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Google announced today that it will offer free calls to Haiti through Google Voice to help connect Haitians with their families in other locations. The company's announcement follows on the heels of Skype's announcement yesterday that it would be emailing vouchers for $2 of Skype credit to its users in Haiti.

However, a United Nations Foundation worker told us this afternoon that the communication systems in Haiti were essentially unusable. It appears that the two companies have just joined the category of "awfully nice, generous, but somewhat impractical" ideas.

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.

Yahoo! announced plans today at the 2010 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) to spread its tentacles deeper into the Internet-connected TV market, inking new deals with TV, media player and processor manufacturers, as well as releasing its widget development kit and signing on with new content partners.

When we looked at the rebirth of the Web TV last year, we had one major reservation - would people really buy a new TV just for the widgets? "Probably not," we said. This year, Yahoo! is bringing the Internet into our other devices, so we don't have to.

Starting this spring, you won't need to gather the whole family around a 15-inch laptop screen to talk with cousin Joe on the other side of the country. As a matter of fact, you won't even need to get up off the sofa after the evening news, because Skype is coming to the big screen - the big TV screen, that is.

Skype announced today that they have been working with LG and Panasonic to embed Skype in Internet-connected widescreen HDTVs.

Skype's litigation woes with eBay had businesses a bit worried. Funding Skype in the enterprise looked risky with the potential that a judge could at some point pull the code base out from under Skype and leave businesses stranded.

But that's not an issue anymore. According to Network World, Skype now has rights to the code that is essential for the service to run. That means Skype for business is a green light for the companies seeking to use the VOIP service.

We've been lucky enough to get our hands on leaked screenshots from one version of Rdio, the forthcoming music app from Skype, KaZaA and Joost creators Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis. Zennstrom and Friis were the original financiers behind peer-to-peer file sharing site KaZaA, but Rdio won't be following a free-for-all sharing model. Instead, Rdio will be a subscription music site similar to Spotify.

What will the men behind some of the most successful software of the online era do when it comes to music? Check out what we've discovered so far.

Ever since AT&T filed a letter with the FCC about Google Voice's refusal to connect to certain areas, the two companies have been in a heated public battle. On the one side, AT&T takes the stance that as a carrier, Google is required to offer open access to all numbers. Nevertheless, in today's blog rebuttal, Google asserts, "Google Voice is a free web application, one intended to supplement and enhance existing phone lines, not replace them."

There are those old-fashioned folks who still prefer to talk by phone, believing that "synchronous audio communication" is sometimes better than email or even - gasp - Twitter. The problem is cost, particularly for those not tethered to a land line or a laptop with Skype. Paying for 1,000 cell phone minutes per month is not exactly recession-friendly. So, is there an alternative to jail-breaking your iPhone or waiting for Apple and AT&T to file for divorce? Yes, there is, and I have been using it for a couple of months now in three different countries, and it works a treat. Here is my user report.

Skype, the popular peer-to-peer VoIP service, just announced that it will soon shut down a large part of its developer program and shutter its Extras service, which allowed third-party developers to develop applications that enhanced the core functionality of Skype and sell them in Skype's own online store. Starting today, Skype will no longer accept new applications for inclusion in the Skype store and will stop to certify new Extras. Existing apps will continue to work and a public API will be maintained for the foreseeable future. While Skype will keep this public API open, however, it won't offer support for developers anymore.

Update: This news is now official.

Online telephony service Skype will be sold by eBay to a group of private investors, possibly including Netscape founder Marc Andreessen's new venture capital group, and the deal will be announced on Tuesday according to a report by a team of reporters from the New York Times.

EBay faces legal challenges from Skype's founders that the company said earlier this summer could mean the end of Skype as we know it. From an innovation perspective, we're always excited when such an interesting company breaks free from a slow-moving monolith that acquired it.