As you walk around the South Hall of the Las Vegas Convention Center or the ballrooms of the Venetian, one thing you don’t see much of is press. For that very reason is why I really wanted to be there. After all, the press are always focusing on big companies that put out the same old “innovations”. I wasn’t that interested in the same old same old. Here are some of the smaller companies that I found while at CES.

Goal Zero

Goal Zero is a company based out of Utah that makes solar powered chargers that can power your devices on the go.

Goal Zero was founded by Robert Workman whose initial motive for building these devices was to the Democratic Republic of Congo, a war-torn country that didn’t have much access to electrical power. When he started Goal Zero, he wanted the company to work together with his non-profit Tifie Humanitarian, an organization he founded after his trip to Congo. In fact, portions of every Goal Zero purchase benefits Tifie Humanitarian.

Now about their products. Goal Zero offers small, medium, and large solar kits. Each kit comes with the solar panel to collect power itself and the battery pack to store power. And considering that each pack is said to work for about 10 years, the $129.95 starting price is brilliant.

You can find Goal Zero products in many US outdoor stores like Cabelas and Bass Pro Shop. They will also be available in the U.K. within the next couple of months.

Ivoke

A great company that I got to meet with at CES was Ivoke, a company that allows photo app developers to monetize their app even further by allowing users to make personalized products like iPad covers, phone covers, coasters, canvases, etc.

The idea behind Ivoke is pretty simple. Let’s say you just snapped a great picture on a photo app of yours and you want to put that picture on a coaster. All you have to do is view the different products that Ivoke offers and you can buy one though the same app you used to snap that picture. Ivoke allows developers to integrate via API which means you app users won’t have to go to an external site. They can do it all through your app.

iOn Road

Car accidents are something that most people try to avoid. Well, hopefully all people try to avoid them. But it your one of those people who aren’t good at judging how far away you are from the car in front of you, iOn Road is definitely for you. This app, which is developed by Israeli company Picitup, displays the road in front of you marked in seconds with the distances between you and potentially threatening vehicles. Like this:

It already has over 200,000 downloads from the Android app market and will be making an appearance on iOS devices withing the next 3 to 4 weeks.

ShoDogg

You have a web enabled TV and a smart phone. Would you like to make the two work together?

With ShoDogg, you can play any video from your phone, on your TV. The best part is that it doesn’t have to go to their servers first which means that your video will play smoothly on your smart TV.

ShoDogg CTO & Co-Founder David Strober was awesome enough to give me a demo of just how easy ShoDogg was to use. That video will be up soon!

MantaroBot

Why is video conferencing still inconvenient? Because it’s not truly mobile. In fact, every room that you want to video conference in has to have all the equipment and that can cost a lot.

That is one of the problems that the ManatroBot fixes. This “TelePresent Robot” was originally made by Mantaro, a product development company. These robots were a hobby project  when they first started but today they are making these things for businesses who want to video conference in multiple rooms.

Mantaro makes two types of these robots. The first one, called the classic, is made of a housing that stores a netbook which hooks up to the screen and webcam at the end of the “neck.”

The second kind of robot is called TeleMe which allows you to use your tablet or smartphone for the video conferencing.

The classic starts at $3,500 and the TeleMe version will cost you $1,500.