CES 2012 was allegedly the biggest CES show ever with over 150,000 attendees.  Vegas was crawling with deal makers and prolific networkers; a few hardworking operational types and booth girls were also visible.

Some big themes from this year’s CES:

1. The Measured Life:  A vast array of self-tracking devices designed to measure each and every aspect of our daily lives and create a dashboard of personal metrics.  From how many steps you walk in a given day to how many calories you ingested over lunch to much REM sleep you got last night.  These devices monitor activity, sleep, diet, and even mood to help make people healthier and more productive.

2.  The Connected Life:  We live in a hyper-connected world with information streaming at us from emails, social media feeds, SMS messages, phone calls, and tweets.  CES 2012 showcased the next generation of technologies and devices designed to keep us connected, informed and in-touch of this veritable firehose of information.  Smartphones, iPads, location-aware watches, Bluetooth headsets integrated into ski helmets, and ultra-portable laptops…and also virtual assistants that streamline information retrieval, artificial intelligence agents that prioritize information consumption, and digital avatars that allow us to be in multiple places at the same time.  I think the only thing that was missing was a direct neural interface that projects the next tweet directly onto a user’s retina and allows automatic thought-to-tweet translation transcription

3. The Entertained Life: As always, CES didn’t disappoint with the diversity and novelty of ways to waste time in the name of entertainment, recreation, gaming…whatever you want to call it. Rich video games, multi-player virtual worlds, online-to-offline rewards systems, 3D movies, and 4G connectivity…all to ensure that after we are done measuring our life and responding to tweets, we have time to recharge for the next day!

More pictures:

And what this has to do with bluetooth, in-car speakerphone, I am not sure: