The year kicks off with two big tech events this week. All the latest electronic toys and gadgets are on display at CES 2007 in Las Vegas, and Apple Computer struts its stuff in San Francisco at the Macworld Conference & Expo. In past years, those two conferences saw the introduction of pretty much every electronic gadget in your house: The iPod, MacBook, iMac, Mac Pro, Mac Mini, VCR, and DVD -- all introduced at either CES or Macworld.

And, by the way, when I say that the VCR and DVD were introduced at CES, I don't mean that individual products debuted at the show -- although they did. I mean that the technologies debuted there. Other technologies debuting at CES: The CD player, HDTV, the personal video recorder (a/k/a "hard disk VCR"), and Microsoft Xbox.

Mac aficionados know to look for the big ritual at Macworld: The one where Steve Jobs is wrapping up his keynote, getting ready to go offstage, and then looks like he forgot where he put his car keys and says, "One more thing.... " That's the way that Apple introduces its biggest and best products.

Pretty big week. And InformationWeek.com will be all over those two conference, helping you keep up.

The extremely talented Barbara Krasnoff and David DeJean will be liveblogging the CES show, at our CES 2007 blog topic center, while ace reporters Aaron Ricadela and Elena Malykhina will be on the scene filing news. Barbara and David will be armed with digital cameras to take photos we can parlay into image galleries. Look for those, and other interesting photo displays, on our Image Galleries.

At Macworld, we'll have crack journalists Sharon Gaudin and John Welch, with Sharon primarily doing news coverage and John primarily blogging. And we'll have podcast interviews with both reporters throughout the week; look for those on our podcast page, InformationWeek.com/newscast.

Be sure to stop by InformationWeek.com early and often this week to find out everything you need to know about these two important conferences.