CEA estimates that about 140,000 people attended CES, and the state of the industry is showing strength. Gary Shapiro predicts that consumer electronics spending will show a 6% increase for 2010, to $180 billion, and will rise an additional 3% this year, to more than $186 billion. The predominant themes this year were tablets, apps, 3D, 4G, gestural interfaces, and ‘smart’ connected devices. We saw a great deal in terms of sharing content across multiple CE platforms – and the high-speed networks required to do so. ETC will have a post show analysis with details of the major themes and trends available by next week.

While media convergence and related CE devices/services take center stage at CES, Hollywood is taking important steps toward addressing the digital production and distribution of media content. The Hollywood tech community – under leadership of the major studios and the ETC@USC – published its Interoperable Master Format (IMF) in 2010, a proposed voluntary specification designed to serve as a standard digital distribution master. Recently, SMPTE announced the creation of an IMF working group to move forward with standardizing the format. While we were covering the increasingly expanded array of connected, over-the-top, CE devices and platforms featured at CES, The Hollywood Reporter was addressing the relevance of IMF.

Winners of this year’s CNET Best of CES Awards were announced Saturday morning in the lobby of South Hall. ‘Best of Show’ went to Motorola’s Android-based XOOM tablet, one in a growing number of tablets targeting the burgeoning iPad market. This year’s ‘People’s Voice Award’ went to the Razer Switchblade – an Intel Atom-based concept design to bring PC gaming to a portable form factor. Razer has taken the familiar keyboard and redesigned it as a tool for mobile gaming controls.

Qualcomm promoted its partnership with Mattel on a new line of game products that utilize a vision-based Augmented Reality technology. The partnership was announced last year, beta appeared in the fall, and cross-platform, peer-to-peer demos have recently taken place. The first product out of this partnership is the Android smartphone-based version of the iconic 1960s game, Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots. In addition to gaming, Qualcomm sees Augmented Reality as a potential for travel, entertainment, education, and other applications.

Sensio has announced a 3D VOD channel available for network streaming customers and VOD providers. Sensio has also announced increased efforts at enabling 3D console gaming by providing a software kit to developers that will encode the 3D game output into a number of 3D formats. Additionally, Sensio Autodetect technology can detect and display a wide range of 3D formats.

Scent Sciences Corporation introduces a new take on publishing scents for the Internet age with the ScentScape delivery system. This time it’s more like a dot matrix printer with a large number of scent capsules in a printer-like cartridge that are mixed and released to resemble many recognizable scents. This is not your father’s Smell-O-Vision.

Panasonic has changed the name of its IPTV service from VIERA CAST to VIERA Connect and installed it on 15 new TVs and a new tablet. VIERA Connect is an open platform, available to developers of third-party content. The company expects to drive its IPTV sales up to 70% of its total television sales in the global market by 2012.

The TV Hat is a simple concept: take a baseball cap, extend the bill, add some makeshift curtains and a pocket, and voilà! A private, portable movie theater for your iPhone, PSP, or EVO. The TV Hat retails for $25 and is made by SKM Industries, Inc., of Olyphant, PA.

Kicking off the largest CES ever, Gary Shapiro, CEA’s CEO, opened the event to a packed crowd, citing the theme of Innovation – the “engine driving the US and global economy” – as the theme of this year’s Vegas soiree. Shapiro’s remarks covered the waterfront, from upbeat commentary on the criticality of innovation in reviving our economy and improving our standard of living to political commentary on the need for Washington to remove barriers to innovation. Shapiro cited steady growth in consumer electronics this past year (up 3.5 percent worldwide in 2010, to $18 billion), driven in part by the acceleration of change with mobile technology, Internet TV, tablet computing, home automation and 3D.

Verizon, which has arguably led the industry in terms of infrastructure but lagged in terms of debuting 4G phones, announced 10 new devices for 2011, including Android talk units from LG, Samsung and HTC. The company also debuted a 4G tablet and unveiled integration deals with Electronic Arts and Skype.