I t happens every year - I come back from the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas and my friends and colleagues ask me: "So did you find anything cool?"

It would be great if a vendor was showing off its new time machine, because then I could emphatically shout "Yes!" and tell colleagues how I went back to 1958 and accidentally bumped into my parents and had a wacky adventure to make sure that I would be born. Alas, there was no time machine, but there were thousands of new products from 2,491 exhibitors. Among those, there were several that could be classified as cool, but still not as cool as a time machine.

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I t happens every year - I come back from the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas and my friends and colleagues ask me: "So did you find anything cool?"

It would be great if a vendor was showing off its new time machine, because then I could emphatically shout "Yes!" and tell colleagues how I went back to 1958 and accidentally bumped into my parents and had a wacky adventure to make sure that I would be born. Alas, there was no time machine, but there were thousands of new products from 2,491 exhibitors. Among those, there were several that could be classified as cool, but still not as cool as a time machine.

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Also: CES 2004 wrapup
The lowdown on the hot storage, multimedia and wireless gear at the show.
Networked media players arrive on scene
A detailed look at the vendors hitting the networked media player market.

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Here are the two coolest products I found:

Wireless media server: Last year I saw a trickle of products that aimed to stream music, photos or videos from home computers across the network (wired or wireless) and play them over a TV or stereo. This year, the floodgates have opened, as dozens of companies showed off their version of a wireless multimedia system.

The system I will want to buy in a few months comes from Prismiq, which was showing a demonstration of its new Prismiq MediaPlayer/Recorder system (set for availability in April for about $300). The company already has a version that streams music, photos and videos (the Prismiq MediaPlayer, priced at $200).

The MediaPlayer/Recorder has a new interface and includes a personal video recorder that lets you record television content and play it back whenever you like (similar to TiVo and other systems). And Prismiq has partnered with online movie provider CinemaNow so users can access its 3,000 titles. One thing I like about the Prismiq offering is that there's no hard drive - the system stores the content on your home network, so adding storage space is as easy as adding another hard drive to your network.

It's clear that Wi-Fi will be the connection of choice for consumer electronics vendors, and the ultimate goal is to take video content and stream it wirelessly from one TV system to another. Whether that connection is over 802.11g, or 802.11a with an 802.11e (quality-of-service) overlay, remains to be seen. But the wireless streaming-video demonstrations were impressive.

With so many products connecting via Wi-Fi, there's good news and bad news for enterprise network managers. The good news is that more products with Wi-Fi in them will lower the cost of Wi-Fi products, making enterprise Wi-Fi deployments less expensive. The bad news: All your relatives will want you to help them install their new wireless networks.

 Coolest gadget: So to answer my colleagues in the shortest possible way, "Yes, I found something that's cool": the Eyetop video sunglasses from Ingineo. The sunglasses have wires that let you connect any video source with RCA jacks (portable DVD player, camcorder or even miniature video games), and you can see the video screen inside the lens when you're wearing the glasses. I've seen similar devices before, but they were way too expensive (more than $1,000). The Eyetop sunglasses come in two versions (one with earphones, one without), and will cost about $450.