Stories by Barbara Krasnoff

The Jam Rewind and Braven 105 are two small, durable Bluetooth speakers that offer good sound and several distinctive features.

Back in the dark ages, when the only way to get onscreen entertainment was by tuning in a television set at a specific time (get home late? miss your favorite show? too bad for you!), networks had a habit of scheduling similar shows opposite each other. The notion was presumably, that the competition would cause one show to win out over the other, which would eventually drop in the ratings and get cancelled. The idea that viewers might be interested in seeing both apparently was not in the networks' psychology.

A few years ago, Evernote picked up a small contact-manager app called Hello (which was then retitled Evernote Hello). One of the main ideas behind the app was to help those of us who had trouble remembering names (a category I definitely fall into). It let you take notes about people you met at, say, a conference, and pick up extra information, including photos, from LinkedIn. You could then use the info and/or the photos to jog your memory.

"Technology has become so critical to business success that the type of engineering skills we need are similar to what a pure technology company has," says Atish Banerjea, executive vice president and CIO at <a href="http://www.nbcuniversal.com">NBCUniversal</a>.

CE Week, a New York City-based exhibition from the same folks who bring you the huge CES show in Las Vegas, attracts vendors who are showing new, innovative or just-plain-weird products. Here is a sampling of what we saw.

Moto X, the first smartphone completely designed after Google acquired Motorola Mobility, is an interesting and well-fashioned consumer device.

Even the most high-end smartphones and tablets today still have less-than-stellar speakers. We test four mobile Bluetooth speakers to see how they can improve your sound.

Two Wi-Fi mobile hotspots offer very different services: The Verizon Wireless JetPack is fast but pricey while the FreedomPop Photon is limited but free.

iTwin lets you share files between two computers using a USB-based device. It's not a perfect solution, but some will find it very useful.

The e-reader market is constantly moving, with new models being introduced (and prices dropping) on almost a weekly rate. The latest additions are from Sony, which has revamped its line of Sony Reader e-book readers. While two out of the three new models don't have wireless connections to a bookstore -- and are therefore missing the instant gratification that Amazon's Kindle offers -- the new devices are sleek and good-looking, with a lot of interesting features.

While 3D movies are already experiencing something of a backlash, technology vendors are still pushing forward with 3D content -- trying to persuade us that 3D is to 2D what talkies were to silents.

When you have a product that has been successful for several years, but has fallen somewhat behind the times, it can be difficult to figure out what to change and what to leave alone.

Digital projectors are getting smaller practically by the day; however, most "pocket projectors" don't have either the power or feature sets that would make them suitable for business use.

Dell, once the king of low-cost over-the-phone computer sales, has recently been trying to find its niche as a purveyor of luxury goods in what could charitably be called a stuttering economy. Having first gone for the high-end consumer market with its sleek Adamo notebook released in March, it has turned its sights to the corporate sector with the sleek, expensive and better equipped Latitude Z.

If you have problems figuring out the buttons on Bluetooth headsets, the Q1 could make things easier