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Verbatim forms partnerships that work

It's no secret that memory prices have completely crashed through the floor and we now have gigs of memory available on tiny hard drives as well as flash and even mobile phones. A quick web check reveals a tiny 12 GB Verbatim drive for $107.99 and if you're willing to pack something larger there is a 100 GB Diskgo portable drive for $104. These days 2 GB drives are practically free as companies put their product data on give-away drives. As a result, companies selling memory are facing serious challenges as they put their products out there against competitors with shinier cases, more memory or more features.

Figure 1: The Ceedo interface is simple and gives users access to programs on any Windows computer. Note support for Word and Outlook Express. Other applications may require a little more finesse. (Source: Ceedo Technology)

Verbatim is tackling the problem with software add-ons from Ceedo and Allway Sync. Allway Sync is simple synching software with an intelligent interface that should keep users from doing something stupid like writing over new files with old ones. (So far, we haven't messed up anyway.)
Ceedo Technology, headquarted in Israel, has developed virtualization software that lets applications launch from a portable device to a host computer as if the program were running on the host computer. For example, when visiting a client, computer users can use popular memory keys, or mini-drives to perform tasks. When they're done they can eject the memory and Ceedo erases all temp files from the host computer leaving no trace of your activities—a particularly useful tool for the paranoid reporter or analyst in a crowded press room. This is also invaluable for users who might maintain two computers—a small portable and a larger desktop.

So, wouldn't it be great to add my programs such as Dreamweaver, Outlook, or Photoshop, and conjure them up with the help a trusty drive like Verbatim's 12 GB disk hosting Ceedo software? It would be great, but in general, you can't. Not all programs are approved to run on the drive and the reasons why are pretty obvious. Companies like Adobe are not so crazy about the idea of letting their IP go anywhere it wants to go even if it does want to be free. Microsoft is a little more accommodating but there are limits. You can take Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and Outlook Express with you wherever you may want to roam but you can't take Outlook.

The Argo Application from Ceedo is also available, it's a low cost ($29.95) program from Ceedo Technologies that lets users install programs (including Dreamweaver among others) to the Ceedo-enabled drive and run from there.

Ceedo recognizes that they're offering users something that is far from a perfect world, so the company has gathered up a useful library of utilities for users to use in place of programs that are not certified for Ceedo. Among them are programs for photo imaging, word processing, email, HTML editing, and other commonly used tasks. Among the photo imaging tools included is the open source tool Irfanview. This is one of the most useful imaging tools you'll find. With It does the work of several other tools with features such as image capture, conversion, batch features (conversion and rename), and support for CAD, Photoshop, Corel and many other formats as well as several important RAW formats. It takes the place of several products.

Also available are:

• Connectivity: Terminal emulators, FTP utilities, IRC utility, remote control tools.
• Email Clients: Mozilla Thunderbird, Pocomail and Barca (for purchase)
• File Sharing: Bit Torrent, UTorrent
• Games: including old favorites like Pong, Asteroids, Snake, Space Invaders, and newer games such as Chicken Invaders (some overseas flights can be long enough that you would actually welcome a few rounds of Chicken Invaders so don't sniff).
• News readers.
• Photo Editors: in addition to Irfanview, open source tools from FastStone, Fresh View for multimedia, Preclick Photo Organizer, and XnView to view, organize and convert image files.
• Productivity: text editors, word processing, web editors, and the very useful Audacity audio editor
• Search Engines: PocketSearch is available for purchase.
• Security: Password managers, and Spybot Search and Destroy to kill spyware.
• Toolbars: Google Toolbar, more password management tools, the Skype toolbar.
• Utilities: PDF readers and printers, Zip tools, freeCommander file manager.
• Web Browsers: the usual suspects: FastStone, Flockbroswers, Maxthon (IE compatibility)

The value of all these programs varies but there's a wealth of open-source tools available out there and Ceedo provides a nice introduction. And, using the Argo software, it's possible to load those programs to Ceedo enabled drives. A look at Ceedo's forums reveals that users are indeed using Dreamweaver and other programs such as Google's Picasa as well an array of Open Source tools and commercial software from Nero and Adobe Flash Player as well as Acrobat, which is really handy when visiting strange computers.

Because Ceedo relies on system resources to run files, it is obviously going to be operating system dependent and at the moment that means Windows. The company has updated its programs to work on Vista. However, some of the individual programs that might work on the drive in XP may not work on Vista machines. This is the sort of problem one comes to expect when switching operating systems and goes a long way towards explaining why only a few machines are upgraded to Vista here at JPR HQ.

Figure 2: The Ceedo platform takes advantage of the Windows system resources on your computer to run programs from an external drive as if they were loaded on the hard drive itself. (Source: Ceedo Technology)

An interesting side effect of the Ceedo technology is that it offers another take on the evolution of the PC towards Web based applications. No, Ceedo applications are not web-based, but the ability to run open-source programs on the drive and use them as substitutes to perform subset tasks found in heavier and undoubtedly more expensive commercial software. Word and image processing is an example of tools that could well do most of what you want to do—crop a photo, write a paragraph—without buying another copy of the hardware. In addition, as the world increasingly moves to the mobile platform and uses phones to do what people previously used computers to do, the value of lightweight programs becomes even more obvious. There is a version of Ceedo that runs on mobile phones.

None of this is lost on Microsoft, Apple, and Adobe. Those companies pay people a lot of money to look in the rear view mirror and see what's gaining on them. But, the ways in which large companies turn and face their challenges could well dictate what kinds of companies they will be ten years from now.
All this from one little tiny drive.

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