“CES is a celebration of optimism.” – Gary Shapiro

Kicking off the largest Consumer Electronics Show ever, Gary Shapiro, CEA’s CEO, opened the event to a packed convention center crowd, citing the theme of Innovation – the “engine driving the US and global economy” – as the theme of this year’s Vegas soiree.

The expected record crowd of 126,000 includes 25,000 from outside the US, with 2,700 companies represented in 1.6 million square feet of exhibit space – the ‘best of the best’ of new consumer devices and services from around the world. Gary’s remarks covered the waterfront, from upbeat commentary on the criticality of innovation in reviving our economy and improving our standard of living to political commentary on the need for Washington to remove barriers to innovation, more thoroughly detailed on the CEA supported website, The Innovation Movement.

Being practical, Gary also invited CES-goers to buy his new book on innovation, “The Comeback: How Innovation Will Restore the American Dream,” released this week (it’s a good read).

Gary cited steady growth in consumer electronics this past year (up 3.5 percent worldwide in 2010), driven in part by the acceleration of change with mobile technology, Internet TV, tablet computing, home automation and 3D. He also noted the rise of the user-created app marketplace, a rapidly changing landscape which helps fuel the fulfillment of the long-heralded ‘anywhere, anytime’ promise for content, news, information, sports and education. He predicts CE sales to rise 3.5 percent to $186 billion in 2011.

Gary turned over the opener to co-keynoters Ivan Seidenberg, CEO of Verizon; Jeff Bewkes of Time Warner; Motorola co-CEO Dr. Sanjay K. Jha, and executives from Google.

Building on Shapiro’s exuberance of the “unique American sauce which fuels our growth,” Bewkes and Seidenberg painted a landscape where network services and platforms provide an “extra hard drive for the brain, a second skin” with which to sense the world.  Bewkes hawked the “second golden age of television,” citing the surprising-to-some increases this year in viewership, ad revenues and program options.

Verizon, Google and Motorola followed up by unveiling several practical examples in the mobile space, notably the new Android Honeycomb platform running on an also-new Motorola XOOM LTE tablet and the Droid Bionic smartphone. The Honeycomb/XOOM combination aims squarely at the iPad and tablet computing market with Android’s refreshingly thoughtful user interface, growing range of applications and high-speed LTE-based wireless connectivity. This demo can be found at the Android Community site and includes good examples of the coming generation of capabilities, including fully 2-way videoconferencing on wireless handheld devices, new e-book options, 3D building and terrain mapping under multi-touch control, 3D multiplayer games and other capabilities not previously seen in a tablet or handheld.

Shapiro and Seidenberg noted the developments shown were the result of the “expanding circle of collaboration” between companies and industries. They alluded to massive scale changes in the telecom landscape, where double-every-18-months-volume of wireless video/data is becoming a new corollary to Moore’s law slamming existing business models and igniting consumer expectations. Seidenberg wrapped up with a resonant message on “even more disruptive social models are in our future.”