Today we're in Vegas at at the opening of CES, the electronic geek Mecca of all trade shows. There's a good 150,000 people expected to converge on this year's event, piling into blimp-hangar-sized rooms filled with 33,000 vendors and their gadgets. We managed to sneak into one of the convention halls 90-minutes early, not that it did us any good—the sheer amount of product on display is staggering, and it would take us weeks to get through it all. Instead we've got two days and one man on the ground.

The good news—or bad news, depending on how you look at it—is that most of the stuff is repetitive from an industrial design point of view. China has 1.3 billion people, and it seems 1.2 billion of them are making flatscreen TV's. Then there are the world's tablet and smartphone manufacturers; add all those things up and we've passed thousands of illuminated rectangles this morning, with little to distinguish them (except for one manufacturer, which we'll get to). While we can't hope to match the manpower of other media outlets—CNET brought a team of ninetypeople—we will try to weed out the repetitive stuff, and find whatever would catch the eye of an industrial designer strolling through the show.

Stay tuned.