Richard Irving, a partner at venture capital firm Pond Venture Partners, sees that making all the exciting consumer advances work together is a big challenge for the CE industry.
The vast Consumer Electronics Show held in Las Vegas each January is always a crowded, frenzied affair - hundreds of thousands of people swarming over literally thousands of exhibit stands scattered all over the city. And of course there is the surreal insanity of Las Vegas, about as different from a normal city as could be imagined, only adds to the frenzy.
After all, where else will you pass retirees at 9am drinking free scotch and sodas and smoking cigars (indoors!) as they dump their life savings into one-arm bandits.
From a gadget viewpoint, this year lacked much originality: literally thousands of mobile phones each almost identical to the other, masses of flat panels, and so on. The most original products also seemed rather nichey, such as Panasonic's 150 inch flat panel - cool to look at but a little large for most living rooms and you would probably get a suntan watching it; or the motorised roller skates, just what every parent wants to buy their kids.
The real challenge facing the CE industry remains making all this stuff work together and usable by ordinary consumers. TV, DVD, PVR and digital camera interfaces are notoriously hard for all except true propeller-heads to understand.
Some companies have solutions: Hillcrest Labs showed a very cool ring-shaped remote, and 4HomeMedia's very intuitive and attractive software interface showed up in numerous booths and garnered no fewer than six awards at the show.
So stuff is coming which will make our lives easier, but it takes a while to trickle through the consumer electronics food chain. Until that happens, surfing the web on an ordinary TV, connecting your TV and PC, or mobile/PC/TV interoperability, all compelling consumer needs, will remain the domain of the highly technical. Too bad, since such attractive user interfaces would mean real new markets today.