Ahh, I love my modern digital lifestyle, especially when it comes to being out, whether traveling or just moving around the city. It's great that I can walk around with a music collection that dwarfs my old college record collection, that I can have several books in my pocket ready to read whenever I want and that I can snap a picture or video of anything I see.
So what am I doing? Am I walking around with an MP3 player, an e-book reader, a digital camera and a digital camcorder?
Nope, just one device, my BlackBerry smartphone, which lets me listen to music, read books, take pictures and video, and, oh, yeah, make calls, play games, manage contacts ...
Right now many companies are looking to go green, and while some are doing it out of a feeling of environmental responsibility, there are many that are doing it mainly in the hope of saving some green.
This has led many businesses to look for more efficient server room hardware, desktops and office environmental systems. But what about your computer monitors? Like TVs, monitors can often be energy hogs.
Not surprisingly, vendors have started to introduce green computer monitors, and I recently had the chance to test out a new one from NEC.
Though DEMOfall just finished a few weeks ago, the push is already on to get ready for the next Demo in early 2010. And the first step took place in Boston on Oct. 22.
The Boston Demo meeting was the first of a string of Demo Meetups. These meetups, which will be held in cities across the world in coming weeks, bring together Demo alumni companies, VCs, press and new startup companies that could be showing at future Demo shows.
At the Demo Meetup in Boston, eWEEK Chief Technology Analyst Jim Rapoza spoke to Demo Executive Producer Matt Marshall about how the Demo Meetups work.
My colleague Don Reisinger recently wrote an article where he talked about the rise of netbooks and stated how they were not yet enterprise ready, pointing out their inability to multitask, connect securely to company networks and handle business class graphics tasks.
I have to admit I was a little bit surprised by Don's article, especially since, as I was reading it, I was on my own netbook, running multiple applications, including Adobe's latest Creative Suite graphics applications and connecting to my office network over a VPN connection.
So what gives? Is Don just wrong to state that netbooks are not yet enterprise ready?
While I've had the chance to test out and try various netbooks, I haven't actually been a netbook owner, that is until just about a week ago when I plopped down my own cash and picked one up.
Scratch that. I was a netbook owner in the past, they just didn't call it that back then. Years ago I was a very happy owner of a tiny Sony Vaio that would have fit in nicely with today's netbook crowd.
I always loved the lightweight and small size of that Vaio so as netbooks grew in stature and increased in power and capabilities that approximate full size laptops, I knew that I would eventually get one.
Once again the enemies of Network Neutrality are doing their very best to help out those dedicated to pushing through laws to ensure Network Neutrality on the Internet.
How does this happen? Well, the main opponents to Network Neutrality on the Internet are the major national ISPs that provide most of the broadband connections for Americans. And many of these very same ISPs are also the large national cell-phone carriers.
And there is no greater example of the potential dangers of an Internet without Network Neutrality than the major cell phone carrier networks.
Click here to see the slideshow While the varying parties in the operating system wars like to tout the advantages that each OS holds over its rivals, all of them share one thing in common. Whether it's Linux, Mac OS X or Windows, none of them are particularly quick about booting up, especially if one is using older hardware.
In fact, along with size and price, one the main attractions of Linux-based netbooks is their ability to turn on and boot up fast, letting their users get to work checking mail and browsing the web in seconds. So an operating system option that provided close to instant-on capabilities for any laptop or desktop could be an attractive option for many people.
This is the idea behind Presto, a new beta product from Linux vendor Xandros. When installed on a system, Presto gives users the option to quickly boot into a lightweight netbook style operating system that provides access to core applications such as web browsers, chat tools, and productivity applications.
My colleague Joe Wilcox recently posted on the Microsoft Watch blog an interesting article entitled "The Problem with Netbooks". In this article he puts forth a compelling argument why netbooks won't last as a significant segment and will become subsumed into laptops or disappear altogether.
If I had read Joe's article a week before he posted it I probably would have agreed with nearly all of his arguments. But after traveling to DEMO 09 and getting a firsthand look at how many people are using netbooks, my opinions on the category have changed a bit.
Xandros has long been a major player when it comes to taking Linux and open source technologies and making them easy for non-techie people to use. With Presto, they are taking a stealth approach to work with Windows systems but to make it more attractive to boot into Presto as opposed to Windows.
The second half of day one of DEMO 09 was shaping up to be a disappointment for me. A group of products focused on mobile devices and cell phones failed to generate much interest at all (sadly the coolest product in the bunch was Skout Out, a product for flirting via one's cell phone),
And this group of products was followed by a fairly depressing panel, where a group of Vcs and investors talked about the economy and the state of funding start-ups. The panel can be summed up by one panelist who said that we are currently in "the worst fundraising environment ever."
Right now many companies are looking to go green, and while some are doing it out of a feeling of environmental responsibility, there are many that are doing it mainly in the hope of saving some green.
