Wanted: Gadgets That Can Talk To One Another

Last week’s Consumer Electronics Show offered lots of whiz-bang ways to get electronic entertainment. A utopia? Or a maze of tech problems? Tech heavyweights such as Intel, Panasonic, Samsung and Sharp all showed off networking systems, but none of those systems are designed to work together. The resulting problems are similar to miscommunication between people who speak the same language but different dialects — sometimes they might understand each other perfectly well, but at other times they might not.