Last week, VivaKi hit Vegas in full force to attend the 45th annual Consumer Electronics Show. With over 400 agency and client attendees, VivaKi hosted a unique three-day agenda that gave guests access to VIP tours of the show floor, exclusive sneak-peeks and insights into this year’s hottest trends and exclusive opportunities to network with some of the industry’s leading companies and start-ups. A huge thanks to our sponsors who made this experience truly worthwhile for all attendees, including: AOL, Buddy Media, CNET, Facebook, MediaLink, Pandora, Popular Science, Rovi, Scripps Network Interactive, ShareThis, Sharethrough, Sony, Syfy/PSFK, Turner, Videology, VivaKi Ventures, Wired, YuMe.

Many of our thought leaders from around the globe were in attendance at CES this year and participated in the VivaKi Bright Lights, Big Ideas agenda. Below are a collection of some of our favorite recaps from them about the show.

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VivaKi Chief Strategy & Innovation Officer Rishad Tobaccowala put together one of the more unique overviews of CES we’ve seen. Instead of an outline of top products, he focused on the feelings and thoughts he took away:

After three days of participating in all the activities noted above and listening to wonderful experts my summary is things are getting larger, thinner, faster, clearer, cheaper and more connected, while everybody is lusting after or leaking into everybody else’s business.

For Rishad, these marketplace changes mean a new focus on optimism, a need for femininity and fashion, that connectivity is a two-edged sword and mongrel living will create huge new business opportunities. See what he thinks this all means at Re-imagining by @rishadt.

Are we in a “filling in” period for technology? That’s the impression Moxie Interactive’s Greg Satell, SVP Strategy & Innovation, got from the show floor. But don’t let that make you think what’s happening today isn’t significant:

Processing and storage capacity aren’t really an issue at the moment, 4G has been launched and we won’t have another bandwidth standard for a decade. HTML 5 won’t be completed for a few years and so on.

Moreover, we can expect a fairly orderly progression until the computing environment shifts drastically around 2020. We have a good idea what standards we have to work with and what we can expect from them.

However, what’s going on now is, in a certain sense, more important. The technology we do have is getting much, much more useful. It’s becoming integrated, intuitive and more reliable. We’re not so much chasing the next big thing, but fulfilling old promises to the average consumer.

Greg outlines examples of this technology in his full write up at Digital Tonto.

Meanwhile, the renewed focus on practical technology at this year’s show was particularly refreshing for Denuo’s Senior Alchemist John Durbin:

This year was a different story. I was amazed at the amount of practical technology that was being presented. Sure, there were still massive 3D displays (LG) but it felt more like a showroom floor where the theme is “we’ll make life better” as opposed to “isn’t this neat?”

Read about specific examples of both the cool and practical at his full post on Denuology.

VivaKi Nerve Center’s Marco Bertozzi, Managing Director EMEA was struck by the prominence of converged television technology.

The TV is no longer lean back but lean in, it is being designed to draw you in and pull you from your stupor. The TV is being assaulted by set top boxes, App stores, satellite companies, it’s now no longer able to sit quietly in the corner of the room, it has to be your communicator through Skype, your music system, social media entry point, picture frame, cinema etc, it is also on a diet and becoming more colourful! (more on that later). Before looking at specifics, I have to say that above all the point I was left with was that the role of the main broadcasters and channels seems antiquated and slow at this stage and being left behind a very fast moving wave of tech.

Read more about his take on the rise of apps, the importance of personalization, the battle of software and the changes in how we will measure viewership in his post at Bertozzi’s Bytesize.

Finally, DigiDay collected the responses of a number of agency execs to CES, including leadership from Razorfish, Digitas and Big Fuel:

Avi Savar, founder, Big Fuel

“I was hoping to see the future – what I saw where some really nice TVs. The sheer scale and showmanship of product displays where mesmerizing. That said, there was not much from the major players that I had not seen before. There were new phones, new tablets and some of the best quality HDTV and 3D display I’ve seen to date, but in terms of true innovation, I saw very little. It felt to me like the same stuff I saw two years ago at CES, just better and brighter. I am looking forward to walking the halls of some of the smaller players tomorrow and hoping to see a little more innovation, cutting-edge integration of user experiences, dynamic “connected” environments and perhaps a new product category (or two).”

Follow Avi on Twitter @avisavar.

Ray Velez, global chief technology officer, Razorfish

“CES 2012 didn’t seem to have any of the standout breakthrough technologies like in previous years with groundbreaking innovations like 3D or Microsoft Kinect, but it did seem to have a lot of exciting iterations on existing technologies. Making 3D glassless or smarter TVs ‘smarter’ are good examples. The standouts for me were innovations pulling together multiple technologies, like Ford partnering with health companies to bring healthy computing to sync in their autos and Mercedes announcing Facebook integration. The takeaway for marketers is that there are lots of ways to partner with new technologies to get your messages to a variety of platforms, everything from connected TV and vehicles to smartphones, tablets, and health devices.”

Follow Ray on Twitter @rvelez.

Jordan Bitterman, social marketing practice lead, Digitas

“CES is many things, but increasingly it has become an invaluable time to gather with industry colleagues to move business forward. While it’s true that these are many of the same people we all meet with in our home cities, the concentration of decision-makers combined with the ability to focus on the topics-at-hand without typical workday distractions make these discussions quick, to the point and ultimately very fruitful. On Wednesday, my group of clients and colleagues met with seven different partners across video, data, social and mobile with offerings that we will prioritize in the coming 12 months.”

Follow Jordan on Twitter @jordanbitterman