When it comes to Las Vegas, opinions vary. You either love or hate this desert city, but with an overabundance of hotel rooms, Vegas is the perfect location for the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), an annual gathering of the consumer electronics industry, an ever-growing industry that loves to celebrate itself.

What’s at CES?

On a show floor of around 180,000 square meters, more than 3,000 exhibitors present 20,000 products to journalists and trade visitors.

The top dogs at the show — electronic companies like Sony, Samsung, Panasonic and LG — present hundreds of their newest products at enormous, flahsy stands. Microchip makers like Intel, Marvell and Qualcomm also attend. You’ll also find mobile companies including Nokia and Blackberry, and camera manufacturers including Nikon, Canon and Fuji.

There was a surprising increase in the number of car manufacturers exhibiting at CES this year compared to 2011. In addition to showing off their latest car models, companies like Ford, Mercedes, Audi and Kia also presented telematic (a combination of telecommunciation and information, like navigation systems) and info-tainment systems.

Absent but Everywhere: Apple and Google

Despite not having big stands at CES, Apple and Google dominated this year’s CES. With the launch of their mobile operating systems, Apple and Google have created the two dominant mobile platforms worldwide: iOS and Android. Thousands of companies around the world use these platforms to launch new products and services in a quick and cost-effective manner. Google’s Android platform not only powers smartphones and tablets, but also televisions and cameras.

This post-PC era — a term coined two years ago by Steve Jobs — is quickly taking shape.

This Biggest Trends at CES 2012

Televisions
Televisions were the trend at this year’s CES. New models were bigger (84 inches), flatter (4 millimeters), and available with higher resolutions and better picture quality. The new smart TVs are connected to the internet, and offer integrated apps like Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo and Netflix.

Television makers seemed unsettled by the rumor that Apple would release its own television set and, like the iPhone did to the mobile market, disrupt another industry.

Smartphones
Google’s mobile operating system, Android, has a worldwide market penetration rate of 47%, followed by Apple’s iOS (29%), Blackberry (17%) and Windows Phone (5%). It came as no surprise that many of the new smartphones on display at CES were running Android. The most hyped phone at the show, the Samsung Galaxy Note, also uses Android and will ship with a stylus for taking handwritten notes. Despite its massive 5.3-inch display, the Galaxy Note fits astonishingly well in your hand. (You’ll have to get over the awkward feeling that your holding a small tablet PC up to your ear.)

One of the biggest success stories from the show this year belongs to Nokia and its new Lumia 900 smartphone, which uses the Microsoft Windows Phone 7 operating system. This device was awarded numerous prizes during CES and highly praised in the trade press. One disadvantage, however, is the limited number of apps available for Windows Phone 7. The device will likely be available in the USA in March. (Microsoft opted not to exhibit at this year’s CES because the early date of this year’s show did not sync well with Microsoft’s product development cycle, and because CES decided not to give Microsoft an opening keynote slot this year.)

Tablet Computers
Tablet computers are still a hot trend, and are now being marketed for use in schools, stadiums and offices. In 2012, experts predict that approximately 100 million tablet devices will be sold worldwide. Apple is the dominant player with 60% of the tablet market. The starting price for tablet computers is around $250 today. Industry insiders expect Google to release its own tablet sometime this year, but there was no sign of any Google tablet in Las Vegas.

Within two years, tablet computers could become a large part of the personal computing market, with significant growth expected over the next year. As prices of tablets have gone down and potential applications of these devices have increased, E-Ink e-reader devices are seen less and less at CES.

Ultrabooks
No, not books with extra special features. Ultrabooks are extremely thin, lightweight laptop computers. This new market segment grew out of the popularity of Apple’s Macbook Air. The base price for Macbook Air competitors is around $800. Companies exhibiting ultrabooks included Lenovo, Samsung, Dell and HP.

Other CES Trends
Manufacturers of device accessories, so-called “electronic fashion,” were well represented on the show floor. This competitive market segment offers cases, bags, skins, protective covers, especially for iPhones and iPads, but also for smartphones and tablets from other manufacturers.

Overview

CES is not just for the electronics manufacturers and technology companies anymore. In addition to new players in the tech world, like carmakers, CES is a big draw for people working in creative industries like Hollywood, who use the opportunity to exchange thoughts and ideas with hardware and software companies. Many discussions hinged on new types of interactivity between devices found in most living rooms: televisions, tablets, and smartphones. In the future, television programs will offer viewers the option to interact with shows in real time using apps on tablets and smartphones.

On the other end of the spectrum, some of the largest innovators are not at CES. Apple, Google, Amazon, and perhaps also Microsoft are choosing to host their own events. Nevertheless, CES is very much the trend barometer for the tech industry in the United States.

Thomas Minkus is the Vice President of Emerging Media and English Language Markets for the Frankfurt Book Fair and German Book Office New York.

Following its initial launch in the United States almost a year ago, the Google Books platform recently launched in the UK in October, and in Canada on Tuesday.

As of the launch, Google Books Canada has partnerships with major Canadian publishers, including Random House, McClelland & Stewart, Douglas & McIntyre, House of Anansi and Dundurn.

The Winnipeg Free Press quoted Scott Dougal, director of Product Management for Google Books, as saying, “We have every major publisher in Canada and a lot of very small Canadian publishers.”

Google has also partnered with two independent Canadian bookstores, McNally Robinson in Winnipeg and Campus eBookstore in Ontario, to sell Google eBooks through the bookstores’ websites.

Google will now be competing with Canadian e-bookstore Kobo, as well as Amazon and Barnes & Noble, which also sell e-books to Canadian readers.

At a press event in New York on Wednesday, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos unveiled its new Kindle tablet — the Kindle Fire– which confirmed the rumors and hype that have been building for some time.

Photo © Publishing Perspectives

Called the Kindle Fire, the tablet device sells for mere $199 (the Apple iPad starts at $499) and ships on November 15.

Photo © Publishing Perspectives

The Kindle Fire features a 7-inch touch screen display with 169 pixels per inch and 16 million colors. It weighs in under a pound at a mere 14.6 ounces — the Apple iPad weighs 1.33 pounds (21.3 ounces). The device also ships with Amazon Silk, a new “cloud accelerated” web browser that speeds up page loading time on mobile devices by processing the web pages in the Amazon cloud before delivering the results to the device.

Onstage at the event, Bezos called the Kindle platform an “end-to-end service” and with the “family” of devices and apps, Kindle is also an entire content “ecosystem.”

With the Kindle Fire, Amazon customers can access all of their Amazon content — books, magazines, newspapers, music, movies, television, apps and the web — on the device. Content on the Kindle Fire (and other Kindle devices and apps) is backed up in the Amazon Cloud for free.

Bezos emphasized the automatic syncing and free cloud storage for Kindle content as a solution to the “broken model” of making consumers responsible for backing up their own files.

Photo © Publishing Perspectives

In addition, Amazon’s recently launched app store will also be available on the Kindle Fire. This extends the Kindle Fire well beyond a device for consuming content, and makes useful for email, games, utilities and more.

Also unveiled at the press event was the Kindle Touch for $99 and Kindle Touch 3G for $149. The 3G service will be free and available in 100 countries. Bezos told the audience, “we’re going to sell millions of these.” In addition, the standard Kindle with Special Offers now sells for $79.

Kindle devices also now come with a new feature called X-Ray, which analyzes and visually dissects keywords, characters and locations within a Kindle book’s pages. X-Ray allows readers to highlight words and see passages throughout the book containing that word, as well as additional information from Wikipedia and Shelfari.

Bezos said that Amazon initially “set out to improve upon the book.” With this new lineup of Kindle devices as well as Amazon’s ever-expanding library of content, the Kindle platform is shaping up to be a serious rival to the iPad.

Photo © Publishing Perspectives

Photo © Publishing Perspectives

By Hannah Johnson

Amazon has sent out invitations to a press conference in New York City on Wednesday, September 28 to announce its new tablet device, according to the Guardian UK.

The device, which may be the first to offer serious competition to Apple’s iPad, will run on Google’s mobile operating system, Android.

Like the Kindle before it, many expect the new tablet to be priced aggressively in order to sell more digital books, movies, and cloud services to consumers, reports the Guardian. The recent launch of Amazon’s Android app store also points to its commitment to creating a real competitor to the Apple system.

The Amazon tablet will also compete closely with Barnes & Noble’s NookColor, which is also an Android-powered tablet.

Read the full Guardian article here

A study from Nielsen reveals that the demographics of tablet and e-reader owners is changing, trending away from early adopters and becoming more mainstream. The study compares tablet and e-reader owners between Q3 2010 and Q2 2011.

According to Nielsen, 61 percent of e-reader owners were women in Q2 2011, compared to 46 percent in Q3 2010. Tablet and smartphone ownership among women also continues to increase by 4 percent and 3 percent respectively.

Tablet and e-reader owners are also skewing older. Tablet owners over the age of 55 increased by by 9 percent and people between 35-44 years old by 5 percent.

By Hannah Johnson

Amazon is about to add another feather in it’s cap. Forrester Research predicts that the Android-powered Amazon tablet, which is rumored to be released this year, will quickly become a legitimate competitor for the iPad. Forrester Research has compiled a report “explaining exactly how, and why, Amazon will disrupt the tablet market.”

Forrester analyst Sarah Rotman Epps writes, “Amazon’s willingness to sell hardware at a loss combined with the strength of its brand, content, cloud infrastructure, and commerce assets makes it the only credible iPad competitor in the market. If Amazon launches a tablet at a sub-$300 price point — assuming it has enough supply to meet demand — we see Amazon selling 3-5 million tablets in Q4 alone.”

This could be a huge boost for Google’s Android platform, particularly in the wake of its purchase of Motorola, meant to strengthen the Android platform against competitors like Apple.

For publishers, the combination of a tablet PC and Amazon’s growing interest in publishing and e-books could mean another huge sales channel for e-books and other book-related content. The Kindle was a decisive factor in the large-scale adoption of e-books, and the Amazon tablet will be one more reason for consumers to switch from print to digital books.

As a side note, Forrester apparently had this report ready some time ago, but waited to publish it: “We held off publishing it last week out of respect for Steve Jobs, and we have great admiration for his inventions and influence on our culture.” Wow, either the Amazon tablet is going to totally destroy the iPad, or this Steve worship is getting out of control.

By Hannah Johnson

Google announced Monday that it will buy Motorola for $12.5 billion. Analysis has been flying around the internet today as to what this means for the future of Google, its mobile operating system Android, and Motorola.

In a post on the official Google Blog, Google CEO Larry Page wrote that the acquisition of Motorola is intended to “supercharge the Android ecosystem.” Earlier this month, research firm Canalys found that Android has captured nearly 50% of the global smartphone market.

Note to publishers with iPhone apps: if you haven’t developed Android apps, now might be a good time to start.

As the Android market share grows, competitors Apple and Microsoft are increasingly under pressure to do something. According to Page, “Microsoft and Apple are banding together in anti-competitive patent attacks on Android.”

Which leads us to, perhaps, the core reason that Google is buying Motorola: patents. Mashable reported:

“Other technology companies have already attempted to charge patent-based royalty fees to manufacturers that use the platform like Barnes and Noble, HTC and Samsung. These fees could pile up to a point where installing Android, a free operating system, is more expensive than making another choice.”

Page said, “Our acquisition of Motorola will increase competition by strengthening Google’s patent portfolio, which will enable us to better protect Android from anti-competitive threats from Microsoft, Apple and other companies.”

Another possible benefit to Google is Motorola’s dominance in television set-top boxes, like those from cable companies. The disappointing launch of Google TV, along with its push for more content on YouTube, signals Google’s strong but yet-unsuccessful foray in online television. And if your cable box came with Google TV, would that be such a bad thing?

By Hannah Johnson

Facebook announced Tuesday that it has bought Push Pop Press, the company behind the much-hyped e-book app, Our Choice by Al Gore.

Push Pop Press founders, Mike Matas and Kimon Tsinteris, said of the acquisition, “we’re taking our publishing technology and everything we’ve learned and are setting off to help design the world’s largest book, Facebook.”

So does this mean that Facebook is getting into the book publishing business? According to Matas and Tsinteris, it doesn’t. “Although Facebook isn’t planning to start publishing digital books, the ideas and technology behind Push Pop Press will be integrated with Facebook, giving people even richer ways to share their stories. With millions of people publishing to Facebook each day, we think it’s going to be a great home for Push Pop Press.”

Our Choice iPad app

A statement from Push Pop Press says the company will no longer continue developing its publishing platform.

However, the interactive browsing experience of the Our Choice app combined with the vast content on Facebook could be a game changer for digital content across all media industries, especially if that content can be curated and packaged as an app. Is this the future of publishing?

By Hannah Johnson

Twitter is now available in Dutch and Indonesian as of Monday, thanks to a crowd-sourced team of volunteers who translated Twitter’s applications, support pages and home page.

Volunteer translators can sign up via Twitter’s Translation Center to contribute to translations of Twitter’s apps and pages.

Twitter is now available in 11 languages: Dutch, French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, Spanish, and Turkish.

Filipino and Malay up next, according to the company blog. Given the power of social media for authors to promote their works, whether self-published or traditionally published, more languages means more authors can reach readers in their native languages.

By Hannah Johnson

Google CEO Larry Page confirmed yesterday that Google+ has attracted over 10 million users since its launch just two weeks ago. Page also said that over 1 billion items are shared on Google+ per day. (Read the rest of Page’s remarks at Google’s quarterly earnings call.)

These numbers are pretty impressive, especially considering that Google+ is still in a trial phase. As TechCrunch notes, Google+ has managed to accumulate 1.3% of Facebook’s 750 million users in just two weeks.

Mashable had also gathered some interesting information about Google+. Two different reports from third-party companies estimate that 70-85% of Google+ users are male, and that around 60% identify themselves as either web developers or software engineers. This demographic seems typical of early adopters.

Google+ is a new social media product from Google that allows users to organize their network into circles of people and then choose which information to share with which circle.

Circles solve one of the problems that Facebook users have dealt with, namely whether to reveal personal information to work colleagues and acquaintances that are in one’s social network along with family and friends.

Are you using Google+? Tell us what you think of it!