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At Comdex, a few products are right at home at home
June 2, 1997
Web posted at: 11:15 p.m. EDT (0315 GMT)From CNN Interactive Writer Andy Walton
ATLANTA (CNN) -- Stories about Comdex can be a mind-numbing jumble of buzzwords and superlatives. Somewhere around the hundredth sales pitch about synergistic parallel asynchronous enterprise network Java watchamacallits, Joe HomeUser has got to wonder -- what's in it for me? Though Comdex's focus is unabashedly business, there are products geared for home use.
Some of them are fun.
Kodak, trading on its worldwide network of photo labs and one of the world's most recognized trademarks, is preparing to roll out the Kodak Picture Network. According to Kodak's Mark Cook, putting pictures on the network will be easy; "Bring your film into one of 30,000 processing centers across the country, just check the box," Cook said, pointing to a box on the film envelope. "You get your prints back, but you also get images delivered over the Internet."
The pictures are then sent to a private "work area" on Kodak's server, where they can be sent to other people as e-mail "picture postcards," or published as a virtual photo album. The network also stores high-resolution versions of the images, so that any photo processor connected to the network can reprint them.
Travroute Software is promising a mid-June release for its Door-to-Door Copilot, a $299 combination of hardware and software that may make it more difficult to get lost.
CoPilot combines a Global Positioning Satellite (GPS) antenna, which uses a network of satellites to determine location, with a street atlas and database of addresses. It can provide detailed directions from any address to any address, according to Travroute's Dan Titus, and can keep up with wrong turns. "If you go off-route, it will automatically update your trip plan to highlight the new route that you should be traveling," he said.
But is it safe to operate while driving?
Titus says it is. Once the destination is set, the combination of GPS computer-generated voice directions requires no input from the user.
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Techmedia has a new gizmo made strictly for fun. The Techmaster wireless joystick is, well, wireless. Once you press and hold a button to set the "zero position," any movement is reflected on the screen.
Though the Techmaster takes some getting used to, it did add a whole new dimension to the familiar program Techmedia used as a demo -- Doom, of course. The Techmaster is scheduled for an August release.
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