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More than half of the devices launched at CES earlier this month were connected. That's according to the GSMA, a worldwide association of mobile operators and related companies. GSMA calculated that more than 90% of TVs at CES, 70% of automotive devices, 44% of healthcare devices and 30% of cameras were connected.

GSMA predicts there will be 24 billion connected devices in the world by 2020. That's up from 9 billion today. It identified car connectivity as an especially important product category to watch.

As each year passes, the connected car makes more of a noise at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. This year several car manufacturers were touting new features, including Mercedes-Benz, Ford and Audi. The term "connected car" refers to the integration of smartphone apps and content into the car. Typically this is done via the car's dashboard, enabling you to listen to online music, access Web data, stream video to the car's passengers and more. In this post we'll look at three such systems: Ford Sync, Mercedes-Benz mbrace2 and Audi Connect.

What all three of the above car manufacturers, and others like General Motors and Toyota, have in common is that they are leveraging the rapid evolution of smartphone technology - rather than trying to build new Internet devices into their cars.

This year's Consumer Electronics Show is getting ready to wrap up in Las Vegas tomorrow. There may not have been a single blockbuster product announcement, but when it comes to the future of television, CES is always good for a few hints about what to expect. By piecing together some of those clues, we can begin to see a picture of what the future holds.

There are a number of trends toward the future of television that are already well underway, some of which will be built upon in 2012. Web connectivity is increasingly standard on new TV sets, time-shifting content is becoming the norm and viewers are supplementing the TV experience using the "second screens" of smartphones and tablets. Nobody knows what Apple has in mind for the TV hardware industry, but consumers and industry incumbents alike have been conditioned to expect it to make a big impact.

If you're attending the Consumer Electronic Show (CES) this week and have an Android phone, you'll be able to use Google Maps to navigate inside the Las Vegas Convention Center. Select resorts and casinos on the Las Vegas strip are also covered, as is McCarran International Airport.

Google has also partnered with some Las Vegas-area Best Buy stores, so it can guide gadget-addled convention-goers straight to the cash register. Today's update also releases the floor plans of some of the first locations submitted to Google.

If you happened to see the movie Star Trek VI (the last one with the original TV cast) when it premiered in theaters in 1991, perhaps there may have been a moment (or a dozen) when something occurred to you: You didn't have to dislike or even fail to appreciate these actors on-screen to realize, yep, there's a reason why this is - and should be - their last performance in this venue.

It's not even Day 1 at this year's CES in Las Vegas, but already we've seen a flurry of product announcements. One of the more impressive was from Samsung. Internet TV is expected to be a big trend of 2012 and as the world's number 1 TV brand, Samsung is a company to watch. Especially given the gains Samsung made over 2011 with the Galaxy series of smartphones and tablets, which made it the leading vendor of Android-based devices in the world.

The big news from Samsung today was a Smart TV push. The word "smart" here refers to Internet connectivity. Samsung's 2012 model TVs will enable users to consume a mix of traditional TV programming and Web apps. It remains to be seen how well these new Internet features are implemented, because software and user experience have not historically been strengths of Samsung. But the message today was clear: Samsung is doubling down on its core TV leadership and attempting to make the TV the main household Internet device.

Last week, news broke that Kodak was preparing to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection after a long battle with digital photography and the proliferation of photo-sharing apps on the iPhone 4. Lest it be defeated, today at CES Kodak announced two new cameras that integrate with Facebook for easy photo sharing. The cameras also have two anti-social media applications for printing images from Facebook profiles. Kodak is banking on the idea that Facebook users may have a secret desire to print hardcopy photos from their Facebook profiles. Judging by digital-to-print image app Postagram, among others, they might be right.

It's called engagement, it's the catchphrase behind one of ReadWriteWeb's top technologies of the year, and it's emerging as one of the latest conceptual technologies on the floor of CES 2012 this week. In the back of ad executives' minds during Salesforce.com's introduction of Radian6 last year, there must have been cogs turning and wheels spinning about how viewers tweeting each other could be leveraged as an engagement tool.

Specifically, what if people tweeting about a show became integrated into the show? Could servers mining those tweets conceivably glean viewer reactions? And could engaging with the various tweeters lead to a new and more direct way to deliver ads?

Anybody with a passing interest in the headlines pouring out of the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas cannot help but identify one major theme: 2012 is the year that the TV will converge with mobile platforms. For all of the talk that CES has lost its clout, it is still a good source for identifying trends that will drive the innovation of major technology companies in the new year. Last year tablets and dual-core processors were all the rage. This year, developers have something bigger on their minds.