Microsoft chief Steve Ballmer will be there. So will Intel chief Paul Otellini, Ford chief Alan Mulally, Nokia chief Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo and Qualcomm chief Paul E. Jacobs. And those are just the headliners. More than 2,500 exhibitors will be hawking 20,000 new products this week at the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. The biggest no show? Apple. No one at Apple has said anything, officially, about a new product to the press. It hasn't even publicly revealed a date for one of its mysterious new product launches. Yet Wall Street analysts are already sizing up what the impact of Apple's yet-to-be announced tablet computer could do for the Cupertino, California, gadget maker's bottom line. If such a gadget is coming, count on Jobs to deliver the news himself, quite possibly by the end of the month. Coming at the end of a decade that saw Apple's shares rise more than 700%--thanks to the iPod and the iPhone--the new product promises to be the biggest technology feat, or flop, of the year. How do you compete with that? This week, it's up to the rest of the technology industry to try. While sales of business PCs and factory automation software have suffered, consumer electronics has remained vibrant, attracting the attention of giants ranging from automaker Ford to desktop software giant Microsoft to networking kingpin Cisco. None of these giants, however, have as much riding on a successful show as start-up Plastic Logic. Formed a decade ago to commercialize technology developed at Cambridge University by Henning Sirringhaus and Richard Friend, the start-up went on to raise more than $200 million from investors such as Amadeus Capital Partners, Intel, Bank of America, BASF, Dow Chemical and Siemens. Plastic Logic will unveil its electronic reader, dubbed the Que, built around a flexible display, on Jan. 7. The device could pose a serious challenge to Amazon.com's Kindle reader. If it's really great, it might even cause a problem for Apple and its yet-to-be announced product. Source: Forbes