Cool Stuff from Computex 2008: Video

After all the hoopla has died down, you can see some great stuff in this video that was featured on ERA News in Taiwan, including (drum roll!) Asus EBOX PC.

I’ve been following this company’s products since the launch of their Asus EEE PC 700 in 2007. The breadth and innovation of the company’s products underlines the ambitions of this company to reshape the PC (sans Apple) world by packaging the PC in a variety of new forms: UMPC, SETBOX style, Asus Radio, Video Gaming, …

While the video is in Chinese, you will get to see some great gadgets in the video: first up, of course, is the EBox. There isn’t the same level of interest in this device, but I believe it has a number of advantages that will see this become an extremely popular choice for all sorts of un (and under-) served markets: kids computing, older folks, family computing, simpler networking, classrooms, etc..

The price, the size, and the low power consumption make this a VERY attractive computer for the next generation of household computers. You could put one in EVERY room in your house for a very affordable price.

In our business, we would find it relatively inexpensive to equip a small language classroom with five or six of these machines; networked together, they’d be quite a cool and effective computer-skills teaching classroom. Now I just have to sell that idea to my partners.

Monday News: A Carnival, Tidying Up, Chinese New Year and our 1st Martian Reader

What you’ve missed here…

  1. Saturday Bytes: WMV to FLV and FireFox’s Causing Me Frustration
  2. Technorati: Why you should bother, how you do it, and the ‘dark side’
  3. NetWork Solutions: How YOU can gouge your customers in 10 steps or less – a case study
  4. and our new Advice Column: Your House Is Not YOUR ATM Machine

For the advice column, simply drop your email to us (anonymously, if you wish) and I’ll write InvestorBlogger’s response with some suggestions.

And now the news…

Monday is here, the first day of our holiday at Chinese New Year! Yesterday, we spent the whole of yesterday reorganising the school offices. I had to finish rewiring the computers, too. But it’s done, and the new network will work nicely, I think. One PC will be devoted to running the printers, another to running the network, another to running the photocopier, and another to running our IntraNet Blog, I hope.

So, though we use a local network at school, we’ve distributed services across every PC except the notebook to maintain as much of a system as possible should one PC die. I had intended to network everything to just one PC, but then thought perhaps that wasn’t a good idea if there should be a hardware problem. So our services are distributed to minimize impact of broken systems. BUT we don’t have any extra capacity at the moment which is a pity.

The New Carnival 10th Edition and the new host

New Carnival 10th Edition

Yep, it’s out on the new blog, and posted with 21 good stories, and most of the junk removed. I took a huge paring knife to cut out duplicates, irrelevant stories, popup articles, etc., But I’m glad, the edition is good. Next time, we’ll feature a new section: Chinese New Year is approaching, posts that make special reference to that will be given their own featured section!

Chinese New Year: A time to tidy up

Chinese take a lot of time to clean up before the New Year (February 6th this year!) and I’ve really gone to town to clean up my own clothes closet! But I’m so untidy and disorganised that it took me more than 12 hours to put everthing here…

P1000559

into here…

P1000561

and it’s done now… But it was a challenge! And it’s not particularly neat and tidy, but it is sorted out now! What is the secret to being organized, please tell me!?

Amazon’s Big News: Downloads go International!

You’ve got to read this story about Amazon’s announcement:

Amazon MP3 is the only retailer to offer customers DRM-free MP3s from all four major music labels as well as over 33,000 independent labels. “We have received thousands of e-mails from Amazon customers around the world asking us when we will make Amazon MP3 available outside of the U.S. They can’t wait to choose from the biggest selection of high-quality, low-priced DRM-free MP3 music downloads which play on virtually any music device they own today or will own in the future,” said Bill Carr, Amazon.com Vice President of Digital Music. “We are excited to tell those customers today that Amazon MP3 is going international this year.”

I’m skeptical, because their definition of the term ‘international’ may only include Canada, the UK, Japan, France and wherever else there is a localized Amazon site. But here’s hoping.

What’s that guy on Mars doing?

CNET is carrying this picture recently taken from Mars courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell University of a 2″ man.

123manonmars550x401

Nasa has finally taken a picture of a Martian: he (or she) is obviously squinting at the ASUS Eee PC with the 7″ screen while browsing InvestorBlogger dot com. What else could the Martian be doing? Suggestions in the comments please!

Upcoming Stories

These are some of the stories I’ll be posting several stories in the next few days:

  1. What I did with my money
  2. Security and WordPress: Beefing Up Security for your Blog
  3. WPBanners: A Fuller Review – Good Value or not?
  4. Blogging: Usability Improvements

Do check back this week to see which is posted.

iTWire – Palm Foleo flop or future?

foleo

Apparently, Palm has done it again! It’s broken the mold, with a new sub-notebook computer that even John Chow could find useful on his trip to Taipei! It pairs up with your handheld to offer (cough!) convenient and portable computing (cough!)… There’s really not much information about this machine at all, I can’t find much about the actual specs either other than it runs Linux, has some editors for Word, Excel and PowerPoint, plus a PDF viewer. It comes with a 10-inch screen and full-size keyboard. And it sports upto five hours of battery life in its compact design!

There are some pretty useful features for mobile computing that we’d need on it so it includes “Instant on, instant off”, it’s light, and sports an OpenSource OS! No word on the chips, processor, RAM or onboard storage yet! I’d have to add that quality of the build is very important as Palm has screwed up majorly on several previous models of its handheld series with component problems and surly service. Let’s hope that they get this one right!

You can read more about it at these stories: Palm Foleo flop or future? or at Palm’s website.