Thoughts from the Floor: PCExpo/TechExNY

 
Jun 25, 2001
by S. Malkah Cohen, Managing Editor

What would June in New York be without PCExpo? This long-standing icon of high tech has always been a fun, if usually exhausting, way to keep an eye on the latest trends and to see the latest gizmos and gadgets in action. It usually also offers seminars and keynote addresses on the latest developments in both hardware and software and gives attendees a glimpse of what is yet to come.

I recently took advantage of the privilege of the press to attend DigitalFocus/MobileFocus, the press-only pre-game show for PCExpo/TechXNY.

I found myself getting a bit nostalgic at times. Just looking back five years, it's fascinating to see just how far technology has come, and how ubiquitous it has become. It seems like what was science fiction, and sometimes laughable, only yesterday, is now in the home, as comfortable and ubiquitous as the television. PDA's with built in cell phones, designed for the pre-teen set?! Shades of Dick Tracy!

Exhibitors at DigitalFocus/MobileFocus ranged from wireless ISPs to emergency batteries for cell phones, esoteric speech to text/text to speech translators to the latest in digital image capture and output. Very little here, or at the Expo itself, concerned itself with ColdFusion or any higher level programming, but certainly our ever-on-the-go developers can be grateful for the many tools that are now or will soon be at our disposal. Here's some snippets you might find of interest:

  • Blackberry's mobile email is text only, but Motorola's latest entries can handle images as well, and looks to be a bit cheaper, too.
  • An interesting new extension of work management sites appears in One Place, which enables you to access your email, files, etc. from remote locations. An enterprise edition is due out 1Q2002 that well enable work groups to share information remotely. I'm In Touch handles the interface a bit differently, but aims at the same purpose and is also planning an enterprise edition. [Note: At the Expo itself, I also saw a product called iManage which already has several modules up and running to do this on a much larger scale with hundreds, if not thousands, of employees at all steps of a process, ranging from manufacturing to insurance claim handling. That one is expected to be completely out of beta also by 1Q2002.]
  • GoAmerica can handle WML and XML virtually interchangeably. They feel that the ability to swap devices transparently will be the key to growth in the wireless field.
  • Fujitsu deserves the prize it won for the lightest, best equipped ultralight notebook, the FMV-Biblio Loox T, although the NEC Versa DayLite/UltraLite, with honorable mention, gives it a real run for its money, and the other honorable mentions, from Casio and Compaq, are no slouches. These slim nothings are little powerhouses. honorable mention
  • Infowave has just announced that its plug-ins are going open source. Yes, democracy works, even in web development!
  • For those of us who are a tad fumble-fingered on the PDA and whose handwriting defeats Graffiti, there is now a wide range of keyboards, ranging from just a few inches wide to full size, to plug your little darling into so daddy or mommy can fill it up with all the information you need it to hold.
  • PDAs have gone from slightly elaborate electronic phone books to micro-versions of a desktop computer, complete with built-in phone, in an impossibly short time. One really must consider these almost as disposable, since the current model rarely lasts even a full year before becoming obsolete!
  • Digital cameras with full functionality now come smaller than most cell phones and are headed even smaller. [Note: So are scanners. I saw one at the Expo itself, not much larger than my old art eraser, which can read bar codes from a product label or a newspaper article, download it to your computer or even PDA, and call up all the information you might need, or a reprint of the article, at your convenience.]
  • Of course, I HAD to check out a booth called "Applied Science Fiction." I'm sure that the ability of their high-tech scanners to restore aged and damaged photos to near-new quality and to bring out the details of blurred images is wonderful, but I couldn't help feeling that I saw very little connection between the firm's intriguing name and what they do.
  • Further down the aisle of imaging innovators, Corel and Zammage were demonstrating their ability to take a scanned photo and turn out an interesting piece of art, directly onto canvas or high quality art paper.
  • And virtually every printer company I could think of was there, whether they had one model to show or a dozen, as were the major battery manufacturers. HP had its hand in several booths, working its versatility into all manner of gadgets and hook-ups. Minolta was stressing affordable quality with a 2,200 dpi color laser printer for less than $1,000.
Over the next two days, I sampled the fun at PCExpo/TechXNY. Unlike its heyday, when techies from all over the world gathered to check out all the neatest new stuff, I found the trends of the last two years had continued. Crowds were smaller, consisting of a far higher concentration of small office/home office users and non-tech corporate leaders hoping to get a handle on what they are now expected to manage. And this year the Expo needed only one floor, plus a press area, reducing its floor space by easily one third.

Most notable was the dearth of software companies. While Microsoft and Novell were clearly there, I almost missed Adobe's spot, even though it was right by the main entrance. Macromedia, Corel, Symantec and McAfee were among those notable in their absence, even though their products would have been of interest to many of the attendees. In fact, I didn't even find resellers of any of these products, or any of the small innovators I'd hoped to glimpse.

Gone also was much of the glitz and flash. No huge, flashy stage shows, no costumed teams of taggers fanning out to encourage people to come to THEIR booth, no twice-around-the-block lines to see fancy multi-media shows or elaborate interactive demos, not even much exceptional in the way of give-aways (much to the disappointment of some pre-teens and not a few adults).

In its place were many very informative demonstrations, such as the explanation of the Crusoe technology behind the lightest and longest-lasting notebooks, and quieter fun events, such as Extreme Tech's "fastest geek" contest. The first two keynotes, presented by Palm and Intel executives, respectively, were geared for people who needed to learn what general direction they should be watching for the latest trends, not what might lie beyond the immediate horizon. (Regrettably, scheduling problems meant I had to pass up Professor David Gelernter's address, which might have extended the boundaries, given his wonderful track record in futurology.) The various seminars were, of course, product oriented, and mostly aimed at immediate business needs.

In other words, if you were looking for high tech or the furthest visions, this wasn't the place for you. If you were looking to find the latest model of PDA or wireless technology wonder, then this WAS the place for you.

It was fun to follow the semifinals for Extreme Tech's America's Fastest Geek contest. In this series of events, Systemax provided the components for a fully equipped desktop computer, complete with all the bells and whistles. I didn't notice any female competitors the few times I checked in at this booth during Tuesday's semifinals, but there was quite a range of ages represented among the self-proclaimed geeks trying to set a new record for computer assembly. Small groups of semifinalists tried to beat the clock and each other to assemble a PC, boot it up and log onto the Extreme Tech website.

Although a time of six minutes fourteen seconds was recorded in the semifinals, a young, out-of-work systems manager named Nelson took home the prize of a top of the line system for completing his assembly in six minutes twenty-two seconds on Wednesday (after allowing for a few seconds of "penalties" for missed connections and misaligned screws). It was refreshing to learn that the systems assembled during the competition will be donated to schools, rather than disassembled and sold.

A few more snippets:

  • DriveSavers showed a number of "victims" whose hard-drive contents were recovered by their techniques, including one that had been virtually completely melted by fire.
  • Connected offers a new twist on off-site backup services. They can automate the process and make it two-way, enabling a system to "heal" itself after a virus or accidental deletion of a .dll or malicious mischief by comparing the system's contents and restoring what's been deleted. Backing up entire enterprises offers another way of saving space in the SendOnce capability: If a file exists in the same form on more than one drive, the system will save it once, then use markers to indicate the additional drives the same file was stored on.
  • The PowerPack looks like a mouse pad, but is really a powerful little external battery for your laptop.
My bottom line? It may not have been the top of the mountain or even the broadest market place it could have been, but PCExpoNY and TechXNY is a great show for small business and home computer owners and a fun afternoon for any geek.

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