprehensive, broad-based plan,” says Sen. Jerry Moran (CrunchGov Grade: A), sponsor of the Startup 2.0 Act, which aims to create a visa for self-employed entrepreneurs.

So, can the sequel to the ‘do nothing Congress’ actually pass immigration reform, after failing to pass the comprehensive DREAM Act? “I think we have an opportunity, potentially, because of new Republican leadership interest in getting this issue behind them so they can once again elect a president,” says Rep. Zoe Lofgren (CrunchGov Grade: A), referring to Republicans need to appear immigrant friendly to win over minority voters in future presidential elections.

Privacy – After Gen. David Petraeus’ email snooping scandal demonstrated that even the nation’s top spies don’t fully understand the scope of state surveillance, there was strong support to require warrants for email spying. All legislation needs to be renewed after the election of a new Congress, but Sen. Ron Wyden (CrunchGov Grade: A) seemed to think his colleagues will again broach a law balancing privacy and security.

The specter of Sen. Al Franken’s location privacy bill loomed at CES, though the SNL-writer-turned-policymaker was not in attendance. Franken’s proposal would place new rules related to smartphone location data, especially how often users would have to expressly give applications consent to use data and how they could seek legal redress for violations.

Honorable Mentions – there are a few low-flying issues to keep an eye on

• Pandora founder Tim Westegren donned a button-up shirt to push the Internet Radio Fairness Act, which aims to equalize royalty rights between streaming internet radio and traditional radio.
• Data Caps – a few policymakers, including Senator Wyden, expressed concern over telecommunications companies imposing limits on the amount of data users can download, so-called “data caps”. Whether rules over data caps will come from congress, or the Federal Communications Commission, is anyone’s guess.

There you have it folks: the (partial) tech agenda for 2013. Some people may be uncorking champagne bottles in the streets; others may be crafting tinfoil hats in a makeshift bunker. But, don’t get too excited, since all of this requires them to get along to some degree.

The government wants to help ensure that conference Internet Wi-Fi actually works. FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski announced a new plan to open up a portion of the wireless spectrum for faster and more reliable Wi-Fi devices. Specifically, the FCC will work to open up the unlicensed slice of 5 Mhz spectrum to make way for gigabit Internet devices, “to relieve Wi-Fi congestion at conferences, at airports, and in people’s homes,” said Genachowski on stage at the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES).

This solution could not come quickly enough. At one of the premier tech gatherings on the planet, CES, the Internet is barely usable. All three ways I connect to the Internet – iPhone tethering, a Wi-Fi hotspot, and hotel Wi-Fi – have slowed to a crawl.

A spokesman for the FCC did not give a timeline for the implementation of the new rule, but says that it must coordinate with other federal and military agencies that use overlapping portions of the spectrum. “We are convinced that the spectrum can be shared,” concluded Genachowski.

Wi-Fi has also been hailed as an important solution to general smartphone Internet speed problems since it allows users to offload data downloads to their home Wi-Fi, rather than congested cellphone networks.

I’m about to pull my hair out waiting for webpages to load here at CES, so let’s all pray we can find a solution soon. Otherwise, my posts may contain a lot more expletives.

Just in time for the CES show, a major media outlet is spinning out a little business out of Twitter. The Associated Press today announced that it has inked a deal with Samsung for the consumer electronics giant to have two tweeting slots a day on the API’s main Twitter account (1.53 million users) for the five days the show runs, January 7-11.

Financial terms of the deal have not been disclosed, but the deal is just between the AP and Samsung and does not involve Twitter or its Promoted Tweets service.

This is the first time that the AP has sold space on its Twitter service, although Samsung has a track record of investing in the Twitter platform to promte itself.

An AP spokesperson emphasizes that this deal is only related to the two tweets per day that Samsung is getting as part of the deal. The AP’s team of journalists will be at the event and tweeting from there as they would normally be, and the Samsung deal will have nothing to do with that. Think of these, instead, as commercial slots in AP’s tweeting news service, which it says will clearly be labelled “SPONSORED TWEETS.”

These tweets will be handled by people outside the AP newsroom and will not be in any way automated — in keeping with Twitter’s rules for how Twitter users can present promoted tweets in their account.

The Samsung service is part of a wider strategy at the AP to build up more advertising revenue through mobile and social media, to supplement the licensing fees it gets from newspapers and other organisations for its news wire service.

Other advertising initiatives have included iCircular, a mobile/tablet version of the advertising circulars that appear in printed newspapers. iCircular is still in pilot mode, according to this release in July announcing integration with Print2Web for PDF services. was sold in November 2012.

There is also the AP’s YouTube channel, where ads are sold via Google (of course); and its AP Mobile app, which has been ad-supported since 2008 and has had 12 million downloads.

All the same, the AP is treading carefully. “The AP developed internal guidelines in recent months so that it may build new business models in the new media landscape without compromising its newsroom values and principles,” it writes in its release.

“As an industry, we must be looking for new ways to develop revenues while providing good experiences for advertisers and consumers,” notes AP managing editor Lou Ferrara, who oversees social media initiatives, in a statement. “At the same time, advertisers and audiences expect AP to do that without compromising its core mission of breaking news.”

Attention dumbphones, point-and-shoot cameras and music players: sorry to tell you this, but it looks like your days may be numbered. According to a new survey out from Accenture (embedded below and released to coincide with the CES show), consumers are moving away from buying “single-use” devices and opting instead for those that offer the ability to do many things, with smartphones (at 41% of respondents), PCs (36%), HDTVs (33%) and tablets (23%) topping the list of items consumers are most likely to buy in 2013, as gadget spending is projected to reach $1.1 trillion.

It’s a familiar story to those of us who write about the tech industry and trends in smartphones and tablets, but Accenture’s research, covering 11,000 consumers worldwide, shows that this is more than just the musings of analysts, and a global trend fuelled by the rise of superphones and tablets.

The survey, from September 2012, was based around consumer responses to some 16 different types of consumer electronics categories — from tablets and smartphones and connected TVs through to cameras, basic TVs and e-readers.

In a telling table of increasing versus decreasing ownership, it’s clear that over the last four years, consumers have been gravitating much more towards devices that let them email and watch TV, or take pictures and post them instantly to social networks.

There are a few exceptions. For example, e-readers, GPS devices and Blu-Ray players are still appearing in the ‘increasing usage’ category, albeit as smaller players compared to tablets, smartphones and PCs. And PCs are actually a little bumpy in consumer sentiment, but they are by far the biggest category — with basic mobile phones still a close second — and so even small declines will continue to keep them the most important consumer electronics device for a while to come.

This is how the list of “increasing purchases” looks right now:

Meanwhile the decreasing category is perhaps a lesson in what features we will increasingly start to see in the multi-use devices. Indeed, the increasing power of smartphones and the ever-growing prevalence of apps makes functions like cameras, music players, and health/fitness tools into add-on, rather than central purpose, features. And with broadband speed improvements and more content moving digital, tablets and PCs are becoming the screens of choice for video.

Among some of the other interesting conclusions in this report are some lateral looks at how ownership of multi-purpose devices is helping to render other devices as obsolete. I think you can read these two ways, though. In the case of tablets, for example, it looks like it has a bigger impact on usage of e-readers and DVD players than it does on PCs and smartphones. That points to some of those features being replicated on the tablet, but also that those using multipurpose devices are going to be the people who will gravitate to other multipurpose devices. In other words, there is still an audience for well-made products that do just what they say they will, and nothing more.

Another response that caught my eye: awareness of operating systems. This is one of those old chestnuts that some have claimed consumers don’t care about, but these numbers seem to tell a very different story:

That’s a powerful table combined with the fact around half of respondents also seem to say that they’d rather have all their devices using the same operating system.

The Accenture survey doesn’t single out any single brands among Apple, Samsung, Google, Sony, LG, Microsoft, Nokia or others that might be leading the pack with consumer sentiment.

That kind of lock-in is potentially music to many hardware makers’ ears, but it’s a road they need to tread carefully. Just as many want the opposite, meaning they can alienate just as many users as they can win over with a strategy that makes it easier or harder to run several devices in tandem (Apple: take note).

Polaroid’s newish image as a digital media company got one more boost today, with the launch of a new, $150 Android tablet aimed specifically at children. Simply/obviously branded the “Polaroid kids tablet,” the 7-inch device has sidestepped the holiday shopping rush to try its luck instead launching among the throng at the CES show later this month in Las Vegas.

The news comes one day after Polaroid also announced a new retail strategy, the launch of at least 10 new stores this year dedicated to digital printing, which will also become a key place also to showcase its devices.

You might legitimately criticize Google’s Android for breeding a lot of fragmentation in the mobile market, but what the open-source OS has also done is help make wireless devices like tablets and smartphones truly mainstream, and, by way of being a ‘free’ OS, pave the way for some interesting devices that cater specifically to particular market segments. The Polaroid kids tablet is part of both of those trends.

The kids tablet, Polaroid says, will be made extra-durable — as you can see by the illustration here, that will include an extra-large bumper/bezel. Other hardware specifics for the Ice Cream Sandwich-loaded device, made in conjunction with Polaroid licensee Southern Telecom, include 8GB of internal storage with an additional external SD card slot; a 1.0 GHz CORTEX-A8 processor, a rear-only camera, and WiFi-only connectivity.

And, like other connected devices aimed at the youth market, it will come preloaded with parent-controlled security features and links to educational and kids-specific content.

This will include a “Kids Cam”, Music Studio and Draw features, as well as a couple of customized interfaces to deliver children-friendly content. These include a filtered video-streaming app called Kids Vids, as well as an interface called Free Play that presents all the free apps available from a child-filtered Android app store, the App Shop.

As a parent of two young kids myself, I have to admit that I’ve been pretty disappointed with a lot of the “kid friendly” devices on the market to date, which are usually too restricted and closed-source to be truly useful. And kids, after all, like to use tablets and smartphones pretty much like adults do, as evidenced by this Harris Poll study out today on smartphone and computer usage across the U.S.

I personally haven’t taken the time to “child proof” our own connected devices and so am constantly hovering over my children every time they use them, to keep them from lapsing into near-constant browsing of very, very random YouTube content (despite my very best efforts to restrict that browsing to Khans Academy ‘let’s learn math!’ videos). Something like this seems to take advantage of the huge amount of good content out there to keep them interested, while also giving a bit of peace of mind.

Other features include hotlinks to Nook children’s books, Dr. Seuss’ catalogue and interactive books from the Smithsonian.

Polaroid is selling the kids tablet along with its other devices online as well as through Kohl’s stores.

The Consumer Electronics Show, that turgid January gadget fest in Las Vegas, has been widely seen in the industry as a great place to show off your wares if you’re not Apple. But is that true? SigFig, the stealth investing startup that’s growing out of stock portfolio manager Wikinvest, has run some numbers on the market performance of the show’s big-company attendees during the event.

The main trend is pretty clear: there’s lots of buying and selling, but no significant gains. And actually, losses are not uncommon.

This data, I should note before getting further, is from SigFig users — a relatively small but statistically significant group of retail investors who use nearly 70 brokerages to handle stock sales and purchases. The overall market data also shows similar big volume changes, but is partially obscured by the large-block trading activities of institutional investors (which in many cases happens for other reasons).

So, in other words, for all the money and time that electronics companies put into the event, they’re not winning many more believers than they’re losing. Maybe it’s just what they’re announcing that isn’t building enough new enthusiasm to drive prices up? Maybe it’s these sorts of data points that helped convince Microsoft to dial down its participation this year?

Now that all the trades have closed from that week, here’s more detail on how this year looked for some top publicly-traded attendees versus previous years.

Intel, which makes semiconductor chips used by many of the electronics companies in attendance, grabs the spotlight every year with a CES keynote about its plans for the future. This year, on keynote day, its stock price jumped a relatively small $0.82 per share — even though shares bought increased by 129% and shares sold also rose by 123% among retail investors on SigFig. Overall, the stock closed down 2.22% by the end of the four-day show. In 2010, meanwhile, the stock ended up 0.48% on top of an 1402% increase in volume, and in 2011 it ended down 0.05% with a 215% increase in volume.

Google, whose Android operating system can be found in more and more devices at the show, has also not seen big gains among SigFig investors. On its biggest day of trading during the show — 90.64% above the average volume — its shares fell by 0.6%. In 2010 it grew by 1.4% during a 374.84% volume increase, and in 2011 it fell by 1.21% with its trading volume at 369.7% above normal.

What about other firms with a big presence at CES?

AT&T’s CES keynote on the 9th mostly failed to register this year, with only minimal volume increase to show — the volume of those buying actually dropped by over 13%, and continued falling during the conference. Verizon, meanwhile, had purchases surge by 1209% (there’s no decimal missing from that number). The price, however, only increased by 0.82%. Both carriers had volume increased around 100% in the past two years, with AT&T losing 2.77% in 2011, and Verizon losing 3.82%.

More analysis is needed to fully understand what’s going on here, like a broader view of all publicly traded companies that have news at the event, over more years. But I have a bit of speculation, following on my earlier point. Maybe CES is really good at generating attention for these companies, but their own announcements are perenially underperforming the hype? If that’s the case, there’s nothing wrong with attending CES, it’s what you bring with you to launch that matters.

By the way, TechCrunch made the CES trek in a big way this year, and generated all sorts of coverage about the events whether it helped the above companies’ stock prices or not. Check out our hub site here for all the details.

Makerbot creator Bre Pettis and his musician friends from Scary Car made this cute little video featuring 3D printed action figures being created in (near) real-time and then discovering love.

The video is celebration of Makerbot’s big debut at CES last year and the launch of the Replicator, the company’s new complete 3D printer that we featured on our CES stage.

A lot of folks would equate a 3D printer with frippery but it’s clear that these things are plain fun and, more important, they work.

Our readers are probably familiar in passing with UltraViolet, a new content rights management system that is supposed to unify the rights architecture on the web, allowing cross-platform sharing and authentication of movies and TV. But for such a major effort by so many device makers and content producers, very little has been heard or said about it. Probably because it’s still in its infancy: only 19 titles with UV compatibility were released in 2011, and the first signups occurred in October. Yet despite its tender age and low profile, the most common sentiment has been one of preemptive rejection.

And why shouldn’t that be the case? Consumers have been treated like thieves by content companies for years, experimented on with DRM schemes, ripped off with faulty authentication systems, and generally disappointed in the efforts to meet consumer demands. This feeling is premature, however: 2012 will be the year UltraViolet makes its real debut, and it is in 2012 that it will prove itself or fail.

It was with this in mind that we spoke to Mitch Singer, President of DECE (UltraViolet’s creator and controller) and CTO of Sony Pictures, at CES. And believe it or not, he convinced us that UltraViolet may in fact be the beginning of a very good thing.

Watch the whole 15-minute interview here, or skip ahead for discussion:

The point I took away from this talk is that Singer gets it, but is in the unenviable position of having to wrangle reasonable content rights out an industry whose livelihood is in restricting those rights. The entire film industry revolves around the slow unfurling of access: first in theaters, then in physical media, then online, usually, with other media and paths working their way in as well. That won’t change much, and has little to do with UltraViolet; it merely illustrates the fact that the MPAA companies make money by clutching their content tightly and releasing that grip only as quickly and to the extent that is absolutely necessary.

Singer has the advantage that he is originally a content guy. Coming from that side of the equation, you understand the mindset of the people there. Normally content guys’ mission is to fight for greater control, for restrictions in a age of free digital love. But when you see a fellow content industry, like the RIAA, drowning in a sea of missed opportunities, the long-term portion of the mission changes to transformation.

He told me an anecdote off-camera that back in the early 2000s, he was experimenting with the tools pirates were using to rip DVDs and create easily copyable, easily distributed versions of the films his company took so much care to control. He ripped a few and brought his boss down to show him how easy, how versatile, and how inevitable the technology was. His boss said “make it.” UltraViolet, he says, is the result of years of research to essentially make that, but legal.

Valve’s CEO, Gabe Newell, has famously said (as I paraphrase in the interview) that piracy isn’t a security problem, it’s a service problem. What people resent is unreasonable restrictions on their content: buy a disc in the US and it won’t play in the hotel in Tokyo. Buy an episode online, and you can’t lend it to a friend. Rent an episode on your home TV, and you can’t bring it with you on the subway. The solution to all these things is piracy because the content providers don’t provide a solution. UltraViolet is supposed to be that solution. A sort of Steam for movies, though incredibly, Singer hasn’t heard of Valve’s hugely popular platform.

It’s natural enough to doubt that, of course. It’d be ridiculous not to, in fact, in light of the problems I just set forth. I too, will only believe it when I see it. But talking with Singer didn’t fill me with skepticism, it filled me with cautious optimism.

In a nutshell, UltraViolet wants to be the authority any service calls when it wants to know whether you own something or not. And if you own it, you have certain guaranteed rights: watch it on any device, watch it in several places at once, share it with a certain amount of people, and so on. And because your rights are not tied to a service, you’re not tied to that service either. Don’t like their interface, their selection, or their stance on SOPA? Skip out and keep your rights intact. Got some Blu-rays from a while back? Scan them with the UV app and get access to them on the web.

It sounds too ambitious, too good to be true, but that may be a factor more of our justified pessimism as consumers than of the feasibility and reach of this service. Wouldn’t unlimited streaming of millions of songs sound too good to be true a few years ago?

And while there’s plenty of room for skepticism, it must be tempered with realism as well. What if you have a big family and run out of devices to register? What if big movers like Apple won’t play nice? What if you want to run it on non-compatible hardware?

These things are more exceptions than objections to the rule. Consumers buck at unreasonable restrictions, not just restrictions. Restrictions are part of any real system: you don’t get content unless you pay for it in some way or another — is that unreasonable? Even on services like Spotify you have to contribute. Content can’t go on unlimited devices — is that unreasonable? Should you be able to add all 700 of your Facebook friends as people authorized to privately watch the content you bought?

Some restrictions are okay. Make it easy to pay for and consume content and don’t prevent people from doing the things they want to do with it 95% of the time. That’s what Singer says UltraViolet is supposed to do; DRM, Singer said, should be “completely invisible.” It should “enable the consumer to do a whole lot more with the content they’ve acquired.” Ideally, they shouldn’t even have to interact with UltraViolet except to configure it once and add movies as they buy them, a process that will likely be largely performed by services. If it fails, it will fail because of forces outside its control: content companies unwilling to authorize certain rights, most likely. These are the people who make the unreasonable restrictions consumers hate.

Information, they say, wants to be free. But goods don’t. And when information costs money, it becomes a good. This is simply part of how economies work. Goods must be paid for, and part of this payment system must be reasonable restrictions. The first step in establishing reasonable restrictions is to have a reasonable person making them. Mitch Singer strikes me as a reasonable person. The industry he is attempting to coax into submission to this new system is not reasonable, and so we have grown to distrust it. Over the next few years, we may find that distrust further justified, or no longer required. 2012 will welcome many titles and many users into the UltraViolet fold. Over the next year we will see if the system DECE has created will enable more than it restricts.

As I noted earlier this week, I’m not a fan of all of the “Company X Won CES!” jibberjabber that goes on around this time of year. It’s posturing for the sake of posturing, with the “winner” generally determined by anecdotal evidence and perceived mindshare.

If only someone could find a way to graph the show! To chart each company’s buzz (be it good or bad) over time, using cold, hard numbers to extrapolate trends from the barrage of tweets fired off during the show. Oh! Here we are..

The folks over at SimplyMeasured have pored over the 182,112 tweets that were sent with the #CES hashtag from January 9th (CES Day 0, otherwise known as “Press Day”, during which most of the big announcements happen) to January 13th (Last day of CES).

Here are some of the most interesting bits they were able to pull out:

Tweet Frequency:

I complain that CES forces companies to cram too much into the beginning of the year, but even CES itself is clearly front-loaded. That big peak you see on the left side is “Press Day”, which actually happens a day before the convention itself starts. At least 2 companies are holding their press conferences at any given time (this year pinned Intel vs Monster, Panasonic vs. Nokia, etc), forcing editorial teams to split their staff and dilute their coverage. Meanwhile, the rest of the week goes relatively quiet and the buzz tapers by about 20% for two days in a row, balances for day, then plummets down by another 40% or so on the last day. Why not spread the love a bit?

182,112 #CES tweets went out during the show, compared to 120,628 last year.

Brand Buzz:

Microsoft may not have won CES, but they came pretty close to winning #CES. By buzz alone (again, “buzz” here being a simple count of tweets at any given moment), Microsoft’s press conference garnered the most attention. With that said, I’d bet that at least a third of those tweets were “What the hell? Why does Microsoft have a Tweet Choir at their press conference?”

Total Share Of #CES Tweets:

And sneaking in with the biggest chunk of the #CES tweets by a hair was… Motorola! This may be a bit surprising given their seemingly small showing on the Brands Mention graph above, but they took it with consistency. They launched the Droid 4 and Droid RAZR MAXX on Day 0, announced a partnership with Intel on Day 2, and then lucked out with some well-received Motorola-themed giveaways that went down on Twitter on Day 3. Behind them by the slimmest of margins: Microsoft.

Meanwhile, Samsung (who almost certainly had the most actual news of the show) comes in at third. That seems wrong.

Oh, and whether or not you agree with MG that Apple won the show before it even started, you’ve gotta love that they pulled a solid 1% of tweets without even being there. That puts them in front of RIM, Verizon, Panasonic, AT&T, NVIDIA, and Qualcomm, and countless others who were actually, you know, there.

We’ve all seen the Kinect, or at least heard about its wonders. Well, the same company that hooked up Microsoft during “Project Natal” development has showed off some pretty wonderful technology at CES last week.

It uses a 3D camera on top of your TV to let you interact with your television through gestures. To be honest, it looks a lot like any touchscreen interface you’re already used to (with similar transitions and gestures) but you just happen to be 10 feet away from the screen.

The next-gen interface lets you flip through channels and navigate the TV guide just by waving your hand around and throwing in a few pinching gestures. It made me hate my remote, if that’s any indication of how cool it is (and I love TV).

But watching TV is just the beginning. PrimeSense showed us a (somewhat bizarre) dancing implementation for the technology that lets you get jiggy with it in front of what looks a lot like Windows Media Player visualizations. The camera follows your movements and lets you throw out bursts of “energy” on screen. I didn’t really get the hang of it while I was there but it seems like an excellent technology for a rave or a group of stoned college kids.

PrimeSense even mentioned ways to let you see yourself in clothes you’d like to buy, right on the screen, and purchase them directly.

Now it’s just a matter of time until a major OEM snatches up the technology and we all find ourselves waving at the TV.

There are plenty of smart watches out there in the world. The iPod Nano doubles as one, and the new MotoACTV watch is a pretty solid offering, too. But over at Wimm Labs, they’re taking the concept to a whole new level.

We got the opportunity to sit down with Wimm Labs VP Tim Twerdahl who let us get up close and personal with the new Wimm One Smart watch. It’s “a wearable platform” as Twerdahl would call it, based on Android and packed with fun features like WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS, accelerometers, magnetometers and plenty of other fun stuff.

There are all kinds of apps that can track your workouts, keep your calendar information, and post alerts from your smartphone, but as Matt points out in the interview the Wimm Smart watch is a watch first.

But the module itself can be toted around in a number of ways, including on a carabiner. Right now the Wimm One is only available to developers for $299, but we’ll be sure to let you know once it’s ready to hit store shelves.

When I think of tablets, I think of the usual suspects — Apple, Motorola, Asus, HTC, and the like. Viewsonic never really comes to mind, but that hasn’t stopped them from pushing out their own tablets and smartphones, and their VP of Business Development Mike Holstein joined us at CES to show us what the company has been up to.

First up on the agenda were two new Android tablets, the Viewpad 10e and the Viewpad e70. The bigger 10e sports a 10-inch IPS display and is surprisingly light, but it only runs Android 2.3 Gingerbread. Don’t expect to be blown away by its performance as it sports a single-core 1GHz Cortex A8 processor, but its $279 price aims to make up for it (whether or not it succeeds is up to you).

Despite being smaller, the E70 is arguably the more interesting of the two — it’s a 7-inch Ice Cream Sandwich-powered tablet that only costs $169. It’s no barnburner with its single-core 1GHz processor and 4GB of internal storage, but budget shoppers could do worse. That said, they could also do better for just a bit more, as the budget segment Viewsonic occupies is growing more crowded by the day.

And lest you think that Viewsonic is all about churning out low-cost tablets, Holstein also took a moment to trot out the Windows 7-powered Viewpad 10pi. It’s a far cry from their budget offerings at $849, but its Oak Trail processor, 64GB SSD, and its ability to boot into Android make it an intriguing (but iffy) option for companies looking to trick out their workforce.

CES was a blast this year. It was the best show in recent memory. Everyone from the press to vendors were upbeat and seemingly truly happy to be there. Attendance was up. The show was the largest ever (too big for some). Best of all, we shared a wonderful booth with the Engadget crew, which allowed us to conduct more interviews and chill on some comfy couches when not livestreaming from the show floor.

Below is the best of our booth interviews and roaming coverage. We truly hope you enjoyed our unique coverage. Any outlet can stuff people in a room (or trailer) and write up press releases nonstop. We strive to bring the entire show to you by webcasting our shenanigans from the floor and interviewing the smaller guys from the booth. Here’s our nine favorite videos from this year’s show.

50 Cent interview

Mr. Cent stopped by our booth and we took the stage to talk about his new headphones among other things including why Twitter works for him. It was an insightful and fun interview.

Gary Shapiro on the future of innovation and CES

Don’t believe the nonsense. CES is not dead. It’s far from it. In fact it’s getting too big. Gary Shapiro, the president of the CEA, weighed in on the debate while also clearly stating Microsoft is not completely done with CES.

Schick shaves John

Schick, you know, the razor company attended CES this year. They had a small booth in the North hall where two barbers shaved show-goers free of charge. John, being one to never turn down something free, jumped on the opportunity. What this video does not show is the post-shaved John who looked ten years younger and a lot more happy.

G-Form does its best to destroy and iPad

Watch G-Form drop a bowling ball on an iPad. Spoiler: It survives.

The Butt Show

Fun game! Count how many sexual innuendos John slips in during his interview with the 80-year Dr. Fuji.

Days Of Wonder’s Ticket To Ride iPad board game

Picture a board game that’s also playable through the iPad. That’s sort of describes Ticket To Ride. Just watch the video.

Broksonic humidifiers

CES is a huge place. It’s not all smart TVs and Android tabs. Within the LVCC is a wide range of products including Broksonic’s new scented humidifiers.

OhMiBod, the vibrators with an app

This shouldn’t be here. Sorry, everyone. Watch Jordan interview a dildo company. It’s kind of NSFW. “It’s what makes mommies happy,” said the dildo lady.

The TechCrunch Gadget’s Final CES Webcast

We had a great time at CES 2012. This was our final live podcast (here are the rest) where we interviewed Parrot, GoPro and gave away a bunch of free stuff to show goers and people watching the webcast. We hope to do CES 2013 even bigger. Thanks for watching, everyone!

At CES 2012, there are quite a few products that would totally change the way you do things (or at least save you some money) that just don’t get enough coverage. We reported on Ooma’s new HD2 VoIP handset, but nothing beats getting the facts straight from the CEO of the company.

Luckily, Eric Stang had a chance to meet with us and chat it up. He explained that, while unnecessary, the HD2 Revel pretty much eliminates the need for a land-line. It’s basically a smartphone (or a smartphone-like handset) that pairs with the Ooma base station to offer VoIP services in your home. It also offers HD calling and caller ID with images collected from your Facebook, Google and Yahoo friends.

The handset should be available in February at select retailers and Ooma.com for $60.

If you were paying attention last week, you can probably surmise that we have about a billion hours worth of footage to process from last week’s CES International show. There’s live streaming coverage that has now been archived, as well as quite a few recorded interviews including this one with Greg Duffy, Dropcam CEO.

Speaking with John Biggs, Duffy shows off the new Dropcam HD and speaks on the transition from hardware buyer to small OEM.

His biggest piece of advice to other companies looking to enter the hardware space is to take your time. “Don’t ship it before it’s ready. We’ve been working on this for over a year and a half and didn’t tell anybody until now because we wanted to get it just perfect,” Duffy said. “It’s totally worth it, even if a couple prototypes are lost in the wild.”

Sounds like a good piece of advice for some of our larger OEMs, too.

A few other highlights from the interview:

• Country music is everywhere at CES
• Dropcam has significantly reduced its pricing model
• John Biggs has night vision and boy scout skills
• Duffy hopes Dropcams are primarily used for security and monitoring, rather than a RedTube-type situation

Enjoy!

CES 2012 has come and gone, and it’s time for the inevitable summary and think pieces on the directions the industry is heading, the highlights of the show, and so on. We’ll also be posting some interviews and highlights from our live coverage this week, but before that it is, of course, necessary to publish some sort of top 10 list.

So here are five winners and five losers of CES, as judged by those of us who went to the show, and with consideration both for the limited, short-term nature of the show itself and the longer-term sea of trends on which these companies and devices are sailing.

Winners

TVs

Last year, the TVs at CES were a wearying collection of the same-y junk, and everyone was pushing the same thing: 3D. I don’t personally have a problem with 3D, and in fact almost every TV we saw this year was also 3D-capable. But this time around, it wasn’t their primary feature. Perhaps as a result of the various display manufacturers’ lineups looking more or less the same for a while (not to mention the indifferent response of the market to home 3D), TV makers decided to actually add different features this year. Not all were useful, mind you, but Samsung, Sony, Sharp, and so on decided to take their own paths – whether in style of interaction, breadth of content, or sheer size (that would be Sharp). It’s good to see a TV here and actually be curious about it again.

Sony

While Sony stumbles here and there, especially with PR, they do make some really cool stuff. This year’s trip to their booth reminded us just how much stuff this company makes, and how much of it is actually pretty great. Sure, 1080p 3D binoculars aren’t the most practical thing in the world, but I like to know someone’s making them, and making them well. The Sony-Ericsson phones were also quite nice; the new Xperia Ion and S both impressed. One caveat there: they’ve been hyping their S and P tablets for so long that the devices are in danger of being old before any consumers really get a chance to use them. They have good products, but need to just trust the brand and the quality and ship the damn things.

Streaming and media services

There was a recurring theme of empowering consumers, by which many companies mean they’ll stop shoving their inferior in-house services down our throats, and let us do what we want with the device we paid for. This means that more and more devices are letting in services like Pandora, Skype, Amazon streaming, everything. If you provide a way to connect consumers with content, device makers want you to be available on their thing. As devices get smarter, it’s getting harder to defend how dumb the big brands have forced them to be over the last few years. There’s no excuse for a device powerful enough to run Netflix (to say nothing of 3D games) not to do so. TV makers are accepting this. That’s a win.

ARM & friends

While Intel has been dominating the desktop world, ARM has crept up and stolen pretty much the entire mobile and embedded market. There doesn’t seem to be any abatement in that trend, and in fact Intel’s hold on Windows machines is starting to show cracks as well. This year at CES, all the smart TVs, tablets, phones, tweener devices, and half the other stuff worth looking at were sporting an ARM processor in one form or another. NVIDIA showed a great, cheap Android 4.0 tablet, Qualcomm had a ton of TVs and powerful media devices, Marvell showed their great OLPC XO-3 tablet and powers a bunch of other things — the list goes on. ARM was probably the most ubiquitous company at the show. Intel did show off their new smartphone, though, so a new battle may be forthcoming.

RIM

I must admit I wasn’t expecting much from RIM, and I guess in the end they didn’t have that much to offer: a hands-on with the PlayBook 2.0 update. But I’m really glad we stopped by, and I think RIM showed that they are still a force to be reckoned with in some respects. The PlayBook, whipping boy of the tech blogs, is made far more complete by the addition of the email, contacts, and calendar features. If they had released this, and perhaps at a slightly lower price than they were selling it for at launch, I think the tech world would have been genuinely enthusiastic. In our interview with them, I wasn’t just buttering them up when I said I would certainly recommend the PlayBook over an iOS or Android device for the purposes of day-to-day productivity, enterprise, and so on. The PlayBook, I said, was a breach birth, its non-critical consumer-facing functions emerging foremost, and its essential business and productivity functions delayed dangerously. Now that they’ve been delivered (so to speak), I can safely say the PlayBook is a far better tablet than it was, and that Google and Apple should take a look at some of their clever and powerful gesture and UI work.

Losers

Apple

People have been saying that the shadow of Apple would fall darkly on CES, that everyone would be spooked about the imminent presence of the new iPad and the rumored iTV, that it would be a show of Apple clones. The truth is that no one really seemed to be thinking much about Apple one way or the other. We saw phones taking design in interesting directions, tablets with diverse uses, business models that move beyond iTunes, and smart TVs that the companies seemed pretty excited about, not defeatist or pathetic. The only place Apple showed up was in the accessories area, and the new items we saw, more often than not, were careful to accommodate Android and other devices as well. CES just isn’t Apple’s show, which isn’t much of a surprise to some, but others want to believe that Apple has a presence even where it isn’t. CES showed this year that, news coverage patterns notwithstanding, the tech world doesn’t revolve around Apple; it revolves around a weird and splendid panoply of overly specific gadgets, raw components, and foreign niche markets.

Consumers

Despite all the wins listed, it still wasn’t a very good show for consumers. Many device classes have been caught mid-transition: tablets and phones, only a few of which are running that all-important Ice Cream Sandwich; TVs, which are beginning the transition to smart TVs but aren’t safe enough yet to put in the hands of non-enthusiasts; car interfaces, which have not learned lessons from smartphones and tablets and are still fairly unintuitive — etc, etc. The trends are good, but you can’t buy trends. Whether it will be next year or the year after that the devices achieve the status of buyable I can’t say, but I do know that I wouldn’t recommend many things I saw this year, even if I found them promising.

Ultrabooks

The much-hyped ultrabooks were mostly snoozers: the same devices people have been making for years, but thinner. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, exactly, but it sure isn’t very exciting — it’s more like what TV makers do. And brands like Toshiba and Lenovo can’t afford to be considered as providing a commodity after this class of products has been hyped to the moon. The devices I saw weren’t bad, just not very impressive from the standpoint of a consumer standing in a Best Buy or browsing the web trying to decide what to get. I didn’t get a chance to check out Dell’s new machine, though, which Matt Burns tells me is a very nice piece of kit. And these are only the first ultrabooks, so we must give them a chance to refine themselves. It just wasn’t much of a debut.

Set-top boxes

There’s been an explosion of diversity in the set-top box space, with devices like the Boxee Box and Roku, and of course Tivo and the like. But the new smart TVs being put out by practically every TV maker take dead aim at these convenient, user-friendly products. It was a bottom-up revolution over the last two years as these nimble and inexpensive boxes took the sloppily-produced “smart” TVs of the day to school with faster updates, more content, and easy entry. Those salad days may be ending; Samsung, LG, and others are putting real money and real R&D into making set-top boxes obsolete. I’d hate to be Roku right now — well, that’s not true, they’re doing great. But over the next year they will really have to step up their game and prevent their service from being duplicated on-device.

CES

I’ve talked a lot and answered a lot of questions from people, family, and media about whether CES is in trouble. And my answer has always been: no. CES is doing fine. They had 153,000 attendees this year and 3100 exhibitors. It’s a huge, important, and interesting show, and will be for a long time to come. But when something like the departure of a partner (in this case Microsoft) causes everyone in the world to doubt its relevance, it’s not a question of practicality, it’s a question of confidence. Is the opinion at large of CES so low that such a relatively small event (Microsoft’s participation was largely symbolic, rarely substantial) would mean the difference between “show goes on” and “show shuts down”? The CEA should take this popular response seriously: it’s not a warning that their show is about to hit the wall, but rather a warning that they have failed to make understood what the show is about. They should take the opportunity to fill the Microsoft gap with something big, and do something to make the show, ostensibly trade but in reality very public, more comprehensible to people at large.

Overall the show was more promising than impressive. Products like the gesture-based TVs, the Galaxy Note, and numerous other devices and services aren’t anything I would recommend, and their benefits aren’t really obvious to anyone who isn’t deeply interested. The offspring of these products, however, will be very interesting. Unfortunately, they won’t be around for a while.

Two things I want to add: I personally would have liked to add the new OLPC tablet to the winners, but although I find it delightful, it’s not really big enough to warrant putting down. And Microsoft could be considered either a loser or a winner: it wasn’t much of a keynote or a show for them, but then again, Microsoft rarely rocks CES very hard, and they might be given a little credit for recognizing that and taking action.

What do you think were the big winners and losers at CES? Were you there? Was it a good show? Tell us below (or dispute my choices) in the comments.

If you needed any more proof that the future is already upon us, take a gander at the LG Styler. It looks like a refrigerator at first glance, but opening the door reveals that it isn’t meant for food — rather, it’s your clothes are meant to go inside.

While we first thought the Styler was just a concept design, it turns out that the handsome clothing refresher has been on the market in South Korea for a while now. Still, LG spent these months wisely by making sure the Styler is ready for a stateside debut.

Here’s the Styler in a nutshell — if you have some clothing in need of some gentle de-wrinkling, throw it in the Styler and wait until the 39 minute cycle is complete. While you’re having lunch and reading TechCrunch Gadgets, the Styler will gently steam your clothing to get rid of any unwanted wrinkles and odors. It even has a depository for what our LG rep refers to as “aroma sheets” that imbue your clothing with certain scents, though it also seems like users will be able throw in their own scented materials.

Everything is controlled by a lighted touch UI on the front of the Styler, which actually helps tie together the Styler’s minimalist design, with settings a plenty for different materials and items. The Styler certainly lives up to its namesake, and with any luck it’ll soon pop up in a hotel (or a Home Depot) in the near future.