After a whirlwind tour of the CES show floor, here are some impressions of what was new and interesting in the VoIP area. Sorry I wasn’t able to blog these from Vegas over the weekend - a combination of the obscene wireless connection scheme at the show and network problems at my hotel kept me offline for my brief jaunt to CES this year.

• Skype announced a whole mess of new gear.
• Vonage kept its marketing machine in high gear. With kiosks scattered around the show for free Vonage calls, and enticing hardware deals for new customers, I never saw their booth without a long line of new of new customers signing up.
• WiFi VoIP phones have definitely arrived (though most seemed ugly and poorly designed)
• Many vendors are showing off new VoIP phones, including consumer giants Panasonic and Phillips (not ugly)
• Taiwanese audio company Kinyo was showing off “VoIP Speakers”, which auto-pause when any SIP call comes in
• Commoca demonstrated its openTouch device, a SIP VoIP/analog touch screen phone with online information access.

And on the non-VoIP tip, I can tell you that all things video were big at CES this year, big TVs were REALLY big, and there was general agreement that Google’s announced moves into online video will help usher in the era of watching TV over the net — IPTV here we come! I have to confess that I’m a little less pessimistic than I was previously about Jeff Pulver’s prediction that 2006 is the year that video producers will start looking to the net first as delivery medium. There’s a lot of growing energy in that space.