You'd think the sky had fallen with all the reports of lower attendance, shrinking hotel room rates and no Bill Gates keynote (as well as no Steve Jobs keynote over at MacWorld) at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Despite the doom and gloom, there were still tons of new products announced with enough fanfare to make the hype-masters happy. Here are a couple of trends and products that piqued my interest:

1) Projectors get wicked small: At last year's show I got a sneak peek at the "micro-projector" or "pico-projector" concept, and this year we're starting to see products based on the concept. Nextar announced its LCOS micro-projector, the Z10, a $300 projector that uses liquid crystal on silicon technology to produce images up to 640-by-480-pixel resolution, with a brightness level of between 7 and 12 lumens. The 1.5-pound Z10 includes a built-in speaker and microSD card slot, and can project images up to 20 inches (Nextar is selling a companion portable 20-inch screen for $40 (the PS-001).

WowWee Robotics, which usually sticks to the robotic toy market, is getting a bit more serious with its ultraportable projectors. Teaming up with Texas Instruments, the company announced its Cinemin series of micro-projectors, which utilizes TI's DLP technology. The series includes the Cinemin Swivel (three-hour battery life, 90-degree hinge for ceiling projection), Cinemin Stick (pico projector with internal memory and expandable SD card slot), and Cinemin Station (alarm-clock sized media center and iPod docking station).

Click to see: The Cinemin Stick

While these devices may be consumer-oriented at first (showing iPod videos on a larger display, or backyard movie night in a tent, for example), it isn't much of a stretch to imagine mobile workers using these to display presentations and other videos to colleagues or sales contacts via their smartphones. We often hear talk about the "death of the notebook," the availability of smaller projectors that work with smartphones adds to the possibility that mobile workers can forgo their laptops.

2) Cisco's "push" into the home: Cisco has already been "in the home" with its Linksys division of home wireless routers, but apparently it's a big surprise that the company would like to now get into the living room with some new offerings. While the multiroom wireless audio system looks impressive (right up there with the Sonos and Logitech offerings), I'm more fascinated by the new Cisco by Linksys (a new branding name) Media Hub, a network-attached storage device that "gathers, organizes and presents all the digital video, photos and music that users have spread amongst various devices in the home."