SAN FRANCISCO: An iPhone-controlled flying drone, new 3-D TVs and an application that unlocks your car doors from anywhere on Earth are among the 20,000 products making their debut at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas this week.

The expo, which runs through Jan 10, will draw at least 113,000 attendees and 2,500 exhibitors, said Gary Shapiro, chief executive officer of the Arlington, Virginia-based Consumer Electronics Association, which runs the show.

While attendance is down from a peak of more than 150,000 in 2006, companies still rely on the event to showcase products and lay out strategies. Sprint Nextel Co. will introduce its next-generation wireless services, Ford Motor Co. will declare itself a technology company, and Sony Corp. is releasing its entire product line for the year, Shapiro said.

The iPhone-controlled aircraft, from a Paris-based company named Parrot, is already a hit of the show, he said. “You walk into the room, and there’s this thing hovering, at eye level,” Shapiro said. “People were just amazed.”

The show is no guarantee of success. More than 500 of the 2,700 companies at last year’s event are no longer around, Shapiro said. More than 330 new exhibitors will make their debut at this year’s expo, a record.

Shapiro, 53, said the mood heading into the show was better than last year’s, which came during the depths of the recession. Demand for floor space increased as the event approached, while last year the show had to scale back because of exhibitors pulling out.

Price Squeeze

“The industry, in the horrible year of 2009, actually sold more products than it did 2008,” Shapiro said. “But it did so at much lower prices, so basically there was a lot of commodity selling. Companies are really forced to do something differently.”

The show, which started in New York in 1967 before moving to Las Vegas in 1978, could add $173 million to the city’s economy this year, according to Jeremy Handel, spokesman for the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority.

The first CES attracted 200 exhibitors and 17,500 attendees, the association said on its Web site. Since then, the show gave rise to the videocassette recorder in 1970, the compact-disc player in 1981, the DVD in 1996 and plasma TV in 2001. This year’s show features zones focused on specific technologies, including the first section ever devoted to electronic-book readers. Amazon.com Inc.’s Kindle faces mounting competition in that market from Sony and a pack of startups. “There’s 28 different companies selling different types of e-books,” Shapiro said.

Surveying the new technologies, Shapiro said he’s most interested in the door-unlocking application. “My young son locked the car keys in my car, like 100 miles from home one time,” he said. “I remember how annoyed I was.”