These short January days mean it is what season? Skiing, you say? How about electronics. An annual circus of gizmos gets under way in Las Vegas this week. The Consumer Electronics Show is a festival of both hype and innovation. And imagine leaving your house keys sticking out your front door — and not noticing it for a year and a half. Experts at Google discovered and have now fixed a dangerous security flaw that might have allowed bad guys to steal private customer information for 18 months.

There’s the government’s official employment and unemployment report today, but what about prospects for the kind of jobs you do online? Elance, a company that uses the web to fix up freelancers with jobs has a 2013 forecast with a bold prediction: One out of four college students in this new year will earn money through online jobs. If we said there’s a machine that makes music by itself, you’d be unimpressed. But what if there’s a robot that will improvise music along with you?

We check in with a mother in Massachusetts who drew up an 18-point contract listing the rules her 13-year-old son would have to live by if he got a nice new phone. Stuff like: put it away in public, and don’t use it to lie or cheat. And digital photography has been, to say the very least, a challenge for the first instant photo company, Polaroid. Now, the company is testing out a new business model: Physical stores where you go to get prints of the digital photos on your smart phone, while you wait.

A recent piece by New York Times columnist and Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman called “Robots and Robber Barons” took a look at a question we are familiar with: Are robots eating our jobs? Krugman stops by to share his take on automation, technological change, and the future of the work and wages in America. 

Instead of a  new digital trend for this New Year, how about getting rid of an old one before it hurts more people? There’s an argument that the era of anonymously creeping around the internet being a jerk without consequence is coming to an end. And as we take stock of our lives to start a new year, here’s an unsettling question. What if all that’s left of us when we’re gone is what we did online?

However you plan on celebrating this New Year’s Eve, you’ll probably spend at least part of it on the Internet. One tech observer predicts that as we enter 2013, we also enter the era of always being online. On Mondays we like to talk big ideas, but how about when a big idea becomes a breakthrough? Research has now made it possible for humans to control robotic appendages with their brains. The tech behind it aids a special relationship between the brain and the limbs.

This week we’re looking at what’s going to be big in tech in 2013. One of the most important stories next year will be about what we’re giving up when it comes to the version of ourself we present online. Plus, while we’re talking about living online, a new experiment for an old medium: Lettrs.com. Founder Drew Bartkiewicz, a tech entrepeneur who has a soft spot for snail mail, launched the website this month.

This holiday week we are looking into the future of tech in 2013. Our first guide is General Electric’s chief teechnology officer Mark Little. He’s looking closely at the energy industry. GE has been working a more efficient tech — like tiny cooling devices that could make our laptops and tablets even thinner. But there have been huge leaps and bounds in big tech, too. Plus, If you tried to escape the family this Christmas Eve by firing up your trusty Netflix account, you might have been Scrooged.

A big idea to chew on as you recover from the holiday revelry: A dog is said to be our best friend, but what if technology became mankind’s worst enemy? Cambridge University is starting up an institute to keep an eye on things that could some day wipe out the human race. It’s got a title that would do Albert Camus proud, the ‘Centre for the Study of Existential Risk’.