More than 3,100 companies flocked to the Consumer Electronics Show this year to hawk their wares. The show's host, the Consumer Electronics Association, estimates that roughly 20,000 products were launched at the show this year. And chances are good that many — maybe even most — will fail.

The show will close its doors Friday, and many of the little companies and entrepreneurs that are packing up may not make it back next year. Still, their hustle is infectious. And with luck, a few startups launched here this year could go on to become huge.

Read More

Computer chips and technology are invading all sorts of previously dumb devices. Phones are now smart. Cars are becoming connected computers on wheels. Call it the computerization of everything. But how we interact with these machines is bound to evolve.

At this year's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, touch pads are everywhere — in phones, in tablets and laptop screens. And Brad Feld has had enough.

"The whole idea that it is socially acceptable or functionally acceptable to have a whole mass of humanity that is staring down at a piece of glass and pounding on it with their thumbs is kind of absurd," says Feld, a venture capitalist at the Foundry Group. His firm is investing aggressively in startups that are creating new ways for humans and computers to interact.

"Twenty years from now the way we interact with computing will be unrecognizable to us today," he says.

But judging from the displays at CES, the touch pad craze hasn't crested — yet. Just inside Microsoft's enormous booth here there's a giant touch pad the size of a tabletop. It looks like the love child of an iPad and a flat-screen TV.

But Microsoft's Steve Clayton says it's a little bit different. This table doesn't just respond to touch, he says, it's actually watching us, paying attention to where we are — where we're standing.

"If I click on one of these images or I tap on one, the image rotates to me," Clayton explains. "This device can see, it can see the orientation of my finger and it can present the image towards me."

More and more computers are doing just that — paying attention, watching and listening to us.

Microsoft's Kinect responds to gestures. Apple's Siri listens to our voice. And observant little machines are popping up in places you might not expect.

Matt Rodgers is a founder at Nest, which has developed what it calls the first "learning thermostat." It observes patterns in your house, then programs itself.

"Use it like any non-programmable thermostat. Turn it up, turn it down and make yourself comfortable and Nest will learn your patterns," Rodgers says.

If you turn up the heat and then leave the house, Nest has sensors that will notice you are out and turn the heat down. You end up programming the computer inside this thermostat without even realizing you've done it.

John Underkoffler envisions a day where machines all around us that respond to how we move and what we want. He's best known as the brains behind the futuristic computers in Steven Spielberg's film Minority Report.

Spielberg didn't want Tom Cruise to mess around with keyboards or touch screens in a film set in the future.

"When I proposed to Steven that it could be a gestural interface that it could be body centered — human centered — and that you could literally point at the screens and command the pixels and sift data using your hands at a distance. I think Steven loved that idea," Underkoffler says.

So, in the 2002 film, Cruise stands in front of a screen and conducts his computer like Mickey Mouse in Fantasia.

Underkoffler built a working model at MIT and after the movie he refined it and started a company called Oblong. The full Oblong system can cost up to half a million dollars, but eventually he hopes it will control all sorts of machines "like laptops and desktops, but also computers that you don't think about — the front of your microwave oven, the dashboard of your car, the TV set in your living room."

And Oblong executives at CES this week say they see more and more signs that this transformation is on its way.

Not too long ago Nokia was the largest tech company in Europe. Its market cap rivaled Microsoft's. It helped create the mobile phone industry as we know it. But the emergence of a new generation of smartphones — led by Apple's iPhone and Android-based offerings from Samsung, HTC and others — left Nokia behind.

Now Nokia, with the help of Microsoft, is trying to force its way back into the North American smartphone market. At the Consumer Electronics show in Las Vegas, Nokia said it will begin selling a new Microsoft Windows phone on T-Mobile on Wednesday — and is unveiling the high-speed Lumia 900 this week.

The Lumia 900 will be launched exclusively on AT&T and will take advantage of that carrier's new high-speed 4G LTE network. Executives at Nokia have to hope this represents a turning point for the company.

Nokia spent billions on research. Just a decade ago Nokia's dominance seemed unassailable, but the last five years have not been kind to the Finnish mobile phone icon.

As Nokia struggled to catch up with consumer tastes, the company's research and partnerships with other giants like Intel failed to bear fruit. And in late 2010 the company's board hired a former Microsoft executive, Stephen Elop, to try to turn the firm around.

Elop decided last year to abandon Nokia's own smartphone operating system, comparing it to a burning oil platform in the North Sea. He said the company's predicament reminded him of an oil worker trapped in a disaster:

"In mere moments, he was surrounded by flames. Through the smoke and heat, he barely made his way out of the chaos to the platform's edge. When he looked down over the edge, all he could see were the dark, cold, foreboding Atlantic waters.

"As the fire approached him, the man had mere seconds to react. He could stand on the platform, and inevitably be consumed by the burning flames. Or, he could plunge 30 meters in to the freezing waters. The man was standing upon a 'burning platform,' and he needed to make a choice."

So Nokia jumped. It decided to commit the company to building new phones based on Microsoft's Windows operating system. Microsoft — like Nokia — had been left behind in the smartphone market after a series of false starts. Microsoft's market share was virtually non-existent.

After announcing the switch to Windows, sales of existing Nokia smartphones collapsed. It has taken nearly a year to bring new Microsoft-powered phones to market in the United States. In the meantime Nokia has been stuck — metaphorically at least — struggling to keep its head above water in the frigid North Atlantic.