CES Press Day

Press day has begun and we have already been to two press conferences.

It didn't take long to recognize a few obvious trends coming in 2007.

Media sharing over home networks and anything that loses or hides wires.

It seems like every one is trying to make their own way to share music, videos and photos with anyone.

Netgear's press conference announced three new products and they all had something to do with these two topics.

The Netgear Digital Entertainer HD is a new device that shares video, audio and photos over a network to any TV in the house. It had a lot of limitations, but it made the new trend of technology pretty clear.

Netgear also showed off their new Storage Central Turbo that acts as a shared network hard drive capable of supporting almost any size of hard drive you put into it. It also supports two drives which either doubles storage or acts as backup of the first hard drive.

The last product they demonstrated was the Digital Media Receiver Skype Phone. It is a pretty cool little cordless phone that supports home land line like a standard phone and WiFi with Skype phone service.

In order for Netgear's services to work as planned they are betting big on a couple of technologies that have yet to be standardized - gigabit wireless or 802.11n wired/wireless networking and Windows Media Center/Windows Vista. It will be interesting to see where these products go.

Netgear typically makes pretty nice home networking equipment, but they also released over 50 products last year - can you name them?

I have posted a short video of the scariest thing we saw at last night's press party. It's a robotic Elvis Head made by WoWee robotics (the manufacturers of robot toys you see every Christmas). It moves along with music from your audio player or Karaoke machine.

The network is a little shaky here and the press room is full, but I will try to post new updates as often as possible throughout the day.