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Today marks the official start to the 2010 Consumer Electronics Showcase in Las Vegas where all of the biggest electronics manufacturers show off their coolest and newest products. While CES is mainly a gadget show, entrepreneurs looking for the next big thing should pay close attention to the innovative ideas being pushed into the consumer market.

The big show is just getting underway, but we are already seeing some trends emerge that could point to new opportunities for startups in 2010.

Mike Kuniavsky from ThingM Corporation spoke this morning at ETech about merging machine-readable identification with pervasive networking. Kuniavsky said that when a digital representation of an object is accessed through a unique ID, it is the object's "information shadow". Nowadays, he said, these information shadows are attached to just about everything. One of the consequences of this is that the physical object changes to a service. This is another manifestation of the bigger trend of internet connected objects. Kuniavsky outlined a couple of examples of objects as a service in his presentation.

In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup, our newsletter summarising the top stories of the week, we review the action from the Mobile World Congress, find out why many people blacked out their social networking profiles this week, continue our series on recommendation engines, analyze Yahoo's progress in search innovation, look into the Internet in cars, and more. Also check out the highlights from our Enterprise Channel and Jobwire, ReadWriteWeb's new product which tracks hires in tech and new media.

A new radio system developed in Australia is transforming the vehicles on the street into nodes on a network. The technology, designed by scientists at the University of Southern Australia's Institute for Telecommunications Research, is an application called "Dedicated Short Range Communications" (DSRC). Using a combination of GPS and Wi-Fi, cars can communicate their location data to a central office, but it also enables them to communicate with each other.