By Jim Harris

The Consumer Electronics Show is the largest gathering of its kind in the world. This year, more than 20,000 products were launched. These are the three most exciting.

1. Fastest notebook drives
SanDisk, the world’s largest supplier of flash memory products, introduced a 32GB solid-state drive (SSD) as a replacement for 1.8-inch notebook hard drives. An SSD flash drive has a number of significant advantages. First, it has no moving parts and so uses 60 per cent less power than a hard disk. Given that about a quarter of the battery life of a typical notebook is drained by the hard disk, this can extend notebook battery life by 15 per cent. Second, SSDs access data at blistering speed: imagine booting up Windows in 35 seconds, less than half the time you usually wait. The SSD has a sustained read rate of 62MB per second and a random read rate of 7,000 inputs/outputs per second for a 512- byte transfer—all of which means a drive 100 times faster than a traditional unit.

Third, these drives generate significantly less heat, a real boon for small notebooks.

The SSD will be available to notebook makers in Q2 2007.

Long term this spells the death of notebook hard disk drive. This is a classic case of disruptive technology. While I prefer a 100GB of capacity, I’ll happily accept less if SSD gives my sub-three pound notebook better performance. I predict within five years all notebook drives will be flash SSDs.

On top of that, I predict that within a year a 64GB SSD drive will be out. Road warriors will store MP3s, movies and other unnecessary files on portable drives, leaving notebooks to store just important files.

2. Real-time translation
Imagine speaking English into a microphone and hearing French come out of the speaker, or highlighting this paragraph in English and hearing and seeing it appear in French. SpeechGear demonstrated its Compadre suite of products which instantly translates whatever you see, hear, say, read, write or type. See www.speechgear.com

Compadre: Interact provides real-time language translation. You load the software onto your system, speak into a microphone, click the translate button and presto: from the speaker you will hear what you said repeated in a different language. The software also generates a transcript. The company has 12 different languages and the translation is bi-directional—meaning you can go from English to French or French to English. The software is also speaker independent, so it does not have to be trained to any one voice.

Languages with bi-directional translation into English include French, Italian, Spanish, German, Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese, Dutch and Iraqi.

SpeechGear’s other products include Compadre: Document, which translates text in Word and PowerPoint documents, and Compadre: Camera, which allows you to take pictures of signs or menus and have instant translation from more than 200 languages. Finally Compadre:Interpreter is a PDA translator.

3. Billions fewer batteries
There are 40 billion dry cell batteries sold globally and the overwhelming majority of these end up in landfill facilities.

Sanyo launched the Eneloop battery which can be recharged a thousand times, so a single Eneloop battery can eliminate the need for 1,000 regular batteries.

While other rechargeable batteries loose their charge completely after one year, Eneloop batteries hold 85 per cent of their original charge for one full year.

Sanyo has redefined rechargeable batteries. Eneloop are available in AA and AAA. They come precharged on the rack. See www.eneloop.info

Jim Harris is the author of the international bestseller Blindsided, published in 80 countries worldwide, and The Learning Paradox, nominated for the national business book award. E-mail 
jharris@backbonemag.com or visit his website www.jimharris.com.