There’s been no shortage of flashing bold statements about “Top Ten CES Trends” and “Biggest Tech Predictions For 2010” over the last week. In an effort not to add to that list, here’s what all those tech innovations and new devices mean for consumers and the role that agencies like LEVEL play in helping create desirable consumer products.

Let’s start by narrowing all the major trends into the two underlying and consistent themes in consumer electronics:

• Manufacturers are focused on creating multifunctional, web-enabled devices that can share content with other devices.
• New content ecosystems are becoming differentiators for manufacturers while simultaneously changing business models for manufacturers, service providers and content developers.

What does all this mean for consumers?
As product categories continue to overlap, consumers will require additional information to ascertain why they should buy one product over another. Tablets, e-readers, smartphones, netbooks, notebooks and more all offer some similar functionality. With so many product similarities, consumers will start evaluating them less on their individual features and more on the content available, the ease of product integration and the overall user experience. Price will also still be important when evaluating several similar products.

New content ecosystems include components like cloud services for media storage, content development platforms and application storefronts. Consumers will become more adept at searching for and purchasing on-demand content and will increasingly want to access media (music, video games, apps, etc.) across their own devices and even on remote, public devices. Manufacturers that facilitate these interactions in a seamless way will stand out.

These major changes are meant to make technology adoption easier for consumers by reducing the number of devices they need and allowing them to access content on all devices. In reality, there are so many technology options and so much content out there that consumers are inundated with both. This makes the purchase decision, product integration and content search more difficult. Agencies like LEVEL (specializing in cross-channel experiences on connected devices) are positioned well to ultimately help manufacturers develop intuitive product interfaces and market the products in a crowded market.

Committed to the consumer electronics space, we recently launched a new resource for CE manufacturers. For more insight and better ways to connect, please visit: www.level-studios.com/connected.