As the bellwether for the rest of the year, the annual Consumer Electronics Show is a four-day extravaganza of what companies plan to release in 2011.At the end of the four-day show in Las Vegas, Acer's Iconia Windows 7 laptop was voted as the best product unveiled at CES 2011 in the Last Gadget Standing contest. The Iconia looks like an incredible machine from the photographs.It is designed as two 14-inch screens with a touchscreen interface. It is like having two connected touchscreens that lie flat. One converts to a touch keypad if you want to use the Iconia as a regular laptop.The Barnes & Noble NOOKcolor, a full-colour touch reading tablet, received the People's Choice Award. It will set you back $249.About 75 tablets were introduced at CES 2011, most of them based on the Android operating system. CNET named the Motorola Xoom as the best tablet of the show, being the first to use Android 3.0, which is also known as ‘Honeycomb'.The company also got the publication's best smartphone award for its Atrix. This is being labelled as a new category, called a ‘superphone'.The 4G phone runs on Google Android 2.2 Froyo operating system, has a 4-inch display for multimedia entertainment, 1GB RAM, and two cameras.A five megapixel camera at the back is for photographs, while the front one supports video calling.Motorola plans to release a HD multimedia dock and laptop dock for the Atrix later this year. The HD multimedia dock has a power connector, three USB ports, and an HDMI output with an infrared remote.The laptop dock features a 11.6 inch display, two USB ports, a keyboard and a trackpad.IoSafe had one of the most active booths at CES. The company took one of its new Rugged Portable drives and dunked it in a fish tank, squeezed it with a vice, shot it and then worked on it with a screwdriver.The external USB connector was damaged, but the data inside was show to be still readable.Finally, GE announced at CES the second phase of its $200m open innovation challenge.If you are an entrepreneur or an IT developer, try submitting an idea to the company's ecomagination Challenge, which seeks the best ideas for harnessing and managing energy at home.The first phase attracted submissions from 1,500 companies participated in developing clean tech ventures. The ideas do not have to be mind boggling, but need to be sufficiently developed to attract venture capital.For example, Promethean Power invented a low-cost method for farmers in emerging markets to keep milk cool when stored and shipped. Others, like SecureRF, created a way to encrypt and protect the entire digital grid.The challenge opens 18 January and ends 1 March at http://ge.ecomagination.com.For the rest of CES go to www.cesweb.org to watch all of the keynote addresses from some of the 22 CEOs attending the gadget fest.Get ready for IPv6, the next-generation Internet protocol meant as the successor to Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4). The main use is to resolve unique domain addresses, such as royalgazette.com, so they can be found on the internet.Under IPv4, the Internet will run out of unique addresses by the end of 2012.To help make organisations and businesses make the changeover smoothly and securely the USNational Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has published a guide to IPv6, which can be deployed concurrently with IPv4.The challenges managers, network engineers, transition teams and others must counter include attackers that can hack into a system in the early stages of IPv6 deployment. Look for Guidelines for the Secure Deployment of IPv6 (NIST Special Publication 800-119) at http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/PubsSPs.html.Send any comments to elamin.ahmed@gmail.com.