At the same time Apollo will give developers the ability to work with the Web 2.0' tools they are familiar with to develop desktop applications.

If there is a poster child for empowering the people perhaps it is Shipwire. This company will give small companies the ability to compete with the largest retailers by offering a SaaS (software as a service) solution for warehouse management and for the pick, pack, and ship process.

Finally, another old high-tech company, Wyse Technology, was on hand with a new concept in thin-client architecture.

Although the N10 thin-client hardware uses fewer chips than any previous device from Wyse, what really makes it different is its intelligent software that legislates where software is processed.

The hybrid processing architecture, which uses a multicore system on a chip technology, has the ability to encode and decode any file type including VOIP, but it is the software that determines whether to process that type of data on the server or on the system on a chip.