CES 2010: Three big winners

CES 2010 is an enigma. For the Gadgetell crew, there wasn’t a clear winning product. One thing we can agree was three companies owned this show, all without actually having a booth. Those three companies are Netflix, Facebook and Pandora.

These three are bread, peanut butter and jelly to electronics today. They represent the go-to apps everyone apparently want to have on freaking everything. From Panasonic TVs to LG DVD players to Sony Dash clock radio thing, to Pioneer aftermarket car stereos to Ford cars. You cannot get away from them.

In fact, if you don’t have accounts with any of the three, get them now. Pandora is a fantastic online music service, Netflix is a great movie service (everywhere thanks to its free streaming service for members) and Facebook, the social network everyone seems to be on these days.

Of the three, Pandora is perhaps primed for explosive growth. Those of us with Pandora smartphone apps, know that having this in the car is tops. Ford will bring Pandora to so many new users with no smartphone required. I asked Ford if they had a revenuing sharing deal with Pandora and didn’t get much of answer after a pretty good chuckle. Pandora has become the goto music app.

Netflix has done an equally excellent job in getting their content to users via a myriad of apps. They have become the leader in online streaming despite efforts from Blockbuster, Amazon and others to supplant them. You can’t swing a dead cat at CES without hitting something that can get Netflix streaming movies. We tried.

And mighty Facebook. Named top dog at the Cruchies yet again, Facebook continues to work hard to allow users to update status from virtually anywhere. Is it a fad like our love affair with MySpace or will it morph with the times? We don’t know but Facebook is everywhere and primed to get more and more users thanks to its ubiquty.

So with that, more than any product, we see these three as the real winners this year at CES.

Thanks to Energizer for providing the battery power to run all our gadgets at the show. Without their support, we wouldn’t have been able to bring you the content we did. A big thanks! Check out energitogo for all the stuff we used to keep us powered up.