After an interesting day of travel (snowstorms, flight delays and switching airlines), I arrived in Las Vegas in time to attend the annual Digital Experience press event (which shows new stuff to the press before the actual show begins). Here's a couple of neat things I saw at this event:
"It's like Google for your desktop," said Mark Lemmons, creative director at Creo Inc. The company's Six Degrees software scans your computer (both while online or offline) and looks for related e-mail messages, files and contact names. If you spend a lot of time looking for that PDF file attachment and forgot where you put it, the Six Degrees software looks like it can find it a lot faster, plus it creates links that can tell you who sent the file, other e-mails that person sent, etc.
The software requires Windows 2000 or XP with Outlook 2000, or Mac OS X with Microsoft Entourage X software, ans 128M bytes of RAM (256M bytes recommended). A free 30-day trial is available at Creo's Web site. The full package costs $99.
It's inevitable, that as soon as I buy a device, a better one comes along. I was kicking myself when I saw the iRiver iFP-190T, a tiny digital audio player that includes 256M bytes of internal memory (Flash memory) in an extremely portable package.
The iFP-190T costs $199.99 and includes a built-in FM tuner, an exclusive "record from FM" feature, and plays MP3, WMA and ASF music files on a single AA battery (iRiver says it has up to 20 hours of life on the one battery). A voice recorder is also included. The device weighs 32 grams (without battery) and measures 80 by 23 by 25 mm (gotta love the metric system). iRiver said the player would be shipping this week to retailers.
While there is no expansion capabilities for the player, it seems that 256M bytes of memory on a portable audio player is pretty impressive (for now). An iRiver spokesman said the memory equates to about 10 CDs worth of music.
Seeming out of place amongst the digital cameras, cell phones, PDAs and network equipment was a booth from Swanson (the TV dinner people). Swanson was on hand at the event to celebrate its 50th anniversary, and none other than actress Morgan Fairchild was there to help pitch Swanson and to cut the official 50th Anniversary cake.
I felt bad, because I walked by the Swanson booth (they were handing out chocolate bars that looked like a TV dinner), saw Ms. Fairchild but had assumed that she was just a Morgan Fairchild look-alike. I was about 10 seconds away from saying to her, "You know, you look a lot like Morgan Fairchild," but luckily there was enough doubt in my mind where I didn't.
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