Lenovo Unveils $800 ThinkPad

HUNTINGTON BEACH, CALIFORNIA -- Mobility and collaboration were two of the major themes as Demo Fall 2005 conference kicked off here on Tuesday.

In its 16th year, Demo gives startups and established vendors six minutes to demonstrate products to an audience of more than 2000 venture capitalists and large high-tech companies looking for acquisitions.

Lenovo Group, the China-based company that acquired IBM's PC business, including the ThinkPad brand, unveiled its new Z series products. The two most outstanding features of the ThinkPad Z-60 models unveiled were the price and a first-of-a-kind broadband wireless capability.

A 14-inch widescreen notebook with 100GB of storage, three USB ports, and an IEEE 1394 port, will start at $799. The price point, unusually low for a ThinkPad or any mainstream notebook, brought a gasp from the Demo audience.

Lenovo also introduced the first notebook with an integrated cellular technology. This model uses Verizon, which will give users the capability to access networks without worrying about where to find the next hot spot.

While both Hewlett-Packard and Dell have announced similar integrated cellular service, Lenovo is the first with a shipping product.

Mobile Gadgets

U3, of Redwood City, California, introduced a platform for creating flash drive applications that live on the flash drive rather than on the device into which the drive is plugged. The QKEY Mobile Desktop application, for example, copies a users' entire desktop look and feel plus Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files that stay resident on the flash drive. Even users' favorite sites are stored on the flash when accessing a browser.

Skype VOIP service is also available for the U3 platform, as are dozens of other applications that can be found on the U3.com Web site.

San Francisco-based Feeva pitched free Wi-Fi service that combines user preferences with location based-services. The Feeva network determines the kind of device being used and adds user preferences from a profile that a user fills out to serve pertinent local services to the traveler.

Once online, even a user-designed home page such as MyYahoo will be filled in with local preferences such as weather.

Multimedia Startups

Two Silicon Valley-based startups, FilmLoop and Peerflix, focused on trading and collaborating.

FilmLoop, based in Palo Alto, broadcasts digital media by creating a moving photo crawl across the PC screen. Companies like the WorldPictureNetwork will create daily photo loops from news events updated in real time. Subscribers will be able to click on a photo as it crawls across the screen for a larger view and purchase.

The system allows companies to send their film loops via e-mail, blogs, or RSS feeds, or to display crawls on a Web site. Search capabilities will also allow users to go sites like AutoTrader.com to search for pictures of cars they are interested in buying and display them through the crawl.

Peerflix, based in Menlo Park, is built around collaborating, and allowing members to trade, buy, and sell DVDs legally for as little as 99 cents.

Users sign on to the service, go to a tab to list videos they want to buy or trade, and if selling they input the UPC. The code will allow potential trading partners to see which version of the movie is up for trade or sale.

Unlike typical eBay sales, buyers and sellers do not exchange money; rather, Peerflix bills them in five-trade increments. Once traded, a Peerflix mailer is printed out and folded along the dotted lines to become a mailer for the DVD.