At Berlin trade show, your home gets smarter

— -- This past week the technorati of the world gathered in Berlin for IFA, the second largest consumer electronics conference after CES. This year is expected to top last year's 1,400 exhibitors and 239,000 attendees. For the most part, the trends here are variations on familiar themes: TVs and mobile, each making expected, gradual changes. Surprisingly, some of the biggest innovations were in appliances. Get ready for a smarter and more integrated world that extends to every room in the house.

"This is not so much a technology show as a product show," says Jens Heithecker, executive director of IFA. And there are plenty of products to browse on the show floor. Unlike CES, the IFA show is open to the public, allowing consumers to interact directly with products before they come to market, closely observed by retailers and manufacturers alike. The show is critically timed for retailers, as they can place orders just in time for the Christmas season. Last year, the order volume at the show hit around $4.6 billion.

Televisions and mobile devices were heavily showcased, but failed to deliver any technological revelations. Rather, there's been a steady pace in the same direction for a few years. In televisions, there are two concurrent technologies being pushed: OLED panels and super-high resolution, 4K/8K screens. Though both may only appeal to the most dedicated technophiles, they are closer to market than ever. Displays at IFA included a Sony 84-inch TV with breathtaking sharpness, and an equally breathtaking $31,000 price tag. Paul Semenza, an analyst with DisplaySearch, noted that 4K televisions like the Sony were finally transitioning from the prototype stage to a final product. "They're making real moves now," he stated.

In mobile, devices running Windows 8 were a trending topic, but there was no runaway hit. However, the Samsung Galaxy camera drew some crowds. It's the first camera to run the Android operating system, which will allow it far more connectivity and sharing options than a typical camera.

If a trade show can be used as a telescope into the future of technology, this year's IFA would suggest that the next platform for innovation is not on the desktop, or in some mobile device, but rather in your kitchen and laundry room, where the dumb iceboxes and clothes cleaners of the past are being replaced by refrigerators, washing and dryers that are more technologically complex than most of your gadgets.

Imagine the following scenario: As you're driving home from work, you'll pull out your cell phone and make a quick check-in to your house. First, you'll ask your refrigerator to send you a photo of the avocados inside, to see if they're still fresh. If not, you'll ask the fridge to add it to the shopping list that's automatically pushed out to a grocery delivery service each week. Then you'll tell your oven to preheat to 350 degrees for that casserole you plan on warming, and have your dryer to steam a load of clothes and text you when it's done.

That sequence of events will be possible in the next few years if the prototypes that Samsung, Haier, LG, Miele, and others brought to IFA can come to fruition. For this to materialize, however, a number of supporting technologies and services must co-develop, Take the smart fridge as an example. The dream of high-tech appliance makers is a refrigerator that knows what food it's storing. Items come in and out, and each one is tracked. Wal-Mart and other retailers have used RFID tags for years to achieve something similar, but though it's easy to slap a tag on a large palette of goods, how do you track an apple purchased at a farmer's market? More importantly, what do you do with this information once your fridge knows that you have that apple?

Answers to those questions are still elusive, and the ideas seems more Buck Rodgers than Julia Child. At one point, though, so did car radios, color televisions, compact discs — all technologies that debuted at the IFA show.

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