Scott Ard, Editor-In-Chief of CNET

Whenever I return from a trade show, I'm asked for inside information: What will consumers will be lining up to buy? Which product will be the next iPhone?

What these people really want is a 30-second summation of a trade show that had hundreds of exhibitors spread across enough floor space to fill a couple of baseball fields. Unfortunately, such a concise summary is just not possible, and it actually misses the point of attending a trade show.

The reality is that trade shows are rarely about a big-bang event, speech, or product announcement. In fact, each show can be viewed as one step in an evolutionary process, in which a product or service on its own is rarely breathtaking. Rather, it's the mingling ideas either across the show floor, or even from one trade show to another, that results in truly groundbreaking products or even new industries.

Take simple LCD panels, for example. They initially emerged in consumer products in the 1970s in screens for watches and some handheld games. In the 1990s they broke into the market for computer monitors and were considered very cool, and expensive. But who among us walking the floor of the Comdex and seeing the latest LCD offerings could have envisioned just where the flat-panel market would lead once th technology improved, prices plunged and the Internet took off?

Today, you can find laptops with multiple screens, cars with a monitor for every passenger, and gas stations and vending machines with 24-hour programming. When was the last time you took a flight or visited the dentist and didn't have a monitor thrust in your face? Just walk down the street and count how many people are staring into their phone rather than enjoying the sights around them.

Now that there's a screen almost always within sight, there's a race to sell content and advertising to those eyeballs. And companies are developing ways to deliver that content to all those new locations.

Did you see that coming in 1999?

Ten years later, the buzz is all about digital convergence (which is really an extension of hardware and content trends that dates back decades). Personally, I will be looking for some key advances at CEATEC: hardware gains that make it possible to carry a world of entertainment in devices more powerful and robust than the cell phone; ubiquitous Internet access such as Wi-Fi-enabled cars; and, perhaps most importantly, the business models that will encourage content owners to catch up to the technology.

So when I'm walking around CEATEC this year and evaluating the latest and greatest devices, I'm not expecting any single company or gadget to answer the question, "What was the coolest thing you saw." But rather, I'm looking for a collection of companies or advances that when considered together will provide a glimpse of what the world will look like very soon.

Profile of Scott Ard.
As the Editor in Chief of CNET, the Web’s leading technology site, Scott Ard oversees the editorial operations for CNET News, Reviews, TV and Download, which combined attract a monthly worldwide audience of 72 million unique users and deliver 370 million page views. Scott been a journalist for more than 20 years and an early tech adopter for even longer. His first PC was an Apple IIe (loaded with an 80-column card, mouse card, 300 baud internal modem) and a Duo Disc Drive (ideal for copying games with the Locksmith software). He is also passionate about home audio and video equipment, dating back to his college-days purchase of Mitsubishi all-in-one stereo with a vertical turntable. Scott joined CNET part-time in 1996 and became a full-time senior editor a few years later, meaning his career has roughly been split between print and Web publishing.