Innovation showcase: The best--or at least the rest--of the rest

It's possible that BelAir Networks walked away with the "best new idea likely to succeed" award at CableLabs' Summer Conference 2010 Innovation Showcase because a number of other similarly themed products split the voting.

"Every company got some votes. BelAir got the most votes but there were a lot of votes for a lot of other companies," said Mark Coblitz, Comcast's (Nasdaq: CMCSA) senior vice president of product planning.

The showcase, in addition to stroking vendors, gives cable operators some ideas of what might be in the development stages at start-up and cable companies. This year, the theme seemed to be looking from the outside in.

"They're bringing technologies to the cable industry that people don't necessarily always associate with the cable industry," said Paul Liao, president-CEO of CableLabs.

Pace, for example, presented a widget format for their existing set-top boxes that was "beyond the typical widgets of finance and weather," said David Reed, CableLabs' executive vice president and chief strategy officer. "Some companies like BigBand and Digital Keystone and Panasonic are developing technologies that allow the existing cable services to interact on different IP devices like tablets and game players."

Others targeted the still nascent home networking space.

"ActiveVideo, for example, had a cloud in the home approach ... that allowed the gateway to be a focal point to enable extension of services to new devices," said Reed. "By far, probably the most dominant theme was technologies that allowed cable operators to connect devices in the home in a myriad of different ways."

Following are highlights of companies featured in CableLabs' Innovation Showcase, from an information sheet provided by CableLabs.