First there was the 2005 International CES in Las Vegas, the world's largest consumer electronics show and where many high-tech companies unveiled their latest offerings. In the past, the VCR, the CD player, plasma television and the Xbox have been launched at the show.
Around 130,000 people attended the show to see the wares of some 2,500 exhibitors in an exhibition space the size of 32 football pitches.
Straight afterwards was the Macworld expo in San Francisco, which this year was pretty much a homage to the all-conquering iPod, bought for Christmas by the other halves of business travellers everywhere this festive season.
Personal video recorders (PVRs) were much in evidence at CES but perhaps the star of the show was the MSI Megaview 566. It has a 3.5 inch LCD screen, 20 gigabytes of storage - enough to record 80 hours of video — and the ability to playback all sorts of content — including MP4 and DivX video, MP3, WMA and AAC music files as well as allowing you to view various photo formats. The MegaVue 566 also incorporates a slot to take an SD card and with the price of this memory coming down drastically — you can now get a 1 gigabyte SD card for around £50 in the UK — you'll be able to store your favourite TV moments forever on a card smaller than a stamp. The player is expected to hit the streets at the end of the first quarter this year.
If you're forever dropping flakes of croissant and spilling your Starbucks onto your laptop's keyboard, you'll be interested in this new gadget from Taiwan's BSM Corporation. It's a miniature vacuum cleaner to clean up all the bits. The clever bit is that you can power it from your laptop's USB port.
Bose appeared to have all but cornered the market in noise-cancelling headphones — ideal for use on flights to block out the din of engines, babies and the cabin crew — but Sennheiser used CES to launch their PXC300 Active Noise Cancelling headphones, an update on their PXC250 'phones from last year. The foldaway design remains the same but the noise-cancelling circuitry has been improved. Likely to hit the streets in the US soon at a price of just over US$200 (£115) with Europe to follow.
Business travellers who tote personal digital assistants will love the sleek aluminium cases launched by DSI at the show.
The US$59 (£32) cases are available for most of the latest PDAs and BlackBerries.
Keeping the files on your laptop and your desktop computer in sync is all very well if you are a corporation with megabucks to spend but it's a lot harder for travellers working for small businesses.
Synchronisation software such as Easy2Sync have been around for a while but ImagineLAN's new Sync-Along software adds a novel twist.
You load the US$19 (£10) software onto a pen drive or other portable storage device (even iPods) and set up a profile to show which files you want to synchronise between the two computers. Every time you plug the storage device in, the software synchronises these files.
The explosion in th enumber of wi-fi hotspots has had the experts scratching their heads for ways to use them. Zinwell has launched a wi-fi phone which allows you to make calls over the internet whenever you are in a wireless hotspot. Sign up to a service like Callserve and you can make calls anywhere in the world for a few pence. Internet telephony has been around for some time but the higher speeds of wi-fi have meant that most of the teething problems — dropped calls, garbled voices and the like — have disappeared.
