New Products at DEMOfall

What caught my eye at day one of the DEMOfall conference here in Huntington Beach? A bunch of things, for a bunch of reasons. Such as:

* U3, a platform for "USB Smart Drives," officially launched. The technology, which will show up in thumb drives from Sandisk, Memorex, Kingston, and others, lets you cram applications and data onto the drive, resulting in a sort of tiny virtual PC. Stick a U3 drive into any Windows machine, and you can run apps and save files; yank it out, and it's as if it was never there in the first place. The idea isn't new, but building a whole platform around it is. One catch: Programs need to be tweaked by their developers to run off a U3 drive. (AOL, Skype, and others plan to support the platform.) Here's more on U3; we're also working on a hands-on review.

* SquareTrade, a company best known for resolving buyer-seller disputes on eBay, formally announced its SquareTrade Sidebar, a comparison-shopping browser add-on that can display competing stores' prices when you're shopping for consumer electronics products at major online stores. Coolest feature: It shows you not just prices at garden-variety online retailers, but also ones at eBay and Craigslist. A beta version for Internet Explorer is available now; a Firefox version is in the works.

* Pie is a gadget that aims to make home networking easier by autoconfiguring routers, setting up printer sharing, and the like. Home networking certainly does need to get easier, but I was startled to see a company try to do so through a dedicated box. A Pie representative told me that the product targets newbies and may be offered by retailers for about $80 a year; one wonders how many newbies are going to do enough networking setup to want to pay an ongoing service charge to simplify things. And technologies like Broadcom's Secure EZ Setup and Buffalo's AOSS, which are built into networking products rather than living in an external box, have similar missions.

* Lenovo, new ruler of the ThinkPad kingdom, launched the ThinkPad Z60 line, which includes 14- and 15.4-inch widescreen models--the first wide ThinkPads--with an un-ThinkPad-like emphasis on entertainment and multimedia capabilities. Noteworthy options include optional EvDO wide-area networking over Verizon's network and an optional titanium cover. (OK, only with a ThinkPad would not being basic black be considered noteworthy...)

* Streamload showed off MediaMax, a new version of its online digital locker service, with more features for storing, retrieving, and sharing massive amounts of video, music, pictures, and other file types on the Net. (My colleague Tom Mainelli is a fan of the current version of Streamload.)

* United Keys has done something you had to know someone would do eventually--it's built a keyboard with tiny LCDs built into the tops of the function keys, so that (for instance) you can program a key to launch Microsoft Word and display the Word icon as the key cap. A bundled icon editor lets you create your own tiny key-top designs. The theory here is that it's easier to identify a function key's purpose by glancing at an icon than by remembering what the F4 key does. I wonder, however, how many people are going to be willing to pony up $300 to put that theory to the test...

* SchmartBoard introduced SchmartBoard/EZ, a tool that makes hand soldering easier. (I mention this only because I like the name "SchmartBoard.")